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This article is from WeChat official account:Quan Now (ID: quanxianzaiAPP)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: Li Yiming, the original title: do problems at home “from” town “to” town speaker “: scores can not give me a sense of security, but the money can” head map: Respondents provide

Liu Jiasen often wonders where he is. After more than six hundred speeches, the scenes in each session are too similar: hundreds of high school students dressed similarly School uniforms; the school is built in a similar fashion; the principal has the same rhetoric; in the exchange after the lecture, the students will also ask similar questions, “How do you learn Chinese? How do you learn math? How do you learn English?”

Behind him, the huge red-bottomed plaque printed “Hengzhong No. 1 Scholar and Peking University Talent Liu Jiasen Enters XX Large-scale Public Welfare Tour” and “Believe in the Power of Example”. XX is the name of the middle school, and sometimes two words are added: “counterattack”.

Liu Jiasen in front of the sign was extremely small, with a microphone in front of him, and his head could not cover any word on the sign.

“Huaban Culture Chief Number One Scholar Public Welfare Tour Lecturer” is Liu Jiasen’s identity at this time.

Liu Jiasen is in the office. Photo by Li Yiming

“I am not from Hengshui, but from Zhuozhou, a small city below Baoding, Hebei.” Before the microphone, Liu Jiasen paused slightly and read the familiar opening sentence. After hundreds of tours, he no longer needs to look down at the draft.

The silence in the audience-this is also LiuJia Sen is familiar with it.

It’s monotonous, repetitive, and silent, exactly the same as the high school Liu Jiasen walked out of. But the difference is that on this occasion, he has two other names that are eye-catching and make him more comfortable: Peking University Ba and Hengzhong champion. These two shiny labels divide his every week into two distinct parts: four days in college and three days in high schools across the country.

After leaving Hengshui Middle School for six years, Liu Jiasen repeats his brilliance almost every day-this has become his job. In this sense, it seems that he has never graduated.

01. Champion

Liu Jiasen is giving a speech. Picture provided by the respondent

The status of “No. 1 Scholar” is the most important label on Liu Jiasen. In the summer of 2015, he was admitted to the Chinese Department of Peking University with a score of 673. He was the number one in the liberal arts of Hengshui Middle School in the national college entrance examination that year and the second in Hebei Province.

This result means that he can enter China’s top colleges and universities, and it also means that he can escape that high school.

Shortly after the college entrance examination, Liu Jiasen had a dream—there was a TV in the dream, which was broadcasting the evening news. With a blue background board, the female announcer sits on one side of the screen, with news messages scrolling at the bottom of the screen. This is a scene that Liu Jiasen has seen nearly a thousand times. He attended Hengshui Middle School in the first two years of high school. He came to Hengshui No. 1 Middle School in his third year of high school. The two schools are in different places but share the same group of teachers. The high school organizes students to watch evening news programs edited by the school every day. This is almost the only way for Heng Middle School students to contact the outside world.

In my dream, a sentence slipped in from the right side of the screen, “The 2015 college entrance examination results are invalid, all recent graduates need to return to the original school to repeat.”

Liu Jiasen woke up in a cold war. He sent a message to a few high school friends, only to know that each of them had had similar dreams.

And with the opening of the university in September, the freshness washed away the nightmare. What’s more, Liu Jiasen is still a champion. During his three years in Hengzhong, his vision for the future path was “to be admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University, and to be an alumnus with the chairman and prime minister.” When stepping into the gate of Peking University, Liu Jiasen thought proudly, “Mr. Liu Zhuangyuan should be a concierge.”

The reality is not like this.

After the college entrance examination, many students went to learn to drive, but Liu Jiasen did not learn. He thought that he would become a “contributor to society” and “the country will provide me with a driver.” At the club welcome meeting, everyone should introduce themselves. He stood up and said, “My name is Liu Jiasen, and I am the champion of Hengshui Middle School.” There was a moment of silence in the classroom. Someone took the lead and applauded, and some cheers came from all around.

The response was not as enthusiastic as he thought. After a few orientation meetings, Liu Jiasen felt boring and never mentioned the word “champion.” He realized that those cheering and booing sounds were just because some people had “high emotional intelligence”.

The champion also has longing for love in college. According to Hengzhong regulations, Liu Jiasen had not been in love before the age of 18. When he first went to college, he naively thought, “I don’t like good people like me, and they should like me too.” At that time, he was still wearing his junior high school clothes and did not like to wash his hair. He defined this as “not pretending”.

He was surprised that there would be girls chasing stars, which Hengzhong had never seen before. Liu Jiasen’s freshman girlfriend was a fan of Wu Yifan. He once questioned his girlfriend face to face: “Wu Yifan’s college entrance examination is a few hundred points lower than me. You actually like him?”

