Repaying kindness

Zhou Qiang's smile looked rather inscrutable in the little restaurant's dim yellow light.

He did not answer directly. Instead, he picked up the glass Wang Xiaoliang had just filled with beer and took another long drink.

"Xiaoliang, you're halfway to being a businessman yourself now, so you should understand what I'm about to say."

Wang Xiaoliang nodded, ready to hear a secret worth a Maybach.

Zhou Qiang set his glass down with a quiet clink.

"How I survived is a story. How I made my fortune afterward, Xiaoliang-that's a trade secret."

He spread his hands, a hint of apology in his smile.

"I can't tell you."

Wang Xiaoliang was a little disappointed, but he understood. After all, this was someone else's secret to getting rich.

"It's all right, Zhou. I understand. I shouldn't have asked in the first place."

He picked up his own glass and took a long drink to hide his disappointment.

To keep things from getting awkward, he changed the subject himself.

"From now on, I'll gather up the cardboard boxes in our dorm for you. I'll save the bottles my classmates finish drinking from, too. You can come by every three days to collect them."

He thought for a moment, then added, "Any longer than that won't work. The dorm's too small to store them all. Still... I won't be able to do it for much longer. Graduation and the break are coming up."

Even he felt a pang of sadness after saying it.

Here was someone talking about business worth a Maybach, while all he could think of was saving bottles and cardboard boxes.

That was the gap between them.

Zhou Qiang watched him quietly without speaking.

Just as Wang Xiaoliang thought that was the end of the subject, Zhou Qiang suddenly smiled.

"Xiaoliang, you really are an honest guy."

Wang Xiaoliang froze.

"All right." Zhou Qiang leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. "Since you're so sincere, if you really want to hear it, I'll tell you."

Wang Xiaoliang's eyes lit up again at once.

"But I have one condition," Zhou Qiang said slowly.

"What condition? Just tell me, Zhou!"

Zhou Qiang pointed at Wang Xiaoliang with a teasing smile. "Tell me how you managed to win over the most unapproachable beauty at our university."

Wang Xiaoliang had never imagined that this would be Zhou Qiang's condition.

He shook his head almost without hesitation. He had not won Wei Zijin over at all.

He neither wanted to lie nor could bring himself to do it.

"Then I'd better not hear it, Zhou."

He picked up the beer bottle again and topped off Zhou Qiang's glass.

"Come on, let's drink."

Zhou Qiang looked at him and burst out laughing, his laughter echoing through the cramped restaurant.

"Oh, Xiaoliang. I think I've figured you out. You're a good guy in every way, but you're far too thin-skinned."

Wang Xiaoliang said nothing, only drinking in silence.

"You have to learn to go after what you want." Zhou Qiang tapped the table with a finger. "Grow a thicker skin. Opportunities don't come from waiting. You have to grab them."

"Take what just happened. I turned you down once, and you gave up. I offered you a chance with a condition, and you gave up again."

"If you'd just tried a little harder and asked, 'Zhou, could you give me a different condition?' or even shamelessly said, 'You tell me first, Zhou, and then I'll tell you,' wouldn't that have done the trick?"

"One more sentence wouldn't have cost you anything. And what if it worked? Look at you-you missed your chance, didn't you?"

His words reminded Wang Xiaoliang of how Zhou Qiang had described going from dorm to dorm, begging people to save their trash for him so he could survive.

He was right.

Compared with what Zhou went through back then, what the hell did my precious pride matter?

Only by trying did I have a chance.

If I didn't try, I'd get nothing.

Wang Xiaoliang felt his cheeks burning.

He put down his glass, raised his head, and looked Zhou Qiang straight in the eye.

"I understand. Thank you! But I don't want to lie to you."

After hesitating for a while, he spoke again.

"Then, Zhou, could you finish telling me how you started your business?"

Zhou Qiang looked at him and nodded.

"Now that's more like it."

He took a sip of beer to wet his throat, and the story finally picked up where it had left off.

"Collecting scrap kept me alive, but graduation season was what really earned me my first pot of gold."

