Simple questions

The first exam that afternoon was physics.

Yang Rui arrived in the classroom ten minutes early and was surprised to find Hu Yanshan there before him, his stationery already laid out, scratching his head as he read a book.

At the sight of Yang Rui, Hu Yanshan merely raised his eyebrows and pretended not to see him.

"This guy studies too?" Yang Rui could not help muttering in surprise.

Wang Guohua laughed when he heard him. "Why else would he join the repeaters' class? He'd have enlisted long ago."

If a soldier could get promoted to officer, the outcome was roughly equivalent to graduating from a specialized secondary school, but far inferior to earning a junior college diploma. Still, a mere power supply station chief might have some influence locally, but the military was beyond his reach.

"What did he score on the college entrance exam?" Yang Rui remained curious.

Wang Guohua tilted his head and thought for a moment. "Around 280, I think. He probably wants to get into a junior college. This should be his third year."

Graduates of specialized secondary schools received cadre status and, with the right connections, could return home and enter a work unit. But to start higher and surpass his father's achievements, a junior college diploma was quite necessary, and that required 330 points or even more.

Presumably, Hu's father, who had spent half his life as a power supply station chief, did not want his son to spend his whole life knocking around the township either.

Yang Rui laughed without a shred of sympathy. "Hu Yanshan's taken it three years and still hasn't reached 300. He'll probably have to go beyond the New Fourth Army and become Old Red Army before he has any hope."

Compared with the New Fourth Army, which fought against Japan, the Old Red Army dated back even further before Liberation.

Wang Guohua laughed at his misfortune too.

The other students looked at them in bewilderment, then went back to preparing their exam supplies or cramming at the last minute.

The importance students in the eighties placed on studying was hard for later generations to imagine. Whether at school, at home, or on the playing field, studying was always what students talked about most. In part, this came from the social climate: fewer temptations made it easier to concentrate. It was also because young students had so few paths open to them; the college entrance exam was almost their only route upward.

This was the carp leaping through the dragon gate. Once they cleared it, they transformed from fish into dragons, instantly becoming the nation's elite, with authorized posts and personnel files, pillars of talent the country needed. Those who failed either tilled the soil at home, worked in factories, or enlisted in the military, with treatment and status that were worlds apart. As for becoming self-employed, that was still a last resort for the destitute and released convicts...

Even for students from the best-off families, whether they ultimately got into college would lead to entirely different futures.

So, given even the slightest chance, students would choose to "study hard and make progress every day."

At two sharp, the physics teacher brought in the exam papers, mimeographed as usual, with handwritten text.

The questions, too, had been newly written following the previous year's college entrance exam. In those years, the syllabus changed drastically with every exam, so schools could only use the latest one as a reference and make adjustments.

Looking at the questions, their ink still wet, Yang Rui silently nodded to himself. Xibao Middle School might only be a township school, and its teachers might not have advanced qualifications, but their dedication was truly admirable.

He had been a teacher himself, after a fashion, and knew how much trouble it took to put together an exam. It had to cover as many knowledge points as possible, while allocating their frequency and marks according to importance and difficulty. Excluding material outside the syllabus and providing questions with varied methods of solution were also tedious tasks.

Even thirty years later, with countless mock papers and reference materials available, teachers still found writing their own questions laborious. By the same token, the workload in the eighties, when teachers had to write almost all their own mock exam questions, was hard to imagine.

"It must take at least a week of overtime to produce a paper like this." Yang Rui first inspected the paper from beginning to end, then bent his head and started answering.

Unlike the other students, Yang Rui had grown accustomed to guessing the examiner's thinking rather than focusing on the questions themselves. It was one of the few pleasures he had left after working through countless exam papers.

Otherwise, endlessly answering similar questions was utterly joyless.

In about thirty minutes, Yang Rui had completed the entire physics paper in neat handwriting.

Compared with papers from later years, this physics exam was noticeably easier. Even the longer problems included simple electricity questions taught in the final year of junior middle school in later times, and the hardest of the other questions did not exceed the level of an ordinary second-year senior high student. Of course, in the early eighties, junior and senior middle school each lasted two years, so from the perspective of a selection exam, this did not amount to an obvious reduction in difficulty.

Still, students who had repeated a year had a clear advantage over those taking it for the first time.

Yang Rui turned to look at Wang Guohua, who had more or less stopped writing too. He had finished everything he knew how to answer; the rest would have to be guesses.