Professionalism is not what I imagined. The lecture was about ancient Chinese and the history of literature, not the writing that Liu Jiasen expected. He was a little disappointed. How could this be what the Chinese department looks like in his mind. With the title of “The First Chinese Department in the Universe”, but in fact, there are not many choices for the direction after graduation.

Liu Jiasen once found the class counselor and asked himself, “Can I earn one million yuan a year after graduation”, and the other party answered straightforwardly, “No.”

For a long time, he was still immersed in the evaluation system of the world of Hengzhong, where scores are the standard for everything.

02. Machine

Liu Jiasen’s bookshelf. Photo by Li Yiming

When he was in Hengzhong, Liu Jiasen brushed hundreds of thousands of practice questions; specially practiced the English font of “15 degrees to the right” for the exam; every morning he should shout in unison, “Fight for the country, fight for the nation, and for yourself Struggle, I can do it, I will do it” to beat myself. And these all seem to be invalidated at the moment when the college entrance examination papers are handed in. As one of the best products of Hengshui Middle School, he is good at exams. Heng Zhong, once regarded as a nightmare by Liu Jiasen, has become the safest place for him.

As the most famous test-oriented education machine in China in recent years, Hengzhong is considered by many to be a manufacturing machine for “the small town to be a tester”.

But Liu Jiasen believes that he is not strictly a “small town writer”-he comes from a double-salary family, and his father is a local civil servant, so he is “not likely to be bullied.” According to his observations, basically only the “small middle class” in small cities, such as self-employed workers, civil servants, or children from double-income families, have the opportunity to be tempered in the balance. In order to enter Hengzhong, Liu Jiasen and his family also need to pay 20,000 yuan “school selection fee.”

After graduating from junior high school, Liu Jiasen’s high school entrance examination results plus a comprehensive evaluation of the three-year junior high school scores ranked fourth in Zhuozhou City. With this position, he got the admission ticket for Hengzhong’s interview. The interview was conducted in a car. The teacher in charge of the interview told Liu Jiasen’s mother that part of the purpose of the interview was to screen out those students who had “good grades but extreme psychological”.

Liu Jiasen still remembers the scene during the interview. He was sitting in the passenger seat of the car, with the examiner on his left. A mother stood outside the car, repeatedly tapping the window, begging the examiner to give her child another chance. A teenager stood aside, looking at his mother’s repeatedly bending waist, with a dull expression.

In Hengzhong, students will actively squeeze their rare spare time for study. On Saturdays every three weeks, the school will be closed for half a day. Students can leave the school and come back the next morning. Liu Jiasen’s parents would come to Hengshui every time at this time and accompany their son to a local hotel for one night. And this night, Liu Jiasen will choose to spend the night-because at school, teachers will patrol the dormitory after the lights are turned off to prevent students from studying privately.. Liu Jiasen said that to save time, he tried not to change clothes for 21 days and had to stop until he had paronychia. The school gives students one hour a week to wash clothes and take a bath, and Liu Jiasen also chooses to spend this fixed amount of time on 40 short questions and 8 major questions-these have become inspirational stories in the content of his future speeches. .

Hengzhong is a school, but it is also like a business. Students invest time, consume knowledge, and produce results; scores become the performance evaluation criteria for teachers. In class, a teacher will directly say, “If you get a good result in the exam, I can also change the car.”

Clear interest relationships make it difficult for “teacher-student relationship” to exist. A teacher in Liu Jiasen’s class deleted the WeChat accounts of all the students in the class after graduation to prevent the messages from the students from “affecting their work.” Liu Jiasen’s feelings about his teacher during school are limited to “understanding”. In this “workshop”, students and teachers are trapped together with extreme rationality.

03. Outside

Liu Jiasen’s short video copy. Photo by Li Yiming

Because they have not yet stepped into society and the school’s closed environment, the ideas accepted by the students are basically indoctrinated by others. In this world, Liu Jiasen said that students are facing the “separation” of two values.

In Hengshui Middle School, slogans for spiritual motivation can be seen everywhere. For example, “I stand proudly above the nine heavens, I wish I could be king forever”, “Raise one point and kill a thousand people”, etc. In collective speeches, one often hears that “as long as you work hard, you can change the world.” Each class also needs to set up a class song. The class song of Liu Jiasen’s class is Zhang Jie’s “Inverse War”.

“That is a dream-like value”, Liu Jiasen described.

Compared with those “grand narratives”, the values ​​the teacher tells the students will be much more realistic. In the third year of high school, Liu Jiasen’s head teacher once called him to the office to chat alone and educate him “If you want to be rich, you must learn more.”

Under the attack of the two values, Liu Jiasen realized one

“Frozen.” A few years later, he used these two words to describe his state at the time.

04. Market

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Liu Jiasen is giving a speech. Photo courtesy of respondents

The most anxiety comes from material things. To put it simply, it is “money.”

