"It's all right if you don't take the college entrance exam." Rui's Mom thought her son was pretending to be strong, and tears of heartache nearly spilled from her eyes.
Yang Rui shook his head hard. In his previous life, he had been fat-the kind who hated exercise and loved putting on weight. Making him march in formation every day, one-two-one, would be no different from killing him. The laziness in his bones had seeped into his soul; it would be the same wherever he went.
"Mom, stop. I have to take the college entrance exam. If I can't even get past this hurdle, what can I accomplish in the future? I have to get up where I fell. Starting today, I'll study hard and strive for good grades, to do my part in building our motherland's Four Modernizations!" In his agitation, Yang Rui instinctively called her "Mom," and even remembered to dig a couple of slogans out of his memory.
Sure enough, the moment he said this, Teacher Lu, who stood beside them with her deeply sunken eyes, actually began to clap. "Well said!" she said approvingly.
Yang Rui's mother was stunned by his words, too. He was her only darling son, and she had spoiled him terribly since childhood. Even now that he was this grown, she still called him Little Treasure. She had never expected the son she had always thought of as a little boy to say anything so forceful. After her surprise, she immediately grew happy again. As far as she was concerned, her son was capable and would make something of himself sooner or later.
"That's the spirit. You have my support. Study hard. If you don't get in after one year, try for two. If two years aren't enough, try for three. I'll talk to your dad."
Yang Rui rolled his eyes, thinking, If you asked me to take a doctoral entrance exam right now, I might be a little nervous. But the college entrance exam? That would be a piece of cake.
Never mind a 4 percent admission rate-even a rate of four in a thousand would not have bothered him. As a biology graduate student, Yang Rui could hardly teach only biology once he joined a tutoring school. To earn more money, he became a math teacher when the school offered foundation math classes, a physics teacher when it offered advanced physics classes, and a chemistry teacher when it offered summer chemistry classes. It was this experience that had given him the confidence to start his own business.
The college entrance exam only covered so much material. It was fair to say that, apart from politics, which required some revision, Yang Rui could go straight into the exam room for every subject.
Still, Rui's Mom's words also won Teacher Lu's approval. "Yang Rui is quite bright, just not focused enough. If he studies for another year, he still has a very good chance. If he really buckles down and puts in a year or two of work, getting into an undergraduate program won't be difficult, either."
Yang Rui smiled wryly. So she thought another year of study would only get his predecessor into a junior college or a secondary technical school. Still, it was common for students of this period to repeat their studies for two or three years.
Rui's Mom was delighted by Teacher Lu's words and immediately began thanking and praising her.
The two soon entered a cycle of praise and thanks.
The next day.
Yang Rui woke very early and stared at the ceiling.
The dormitory conditions were terrible. Two rows of communal sleeping platforms, each accommodating ten people, were all the furnishings the single-story building contained. Although many students had gone home after the college entrance exam, plenty of students like Yang Rui would stay for "retraining classes," the repeat-year classes common in later years.
Because the college entrance exam admission rate was extremely low, most students, apart from those who did not intend to keep studying, had to attend retraining classes for two or three years before getting into college or choosing to give up entirely.
As a result, the retraining classes often had more students than all the graduating classes combined.
Naturally, the dormitories were even more crowded.
But Yang Rui's sleeplessness was not because the heated brick bed was too hard or the wheat-straw pillow too prickly. It was because his head was filled with far too much text and imagery.
Plants, animals, cytology, genetics... The terms Yang Rui had studied until he was sick of them as a graduate student popped into his mind one after another.
Even more astonishingly, as these terms appeared, books he had once read emerged in his mind, one after another. "Heredity," for instance, would be followed by the third Higher Education Press edition of Genetics, the second Higher Education Press edition of Genetics, the third China Agricultural University Press edition of Genetics, the second People's Medical Publishing House edition of Medical Genetics, the third Higher Education Press edition of Principles of Genetics...
Yang Rui felt as though he had memorized their contents. With the slightest effort at recollection, he could recall long passages of the original wording.
Yet he was certain he had only briefly leafed through most of these books.
He tried recalling other books, and even the complicated college entrance exam workbooks, with the same result.
More outrageously still, he could even recall student assignments he had marked.
Within a few short minutes, Yang Rui had begun "rereading" the books he had consulted most often during graduate school.
"This is setting me up to be a top student for life..." At the thought of all those classic papers and books that had yet to be published, Yang Rui himself was left stunned.
Around six.
The students in the dormitory got up one after another.
Some took books outside to recite, some sat near the door and windows, working through problems with troubled expressions, and others wrote letters with silly smiles.
Unable to stay in bed any longer, Yang Rui dressed and went outside, where the cold wind made him shiver.
