ye learns to write

It's not very easy to free yourself out of the Public Perception in current China, you have to win, or be a loser. So, when Yanzhe told me he had just gotten a job of a start salary RMB3500, we all had two beers for this new career.

He had to find a job.

Yanzhe is my senior middle school classmate(age 16-18), sometimes we played mahjong or cards with each other in that little county. Sometimes we played billiards if we have enough time.

It's a long time since we went our separate ways after our graduation. Things changed. Yanzhe's ex-girlfriend has now got pregnant by another guy: she married soon after he decided to get out of Sichuan Province, with a local county school teacher. No one knows that guy, no one wants to know.

Yanzhe went to Shenzhen, Beijing, then Shanghai: Running after his dream means he has to move. He even created a company focusing on DM magazine for the sellers in taobao.com, but soon failed. Then he decided to sell the cheap cellphones (in China, it is called Shanzhaiji.), but the best days selling these phones had gone. Every guy is trying to do some big clearance sale in Shenzhen, it's not his time. He then applied for jobs in this city, asked for a 3000 salary without any confidence when the company had printed clearly to provide the position between 3500 to 5000.

At last, he got the job after he told the HR officer how he send cokes to the students to popularize www.xiaonei.com. 5,000 were signed up with accounts under his name after 2 months in 2006, this site is now the Chinese Facebook.

This is my friend.

The 40th Middle School sports meeting of my lovely alma mater after my graduation.

The Jialing River who named me shot under my middle school.

Morning routine exercises between classes (usually 09:30-10:00), this is an extra training prepared for a coming inspection by some important authorities.


Below is the "Nanbu Middle School", at least 10,000 students being educated there recently. Several years after our graduation, there are 35 classes with an average 65 students in each class in Senior grade 3 (age around 18)preparing for the critical "National College Entrance Examination", around 200 will be admitted into the key universities, about half of the remainder will have the chance to get into the normal universities, rest of which will have to pay much more to step into some run-of-the-mill universities/colleges if they can afford. It's too many.

The No.3 classroom building in the west part of my school.

Red Rock Hydropower Station, with a 425,800,000 kwh per year, it's planned to build 9 stations in my home city, thanks for Jon's photoshop work!

I also found another picture of this little hydro station:


The school playground and the hydropower station after a snow.

East part of the school after a snow.

A square by the Jialing River, the ostentatious "image" and "administrative achievement" projects once pointed out by former Premier Zhu Rongji.

The strange square by the river shot from my school.

A closeness of the monument of the hydropower station.

The 3 "Number One Scholar" in Song Dynasty, nearly 900 years ago, they were local heros, not only for the students, but also for the whole county.