Reborn in 1962: Giving Up on College to Start Vocational School

In his previous life, Chen Jianguo rotted away in a fish shed in 2016, with no one to see him off. He had worked hard all his life, yet because of a youthful dream of bringing honor to his ancestors by attending high school and getting into college, he missed out on an assignment to a technical secondary school. The tides of the times that followed swept him back into the muddy countryside. He married, had children, and spent half his life in hardship. After reform and opening up, he was unable to seize the opportunities. When his children grew up, they became estranged from him because of his incompetence. In his later years, illness plagued him, and his children abandoned him in a dilapidated fish shed. He swallowed his last breath in the cold winds of the twelfth lunar month, consumed by overwhelming regret. When he opened his eyes again, he had returned to 1962, that fateful summer. At sixteen, he once again held the application form for his junior high school graduation choices. Before him were his teacher's expectant eyes, his father's hopes of "smashing pots and selling iron to put you through college," and the illusory glory of "knowledge changes destiny." Yet before his eyes surged the seventy years of suffering from his previous life: his mother's sickbed, his hungry younger brother and sister, his wife's resentment, his children's indifference, and the fate of freezing to death in a fish shed. This time, without hesitation, under the stunned gazes of everyone around him, he firmly selected "technical secondary school." To hell with the college dream! What he wanted was food coupons, a salary, and worker status that he could grasp immediately! He would begin as a technician at the textile mill in Datong Lake Town and climb, step by step, the most stable worker's ladder of that era.