Liu Jiasen told Quan Now that he has been sensitive to substances since he was a child. He always remembered the scene when he moved to Zhuozhou City when he was a child-the house is not small, with 120 square meters, but the only decent furniture is a picture tube TV set and a set of spring and autumn chairs sent by relatives, and the white paint on the ceiling and walls It also made him feel like a “family disciple”.

In that small city, KFC can be regarded as a “big meal” that “can only be eaten after bathing and changing clothes”. Until he graduated from high school, he firmly believed that if you “do not study, you will have no food.”

When he was in junior high school, he first realized the difference in class. At that time, there were some “rich second-generation” students in the class. Because of his good grades, Liu Jiasen was often taken to play with him. In Hebei Province, where education competition is extremely fierce, having a “cultural” friend is a “face-saving” thing. Liu Jiasen mingled with these wealthy children, and didn’t have to spend money to sing K for dinner.

But his ranking dropped from less than 100 to more than 800. Seeing the ranking, Liu Jiasen was dumbfounded. He suddenly realized, “No matter how people play, there is still a lot of money at home. But I have no bottom.” He needs to work hard like climbing, the higher he climbs, the safer he is.

The more intuitive impact occurred after going to college. When he first used his smart phone, Liu Jiasen registered WeChat and changed his signature to “Fear of people who are afraid of melons. At that time, the use of Zhihu was popular among student groups, and some of the above discussions on social issues became Liu Jiasen’s main consumers when he came into contact with the real world.Information source. On his timeline, he can often get news related to house prices. Once, he checked the selling price of houses near Peking University and discovered that in Beijing, in an old community in the 1990s, a room and a square meter could sell for 100,000 yuan. His hometown, Zhuozhou, is only more than two hours away from Beijing by car, and more than 20 minutes by high-speed rail, but Beijing’s housing prices are more than ten times that there.

Liu Jiasen, who fantasizes about success, realized that it is not only a dream to “be with the chairman and the prime minister”. According to this price, even staying in Beijing is a problem. He wants to earn money as quickly as possible, as much as he wants.

After the freshman year, he met his own “that opportunity”.

After the college entrance examination list was released in 2015, an old high school teacher who had left his job and was preparing to publish books for teaching supplements contacted Liu Jiasen and purchased his high school notes for book planning. In mid-2016, this teacher has become the boss of Huaban Culture Communication Co., Ltd. He once again found Liu Jiasen and said that the supplementary product he made based on Hengzhong’s No. 1 Scholar’s ​​notes was “finished”. He asked Liu Jiasen to give lectures everywhere. “Can cover tuition and living expenses” tens of thousands of yuan. Liu Jiasen agreed that from that summer vacation, freshman Liu Jiasen returned to middle school and became the “Jiasen Senior” for candidates.

The first lecture was in the summer of 2016 in a middle school in Dexing County (now Dexing City) in Shangrao, Jiangxi. For this speech, Liu Jiasen prepared a month in advance. He wrote a 20,000-character speech, which he simulated at home every day, practicing various gestures and tone, and the circumflex of the speech.

But sitting on the podium, Liu Jiasen still panicked. The principal called the entire second-year high school students, dressed in uniform uniforms, filled the entire auditorium. There were more than 20,000 words in the speech, and Liu Jiasen did not raise his head the whole time, and read the manuscript without any errors. After the first session, the principal said that he spoke well and didn’t let him move his butt, so he arranged two sessions for the other two grades in the morning and the afternoon of the same day.

Sitting on the stage alone, a banner welcoming him hung over his head—the three words “Liu Jiasen” were printed so big and hung so high for the first time. At the end of the three speeches, Liu Jiasen was already dry-mouthed, but he was more happy. “I didn’t expect this thing to be very popular.” This kind of speech originally “has a market.” A quick search on the short video platform will find dozens of creators who claim to have backgrounds in prestigious schools. Similar to Liu Jiasen’s speech, they will tell about their “counter-attack” experience along the way, share their parents’ successful education methods, and tell the audience that “learning will change your destiny, and so can you”.

Hengzhong champion Liu Jiasen started his speaking career in this way. Huaban Culture signed a one-year contract with him, and what he has to do is to follow the company’s safetyRow, went to middle schools across the country to give lectures, and mentioned a supplementary book produced and sold by the company.

Although one year’s income can’t buy a square meter of real estate around the school, compared with other ordinary students, Liu Jiasen has nourished a lot and has more leeway to groom himself. He went to the mall to buy a Jack Jones coat for 3,000 yuan, put it on, walked outside from the dormitory, trying to hide his inner pride with a serious expression, “Let’s take a look at my dragon robe!”

