In 1992, during the midterm exams of my sophomore year of high school, I stared at the bright red 18 on my math paper as our homeroom teacher stood at the lectern, sneering while reading out the “list of underachievers.”
“Lin Ziqiang, you useless waste. Go haul bricks at a construction site, and stop dragging the whole class down!”
As the whole class burst into laughter, I silently tore up the provincial math competition application form hidden beneath my desk. Our homeroom teacher had deliberately kept it from me.
That night, I knocked on the principal’s door. “Sir, I want to report Teacher Wang by name for embezzling class funds and hiding the competition slots...”
A week later, our homeroom teacher was suspended pending investigation. Standing outside the math competition venue, I smiled at the new homeroom teacher who had rushed over to stop me.
“Teacher, how exactly is someone who scored 18 in math supposed to ‘make a fool of himself’ in the competition
