Page 254 - updated on July

Yu Jihui: “A Stinking Old Ninth – A Tale of the Coal Capital” (updated on July 2020)

discriminated against. They were at the bottom of the

social ladder. It was a time when knowledge was not

worth a penny!

I still remember what I saw with my own eyes in

the job assignment office. The Liao Ning province

had a special agency called the ‘job assignment

office’. All the university graduates had to go there

to be given a job. If you were a graduate of

engineering, you could be given a job in a factory. If

you were a graduate of medicine, you would be

assigned to work in a hospital. I was a graduate of a

normal university. I would be assigned to work in a

school. So after I left my alma mater, the first thing I

had to do was to go to the job assignment office to be

assigned to a school for work.

It was about 10am when I got to the office.

There were several young men and women sitting

there in the waiting room already. They were

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