"Don't go catching another cold." A student poked his head through a gap between two battered door panels by the side wall and caught hold of Yang Rui. "Feeling better?"
"Yes." Yang Rui glanced at him and immediately recalled his name: Wang Guohua, a name very much in keeping with the naming conventions of the era.
As he remembered it, Wang Guohua had shared a dormitory with Yang Rui for a long time, and they were close friends who shared a desk. Both had failed this year's college entrance exam.
Outwardly, Wang Guohua seemed unaffected by his failure. A smile on his lean face, he said, "It's packed over by the west wall. If you want to read, you might as well stay here. Less wind."
He lifted one of the battered door panels to let Yang Rui squeeze inside.
Yang Rui hesitated, then ducked in and nodded. "It really does block the wind. What are you reading?"
Wang Guohua handed him the notebook he was holding and smiled sheepishly. "I barely got any points on the trigonometry questions this time, so I thought I'd study it again. Say, what's the point of shuffling these few symbols back and forth?"
Yang Rui examined his notebook curiously.
The ordinary white-covered, thirty-two-mo notebook was filled with problems and key concepts in tiny handwriting. Although the classifications were not particularly detailed, it was quite presentable.
Although reference books were available for purchase in 1982, both their quantity and variety were severely limited, and their prices were hardly cheap relative to ordinary incomes. Even an average mid-ranking official's family could not afford to drill through vast numbers of practice problems. Wang Guohua's father headed the Xibao Town post office, a section-level cadre who, in administrative rank, was an ordinary staff member below even a deputy subsection chief. With three children in the family, they naturally saved wherever they could.
For students at township secondary schools, copying out problems to work on was almost second nature.
Yang Rui flipped through the notebook and said out of habit, "Trigonometric functions can certainly make your head spin sometimes. But once you understand sine, cosine, tangent, and cotangent, the problems are easy."
"Huh?" Wang Guohua exclaimed. "Well, look at you! What, have you figured them out?"
Yang Rui was momentarily speechless. "I suppose I have."
He was a top-notch tutor. If he could not even understand such basic concepts, how would he make a living?
Wang Guohua did not believe him. "You only scored twenty-something in math, didn't you? Don't tell me all those points came from trigonometry?"
Math was a fearsome beast. Many township secondary school students did not even average twenty points. Those who had only started studying in the past few years, in particular, struggled even with equations in two unknowns unless they put serious effort into catching up from elementary school material. Alibaba's Jack Ma had taken the college entrance exam in 1982 and scored nineteen.
Yang Rui rubbed his chin and thought for a moment. Seeing that no other students nearby could overhear their conversation, he said, "I got stage fright during the exam and forgot everything I'd memorized beforehand. But I really do know a few special methods."
"I don't believe you." Wang Guohua was thoroughly straightforward.
Yang Rui smiled, too. "Then how about I tell you the method I learned?"
"Let's hear it, then." Wang Guohua perked up a little. In those days, students were very keen to learn from one another. With so few reference materials and so few highly skilled teachers, they could only ask around for information and help each other.
"This is called the Hexagon Memory Method. First, draw a hexagon..." Taking Wang Guohua's pen and paper, Yang Rui spoke as he wrote. "Starting from this upper-left corner, write sin, cos, cot in order... Then you get these patterns. Look, I'll explain. First, the values of the two trigonometric functions connected by a diagonal are reciprocals. Second, the value of the trigonometric function at each vertex equals the product of its two neighbors. For example, cos equals sin times cot..."
After just a few sentences, Wang Guohua's eyes went wide.
Never mind that such systematic memorization methods did not exist in the eighties-even if they had, there would have been no adequate means of spreading them.
Only five or six short years had passed since the college entrance exam was reinstated. Not only were the students unable to make sense of it, the teachers were in a fog, too. What would be tested, and how? What should they teach, and how should they teach it? No one could say clearly, to the point that local education bureaus had to organize teaching groups, gather people who understood things a little better, and then retrain teachers from the various localities.
By the standards of later years, probably only certain key secondary schools in a handful of major cities and educational strongholds could have reached an average standard across all subjects. Township secondary schools like Xibao Middle School relied entirely on secondary technical school and high school graduates from earlier years to teach. The most qualified among them was actually a high school graduate from the three graduating cohorts of 1966-1968. Because he was already married, after failing the college entrance exams in 1977 and 1978, he had been forced to abandon further education and remain at the school.
Using high school graduates to teach high school students was an utterly commonplace sight at township secondary schools and schools run by factories and mines in this era. As for the results, only heaven knew.
Wang Guohua listened hungrily to Yang Rui's explanation. In his mind, this so-called "Hexagon Memory Method" had already become something like a secret manual.
It was incredible.
Wang Guohua took notes furiously, wishing he could write down every word Yang Rui said.
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