A Scholar's Journey in the Age of Steam

This is a story about growing up and going to school in the 1970s and 1980s. The son of an ordinary worker uses his own sweat to carve a new path through a destiny already laid out for him. Studying, exams, sports, and fun. No being reborn, no showing off and face-slapping, and no academic prodigy. Lin Weidong isn't the chosen one. As a child, he suffered two serious illnesses and came close to death both times. A “sickly kid,” he was always the shortest in class. Even sitting in the front row, he could be overlooked by the teacher. His grades were average, he was no good at sports, music, or art, and he was quiet and introverted. In other people's eyes, he was an utterly ordinary nobody. There was just one thing that set him apart: he was stubborn, with a refusal to give up buried deep inside him. In his second year of middle school, he fell in love with soccer and started running around the cinder track every day at six in the morning. He went from gasping after 400 meters to winning the school sports meet's 1,500-meter race in his final year of middle school, and placing among the city's top ten student long-distance runners. He went from the shortest in class to the tallest. He loved taking things apart and putting them back together, reading all kinds of books, and trying all sorts of sports. If he could get his hands on something, he'd find a way to learn how to do it. He failed to get into high school and used connections to enroll in the most ordinary school for workers' children. He went from last place in his class to first in the science track. Everyone urged him to take a shortcut by enrolling in a sports college, but he stubbornly focused on English and repeated a year. In the end, he became the first person in his family to attend a regular university. If you too miss that era of roaring steam engines, if you too were an ordinary person others underestimated, then this story is for you.