I knew what poverty tasted like, but I truly had no idea what it was like to be poor to the absolute limit.
My family hadn't been rich when I was little, but we hadn't been the poorest, either. At least my daily pocket money could buy a packet of spicy strips.
And there was always one especially rich kid in class. He could buy as many snacks as he wanted, and he always had toys that looked expensive. By adolescence, kids like that always wore especially fashionable clothes and used the latest phones.
When I faced people like that, I too felt an inexplicable sense of inferiority, even though I didn't feel inferior most of the time.
In fact, plenty of my classmates were poorer than me. They might only get to buy a packet of spicy strips when they received money for the New Year, or shamelessly ask for a couple when they saw someone eating them at school, just to satisfy their cravings.
But like me, and like those especially rich classmates, they grew up all the same. Yet no one paid any attention to their inner worlds, or cared whether they felt inferior inside.
And Liang Yi was more than ten or twenty times poorer than they were.
Who would care whether Liang Yi felt inferior inside? The only thing people might notice about her was that she studied hard.
And studying hard was all she could use to cover up her inferiority and embarrassment.
She had come out on top in this campus beauty contest, winning first place, but in reality, it was like comparing a girl from the slums to a princess from a wealthy nation.
To Liang Yi, this was humiliation-an invisible humiliation that wounded her to the depths of her soul.
"So