For the third time, Lin Jianxia applied for the Xingdeng Scholarship, and once again she couldn't find her name on the list. Of the fifty-two proposed recipients, forty-six held student leadership positions. She wanted to ask how the scores were calculated, but first she was questioned about whether she was the person behind the anonymous post.
At first, all she wanted was to fight for a fair result. Later, her writing was edited without her consent, interviews came with talk of money, a poem stalled halfway through, and someone was late to meet her at the secondhand bookstall. Zhou Xu studied drama, film, and literature. He could tell when the characters in her novel failed to come alive, but he couldn't make his own days go perfectly to plan.
The winters in the north were long. They asked the questions that needed asking, and kept writing the things they wanted to write.
