Chapter 79: The flag-raising ceremony
Su Can returned to the classroom feeling uneasy. After all, such an honor was hard to come by at City First Middle School, and being chosen to speak at the flag-raising ceremony was bound to spark plenty of discussion.
The point was that Su Can had little interest in this sort of thing. The speech would bring him nothing. He was neither applying for a position at a top company nor courting business partners or investors. Simply offering the whole school some definition of "happiness" sounded utterly dull.
More importantly, how was he supposed to tell the seniors what happiness was? Thousands upon thousands charged toward a narrow bridge, and the occasional few who made it across grinned foolishly back at those still fighting until their heads bled and bodies tumbled. That foolish grin was happiness.
Was he supposed to tell them that happiness meant studying hard and improving every day in a bright classroom, then graduating from university and having the honor of joining the working poor, spending most of their lives struggling against ever-rising housing prices? Once these seniors developed independent minds, they would look back and know he had been talking nonsense. Su Can had no wish to leave that sort of "legacy" among students who would eventually scatter across the country.
Fortunately, it did not seem to count as much of an event. Compared with news of who was dating whom, who had fought whom, or who had shone at the sports meet, nobody cared yet about who would speak at the flag-raising ceremony.
After class, however, students did gather in little groups to discuss it. Their conversation hovered around the edges of the subject, making Su Can, bent over his desk, prick up his ears.
"They say there are three