There are his parents, younger brother and grandparents. In a small town with only 5,000 people in the central United States. He lived until he was 29 years old, wrote inspirational articles and never gave up. He had never seen the prosperity of the eastern part of the United States and the romance of the western part. The first time he left home in his thirties, he went to China. He lives in Gongyi West Bridge, looking north from the 7-story rental house, which is the glittering political center of China.
He is one of countless ordinary Americans. His name is j. He is tall and thin with short hair and always wears a loose canvas coat. From the back, he really has no foreign flavor, just like a young "North drift" who will pass you by at any time on the streets of Beijing. But after getting to know him, you will find that he is a little different. Compared with most hurried "drifting north", his mood is always calm.
When I first met J, he joked that he was different from those rich foreigners. In America, he is a loser. His family is not rich. He and his brother completed the course from primary school to high school under the education of their mother. With the help of the government student loan, he went to a junior college. At school, he had to spend his spare time washing dishes in restaurants. His grandfather and grandmother successively got Parkinson's disease. But without medical insurance, the 55-year-old mother had to give up her job to take care of her old age: her father tried several times to find a job in other places to change her family's economic situation, but she had no education and had to hit a wall everywhere; After J graduated, because he didn't have a good university and major, he couldn't find a well-paid job. He still made a living by washing dishes and working as a cashier, and little by little he still got an astronomical student loan compared with his salary.
Later, by chance, a teacher from a junior college recommended him to teach English in China. He set out on the journey without saying anything. At this time, he has nothing but dreams. During my nearly two years in Beijing. He works more than 14 hours a day, and he also wears several hats. Once, he worked in an English cram school run by a Chinese-American boss, and he had a quarrel with his boss at the end of the semester. Boss Hong was very angry and didn't want to pay him, so he sat in the office all night. He said he was no different from a migrant worker who asked for a salary.
In the days when he didn't have to go to work, he wrote as diligently as Balzac, and the lack of materials didn't damage his rich imagination. In his own novel world, he took his dream to the extreme. The voluminous words let him get rid of the shackles, put on his wings and fly over all the barriers of reality.
Once, J invited me to go to Laiyuan, Hebei with him. He helped a little girl there for a long time. I asked him jokingly, "Don't you save your salary and pay back the loan?" He smiled: "When you mention the loan, my heart will break."
Most of his savings in Beijing for two years were used to pay off the loans he owed at school. But he keeps some money every month. I'm going to spend a month and a half on a "European tour", visiting Britain, France, Greece and Germany, and I'm leaving next week. Everyone has packed their bags. I believe that he is no longer a "loser" in life. He is realizing his dreams one by one.
In fact, the so-called heroism is that the more life makes you stand upright, the more you have to work hard to live; The so-called happiness is to recognize the cruel side of the world and still love it deeply. This is the right path for "losers", whether at home or abroad.
That famous saying about the struggle of youth, there is no natural good life, only the struggle of biting one's teeth. Poor students in Tsinghua have 10 years of struggle experience.