"I realized that besides bottles and cardboard boxes, there was another kind of 'scrap' at the university that was worth more: the things graduates didn't want anymore."

"Their books, notes, desk lamps, fans, and so on were all a burden to them. They couldn't take them along, but throwing them away felt like a waste."

"I also discovered that there were people who specialized in buying this stuff. They knew what they were doing."

"But who was poorer than me? I never expected being poor to become an advantage."

"That made me the perfect person to collect their junk. They knew I was poor and needed those things. A lot of them simply gave them to me, saying, 'Here, junior. Take it and use it.'"

Zhou Qiang smiled. "Their kindness also helped a poor kid pull off the miracle of changing his fate."

"A textbook in pretty good condition might cost me just a few tenths of a yuan, or even nothing at all, and I could resell it for ten yuan. Clean up a little fan, and that could sell for twenty or thirty. That was how the money came in. Much easier than picking up bottles."

Wang Xiaoliang listened, fascinated. It was like discovering a whole new world.

"Later, I discovered online secondhand marketplaces." Zhou Qiang's account began to pick up speed.

"I sorted the things I'd collected into categories, took good photos, and posted them online. That became my first online store."

"Suddenly, I could charge more. The internet had expanded my customer base. And once both sides had access to the same information, prices naturally went up."

"Through those platforms, I could sell my goods all over the country, and for higher prices, too."

"Later still, I happened to discover that some electronics that were quite ordinary here, along with little products unique to China, could sell for several times as much on foreign websites."

"So I got into cross-border e-commerce."

Zhou Qiang spoke more and more casually, as though he were recounting someone else's life.

"And just like that, by trading in the 'junk' other people didn't want, I went from a poor kid who could only afford one two-yuan meal a day to a... piece of junk making a fortune every day."

When he finished, he chuckled again, as though mocking the strange label he had given himself.

But Wang Xiaoliang could not laugh at all.

He sensed that when Zhou Qiang recounted these later experiences-the ones that had truly made him rich-he showed far less heartfelt pride than when he had talked about collecting bottles.

He skimmed over everything about cross-border e-commerce and capital operations. It was as though those genuinely thrilling business battles seemed less pure to him than fishing a drink can out of a trash bin back then.

Wang Xiaoliang fell silent for a moment, digesting the enormous amount of information.

"Zhou, I heard... you donated a building to the university. Is that true?"

Zhou Qiang's hand paused as he lifted his glass. Then he nodded, perfectly calm.

"Yes."

Wang Xiaoliang's heart began racing again.

A whole building! How much money must that have cost?

Looking at the foam in his glass, Zhou Qiang said quietly, "If the university hadn't given me an environment where I could corner the scrap-collecting business, I would've starved or dropped out long ago. I wouldn't be where I am today."

"So this wasn't me repaying a kindness."

"It was what the university deserved."

"The university wanted to put my name on its newest laboratory building and call it the Zhou Qiang Experimental Base. I refused, because a lot of students shared the credit for it."

Not repaying a kindness.

What the university deserved.

Those two phrases echoed over and over in his mind.

Most successful people, when giving back to their alma mater, presented themselves as repaying kindness and remembering where they came from. It was a virtue, but also a way of presenting themselves.

But not Zhou Qiang.

He treated it as a matter of balancing the accounts.

The university had inadvertently provided a closed, resource-rich business environment with no competition.

He had used that environment to earn his first pot of gold, the starting point for all the wealth that followed.

So he had taken a portion of his profits and returned it to the provider of that "business environment."

To him, it was not a favor, but an obligation.

What clearheaded, fair, and powerful reasoning that was!

This went beyond simply having a broad perspective.

It was a business mindset and a code for living that had transcended ordinary social conventions.

Wang Xiaoliang opened his mouth, only to find that he could not say a single word.

Any flowery praise seemed pale and powerless beside the words, "It was what the university deserved."

Only after a long while did he finally manage a heartfelt remark.

"Zhou, that perspective of yours... honestly, it's no wonder you've built such a big business."

Zhou Qiang raised his head, glanced at him, and drained the beer left in his glass.

"It's not about having some grand perspective. I'm just telling the truth."