His Love Came Four Years Too Late

At exactly eight o'clock on the night Jiang Tong was born, a new star appeared in the sky. The old folks said he would grow up to be a child prodigy, so his father gave him that very name on the spot.

Things really did turn out that way. At three, he could recite the Three Character Classic backward. At four, he climbed a tree to steal bird eggs. His father hung him from the clothesline in the yard and spanked him six times, then boiled him an egg without saying a word. At eight, he hooked the hair tie off the girl sitting in front of him. At nine, he took first place in the national elementary school math competition. At thirteen, he won the national high school math modeling championship and was hailed as "the youngest mathematical prodigy."

At fifteen, he secretly snuck into the county English debate competition and used his fluent English to leave his opponents speechless. He left without giving his name, and those students searched for him for years.

He scored a perfect 750 on the college entrance exam at seventeen. Everyone thought he would go to Beijing.

Instead, he applied to Mingzhou University, right in his hometown. His reason was just three words: close to home.

At half past eleven on the third night of his first term, he handed a freshly boiled egg to a girl who had just been crying, in a corner of the stairwell. She said, "I'll owe you one."

Over four years, he won four major competitions, lost five, and lost one person too.

He could solve every problem. There was just one answer sheet that took him four years to hand in.

The first person to teach him never got to see it.