Zhaodi's Road to Fame

The person who once led an online hate campaign against me now nags me for updates every day.

My name is Zhaodi. I'm the first person from my village to go to college.

After graduating, I sent out 87 resumes and got rejected by every one. When my landlord started demanding rent, I found an old broken computer.

On a whim, I wrote a post called "The Full Story of a Rural Girl Humiliated by HR" and put it online.

The next morning, my phone blew up:

"Author, update now! The face-slapping is so satisfying!"

Now publishers are lining up to sign me, and the director of a prestigious company that rejected me back then said on a livestream:

"Ms. Zhaodi, my daughter is a huge fan of yours..."

My name is Zhaodi, Li Zhaodi. My father was crouched outside the maternity ward of the township clinic, and before he'd even finished smoking a whole pipe of tobacco, he'd made up his mind on my name. Our village is tucked away in the mountains, so small you'd need a magnifying glass to find it on a map. I was the first person here to get into a university in the provincial capital. The day my acceptance letter arrived, the whole village celebrated with gongs and drums. My father, for once, bought a string of a thousand firecrackers, and festive scraps of red paper covered the ground outside our home. My mother wiped away tears as she counted out the tuition money she'd sewn into her waistband, one bill at a time. The notes carried her warmth and smelled faintly of mothballs.

For four years at university, I ate steamed buns with pickled vegetables, and I knew the library's closing music better than any pop song. In my graduation photo, I wore a shirt washed nearly white and smiled with all eight teeth showing, thinking that a golden road to the wide world lay right beneath my feet.

And then? Reality swung its arm back and slapped me right across the face.

The job fair was packed like a tin of sardines. I clutched my carefully polished resume like an unimpressive sign. "Li Zhaodi?" An HR representative in a sharp suit, with eyebrows raised high enough to hang an oil bottle from, glanced at it. "Oh, from XX College..."