After Winning the Lottery, I Turned My Life Around

Two years after graduation, Lin Wan had become a laughingstock in her village. She had an ordinary undergraduate teaching degree. She hadn’t gotten into graduate school or landed a government-funded teaching job, and she’d even been advised to quit teaching because she was too introverted. Her cousin had graduated from a top 985 university and designed chips, her older female cousin had graduated from a military academy, and her younger female cousin had landed a teaching job. As for her, she was stuck on a bed by the entrance to her family’s main room, without even a wardrobe of her own, waking up every day to the sound of people walking past. Her parents were disappointed, her relatives mocked her, and her sister-in-law looked down on her. At twenty-five, she felt her life was already over. Then she bought a lottery ticket for 20 yuan. 800,000 yuan, or 640,000 after taxes. She told no one. She quietly paid off her student loans, rented an apartment, had laser eye surgery, and got her teeth fixed. In three months, she went from a disheveled “loser” to a confident woman who strode through life with her head held high. Then she won 25 million yuan. She would buy a house and a car, go to graduate school, and travel around the world. She swore she would make up for every one of the twenty years she had lost. What she never expected was that a lollipop would lead her to “pick up” a top student, a puppy-like young man enrolled in an integrated master’s and doctoral program at a top 985 university. He was worth over a hundred million yuan, but low blood sugar made him faint against her. He’d never been in a relationship, yet clumsily pursued her every step of the way. When her relative’s 985-university graduate student sneered at her, when her classmates with secure government jobs bragged about their iron rice bowls, and when her son-favoring parents once again told her to give in to her younger brother Lin Wan smiled and showed them her property deed, admission letter, and the outstanding man by her side who left them speechless. From a hapless woman despised by her whole family to a winner everyone else could only aspire to be, she did just one thing right: love herself first, then love the world.