Biting his pen, Wang Guohua sensed Yang Rui's gaze and grinned. "I got 36 on the college entrance exam. It won't be much higher now."

Physics was worth 100 points; a score of 36 meant answering only the basics.

Yang Rui glanced sideways at his paper. For most of the longer problems, he had written only two or three equations without completing them, and the rest were all blank. Clearly, he had scraped together those 36 points one or two at a time.

"I'll help you catch up in physics too when we get back," Yang Rui said quietly.

Wang Guohua nodded repeatedly, his eyes full of anticipation.

"No talking. Do your own work." The physics teacher tapped the desk.

Yang Rui smiled faintly, turned the paper over and checked it once more to make sure he had missed nothing, then covered it with his scratch paper and closed his eyes to rest.

Class monitor Liu Shan also looked up at the disturbance ahead. Seeing Yang Rui behaving as he always did, she pursed her lips and sighed for no apparent reason before lowering her head to return to her own answers.

She had scored 352 and 361 on her previous two college entrance exams, putting her just a hair below the undergraduate admission cutoff. But in an era when more than six million applied and only a little over two hundred thousand were admitted, that narrow gap was not so easy to cross.

At three in the afternoon, the physics teacher collected the papers right on time.

After handing theirs in, the students hurried out to the toilets, while those with a smoking habit seized the chance for a cigarette.

Students with a little spending money often lit cigarettes openly and puffed away right in the classroom. As they smoked, they talked loudly, with the air of men holding forth on affairs of state. The students around them were accustomed to it and calmly breathed the secondhand smoke.

Most smoked Shanhua Cigarettes at three fen a pack or Swordfish Cigarettes at five fen a pack. Those who craved tobacco but could not afford manufactured cigarettes slipped away somewhere deserted to smoke hand-rolled ones.

Hu Yanshan smoked the fanciest brands. He carried two kinds: Sheep Cigarettes for everyday smoking and handing out to his followers, which cost nine fen a pack and were better than what ordinary teachers smoked; and Big Wild Goose Pagoda cigarettes for showing off, which cost an outrageously expensive twenty-six fen a pack. Never mind students-even ordinary adults could not afford them, and they were mostly used as gifts.

At the time, even the famous Daqianmen Cigarettes sold for only thirty-six fen, required ration coupons, and were a mainstay of gift-giving in counties and cities. As the township power supply station chief, Hu Yanshan's father mostly received Big Wild Goose Pagoda and Baocheng cigarettes. Each week, he smoked a carton himself and gave his son two packs.

Yang Rui habitually waved a hand in front of his nose, then got up and went to stand by the window. When he had first started university, he would occasionally join his classmates for a cigarette without inhaling. Ever since smoking had been banned in public places, he had dispensed even with that token gesture.

Hu Yanshan shot him a disdainful glance. To him, Yang Rui had become far too delicate.

"Woman!" Hu Yanshan blurted out his verdict, its target unmistakable.

His two followers immediately chimed in, though neither spoke very loudly. Yang Rui's words at noon still rang in their ears, and they were somewhat afraid.

The ten-minute break flew by, and the chemistry assessment followed.

Yang Rui answered even faster this time. Even pacing himself, he took only twenty minutes. Compared with the other subjects, chemistry seemed simpler still.

To the township school's students and teachers, however, chemistry was a strange and difficult subject. With the school so poorly equipped that even basic experiments were impossible, gaining an intuitive understanding of chemistry through memorization alone was very difficult.

Xibao Middle School did not actually have the resources for systematic chemistry instruction. Even their chemistry teacher was merely a worker transferred from the city chemical plant, relying entirely on enthusiasm and hoping diligence could make up for his shortcomings. His paper was much clumsier than the math and physics papers, consisting almost entirely of standard question patterns. Even the last question had an obvious oversight.

Yang Rui hesitated, then refrained from marking the error directly on the paper. Instead, he followed the teacher's intended approach and wrote out the correct equations.

When he lay down on his desk to rest again, Yang Rui found himself scratching his head a little. If he was going to tutor his study group in chemistry, pen and paper alone would not do. He would need teaching equipment and reagents. At the very least, he had to establish a reasonably sound framework for thinking about chemistry for them.

Of course, relying solely on memorization was not impossible, but it wasted too much time. Students and teachers in the eighties might be accustomed to it, but Yang Rui did not want his students wasting their precious energy that way.

"I'll have to think of some way to get funding later. I can't keep living on steamed buns either." Thinking of dinner, Yang Rui looked thoroughly sick of them.