Page 75 - updated on July

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

find a girlfriend. I was notorious all over the school.

No girl was willing to get close to me. I had been

abandoned in a corner, where I hadn’t been paid any

attention to, and for years had stayed there. By the

time I went out of my alma mater and became a

teacher in a small middle school, I had become a Da

Guang Gun (a big bachelor, or a big single man).

The cross-eyed teacher openly made fun of me. I

worried about myself. I worried that the students

might tease me. If they made a fool of me, it would

have been hard for me to build up my prestige among

them. It would be hard for me to be a teacher.

I was told that the students were a crowd of

hoodlums. They cursed, stole, engaged in gang fights,

played with girls and so on. Anyway, they did all

kinds of evil things.

The school headmaster asked me what I could

teach. I said I was an English major. I could teach

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