05. Mr. Liu

Liu Jiasen is in the office. Photo by Li Yiming

Now, Liu Jiasen wears the plaid shirt from junior high school at least half of the week, but when looking back at the beginning of the tour, he feels that his material desires are rapidly expanding. At that time, he would buy ten pieces of clothes online at one go, and put them in the cabinet if they didn’t fit, too lazy to return them.

At that time, he would also follow the guide in the Men’s Wear Teaching Official Account to match himself with a formal outfit. The article said that in the suit, the color of the pocket square and the shirt, the color of the belt and the shoes must be the same. Liu Jiasen dressed carefully according to the strategy, permed his hair, and went out confidently, “Special burn bag, looks like a businessman in the 1980s.” It is true that many girls look sideways, but when Liu Jiasen and them have a pair of eyes, what they see is a “gentle smile to primates” on each other’s face.

Sophomore and junior year, Liu Jiasen seems to have returned to the state of squeezing time and full efficiency when he was in balance. You have to give lectures four days a week at most, go to eight different schools, from morning to evening. Liu Jiasen has also really changed. When he graduated from high school, he “said everything was unsatisfactory.” Now, his voice is dull and frustrated, and he can talk for four to five minutes without stopping to answer a question from a student.

The frequency of inviting guests to dinner and buying gifts for roommates has also increased. Friends who slept with him laughed and called him “Mr. Liu”. Compared with “Liu Zhuangyuan”, he prefers this title.

He began to wonder how to realize the leap from “from one hundred thousand to one million”. After one year of the contract, he took the initiative to propose to the company that he hopedI hope my salary can be linked to book sales. Now that he has joined the company for nearly five years, Liu Jiasen claims that he has made nearly two million yuan.

In his senior year, Liu Jiasen paused his speech. This year, he was introduced by a senior of the Chinese Department who was doing educational entrepreneurship and entered an investment institution. Liu Jiasen revealed that this institution has about 30 students with Tsinghua and Peking University backgrounds and entrepreneurial ideas. The organization pays them a salary of 5,000 yuan a month, and the requirement is to come to the company to hold a meeting once a week to exchange their latest experiences and ideas.

Liu Jiasen knew in his heart that the speech was just a “trafficking halo”, and the awkward thing was “just bad money”. He wanted to find an opportunity to change his direction and “stand and make money.”

But Liu Jiasen later discovered that in order to stay in that institution and obtain investment from investors, he must obey him absolutely. He told Quan Now that there will be a session in the weekly meeting called the “Criticism Meeting”, with the main theme of “Punishing the past and the end, curing the sick and saving people.” In this link, everyone must expose all of their hearts. He remembered that a student union cadre dressed as a “legal elite” was forced to kneel on his knees and cry in tears under the pressure of investors, publicly acknowledging his identity as a gay man. In addition, every student who enters the institution must learn to play golf, and investors will also formulate a game for the two to “gamble.”

Here, he came into contact with another world he was looking forward to. Among these people are the sons of the bosses of multinational companies, entrepreneurs from Haidian Jiwa, and “predecessors” who have handled tens of millions of funds but went to jail for illegal fund-raising. But their anxiety and suffering are several levels deeper than Liu Jiasen. Liu Jiasen once asked one of the seniors casually, “What kind of tea do you usually drink?” The other party froze for a moment, hesitating for two seconds and replied: “I usually drink very expensive tea”.

Five months later, Liu Jiasen left here and returned to Huaban Culture to continue his speech.

Soon, Liu Jiasen will embark on the next one-month tour of lectures. Before the speech, he will always get into entanglement-for those children who are still closed and struggling for the college entrance examination, whether to let them break away from the fantasy and accept the truth of the world: “For them, A core dilemma is that he has not experienced the rest of his life yet, so he is responsible for the rest of his life, so he can only understand what his future life might be like through the words of others.”

And Liu Jiasen believes that what he can do the most and the most realistic is to remind students when they ask questions that “small towns are not necessarily suitable for basic subjects.” Otherwise, they may face the disillusionment of their dreams and embarrassing employment prospects.

LiuSui (pseudonym) heard a speech by Liu Jiasen. It was March 18, 2018, and she was in her senior year in a key high school in a county-level city in Yunnan Province. The campus is small. The lectures are held on the playground surrounding a 250-meter track. The audience is full and there are banners specially drawn to welcome Liu Jiasen.

Liu Sui sat in the back row. For her, this was an extremely ordinary day in her high school career. Far away, the people on the stage couldn’t be real. She didn’t have a deep impression about the content of the speech. She only remembered that the champion was quite humorous and told many stories about her life in Hengzhong. She also remembered the last sentence of the whole speech-at that time, Liu Jiasen solemnly said: “My journey is the sea of ​​stars.”

This article is from WeChat official account:Quan Now (ID: quanxianzaiAPP)< span class = "text-remarks">, of: Li Yiming