Page 5 - updated on July

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

languages department to major in English. Our class

was small. There were only twenty students.

The students in our class were mostly around 18

or 19 years old. But I was already 21 - two or three

years older than my classmates. They humorously

called me Lao Da Ge (old elder brother). I was older

than my classmates not because I had gone to school

late, but because I played professional basketball for

two years. In 1962, I quit the basketball team, took

the national university entrance examination and

satisfactorily became a university student. I was very

happy and proud of myself to be a university student.

A university was the first step on the ladder to an

iron rice bowl; once admitted by a university, the

students were guaranteed to have jobs. That’s one of

the benefits of socialism. The length of schooling

was four years, so I should have graduated in August

1966. During the four years, every day I would look

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