At the age of seventy, Zhao Zhenbang signed up. Next June, he would take the university entrance exam.
His granddaughter asked him why. He dragged a tin mooncake box from the very bottom of a cupboard. Inside lay three things: a 1977 university entrance exam admission ticket, an old fountain pen with "For Zhenbang, from Guilan" engraved on its barrel, and a plum-blossom school badge with a rusted edge.
He never got to take the exam that year. He gave his younger brother the chance to enlist, took his father's job at the factory, and later came his son's wedding, buying a house, and raising the children. The four major things he had handled in his life had all been for someone else.
"When you're old, the scariest thing isn't dying. It's being useless."
His granddaughter filmed her grandfather leaving at 4:30 every morning and studying beneath the streetlights. Overnight, the comments under the video filled up. Some accused him of putting on a show; others told him to accept his lot. His son rushed back from the provincial capital and said only four words: "You have to accept old age."
Neither the old man nor his granddaughter listened. The next year, Grandpa sat in a university lecture hall, and his granddaughter quit her accounting job and picked up a camera.
This is not a story of a miraculous comeback. It's about an old man using an old fountain pen to fill in, stroke by stroke, the application form he had owed himself for forty-three years.
