Beneath the Podium

The protagonist, Chen Shouzhuo, was born in 1973. In 1998, at the age of 25, he graduated from Taozhou Normal College and was assigned to teach Chinese at Taozhou No. 1 Middle School, a key county school in central China. Now 53 years old in 2026, he still has seven years until retirement, having lived through the full 28-year cycle of change in Chinese education. The protagonist is an honest, down-to-earth man who doesn't know how to curry favor with his superiors or grease palms with gifts. When he was young, his leaders valued him, but he was never good at handling things tactfully, so he was pushed aside and once sent to teach in a rural school. Now in his fifties, he has watched wave after wave of younger colleagues rise through the ranks and become his bosses. All he can do now is muddle through until retirement. People his age have become department heads and principals, but he is still constantly pushed aside and suppressed. As a result, he has become somewhat depressed.