The Smoke and Fire Between the Lines

Xu Cheng, a graduating senior majoring in marketing at Yunlan University. The night before graduation, one roommate landed a job at a state-owned enterprise, another got into graduate school, and a third went home to take over the family factory. His own resume, meanwhile, went unanswered. He sent out over a hundred applications and got seventeen rejection letters. The only company to call listed "labor dispatch and employment agency" among its business activities. He was scammed out of 400 yuan, and during his probation period he earned a mere 300 yuan for his hard work. One interviewer told him to his face, "Your resume is too empty." That night, he opened the hard drive he'd filled over four years of college: more than a hundred articles and several thousand photos. It turned out he had skills, but no one had ever told him they counted. So he started a public account called "Step by Step"; listed his secondhand mirrorless camera for sale and took on newborn and ID photo gigs; wrote ad copy for an advertising agency by day and newspaper columns by night. A pot of meat sauce made the same way for twenty years, the red lanterns of an alley, and the lights in every home across a city, all found their way into his writing. A year later, he rented four desks at Lanwan Science Park and personally nailed the "Shijie Culture" plaque to the entrance. This isn't the story of a genius. It's the story of an ordinary man who turned "not doing proper work" into a career, and 300 yuan into a company.