[Editor’s Note: For this update on Mr. Liang’s quixotic quest to make total sense, please read our previous article on him: 114 NEVER GIVE UP.]
TIME TO GIVE UP?
After failing to achieve a high enough score on China's famously difficult college entrance exam for the 27th time, 56-year-old Liang Shi is beginning to wonder if he will ever make it to his dream university.
Mr. Liang, a self-made millionaire, has taken the fearsome “gaokao” exam over two dozen times in the past four decades, hoping to earn a place at top-tier Sichuan University, to fulfill his ambition of becoming “an intellectual.”
By most measures, Mr. Liang has had a successful life – he worked his way up from being a laborer on a factory floor to owning a profitable construction materials business, making millions of yuan in the process, but his university dreams have so far always escaped him.
In his struggle for higher education, he has put in 12-hour study days, abstained from drinking and playing mah-jong, and endured media mockery as well as online rumors that it has all been just a publicity stunt.
Unfortunately, despite months of living like “an ascetic monk,” this year Mr. Liang was 34 points short of the official requirement for getting into any university.
“Before I got the result, I had a feeling that I would not be able to get a high enough score to enter an elite university,” he said.
“But I did not expect that I would not make it into even the ordinary ones!”
On Friday – along with hundreds of thousands of high-school students across southwestern Sichuan province – the grey-haired businessman carefully typed in his exam identification code information and nervously waited to find out how he had done.
Several local media reporters, live-streaming the results on their devices, were also eagerly checking the updates – and from their disappointed expressions, Mr. Liang knew, before he even saw the screen himself, that this year’s result was not good.
“It is all done again for this year,” he said to himself. “It is very regrettable.”
In the past, Mr. Liang’s repeated misses have failed to deter him.
Every time he fell short, he vowed to try again the next year.
Now, for the first time in decades, he is wondering if his hard work will ever lead to anything.
“If I truly cannot see much hope for improvement, there is no point doing it again. I really did work very hard every day,” he said tiredly. “It is hard to say whether I will keep on preparing for the gaokao next year,” he admitted.
But a life without gaokao preparation is almost unthinkable to him.
“It is a hard decision to make. I am not usually a person who is willing to give up, either,” he said.
“If I were to stop taking the gaokao, every cup of tea I drank for the rest of my life would taste of regret.”
Stay tuned for the continuing story of Mr. Liang and his nemesis, the dreaded gaokao.
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