Chapter 3 - 1.2 Frustrations on the Job Hunt

"Sorry, we require a bachelor's degree or higher.""Apologies, you don't have relevant work experience.""We're not hiring at the moment. You can leave your resume, and we'll contact you if anything opens up."Chen Yu had heard these cold words countless times. Each rejection was like a heavy hammer blow to his already fragile confidence. As a boy from a remote village in Suichuan, Jiangxi, he knew better than anyone that his junior college diploma had been obtained by his family selling everything they had.His father, Chen Jianguo, was an honest farmer who had spent his life tending to their three small plots of land. To pay for his education, his father had sold the family's only plow bull—an old yellow bull that had been with them for over a decade. The day the bull was sold, his father didn't sleep all night, sitting by the cowshed door, smoking his pipe. As the bull was led away, it would occasionally stop and look back, not knowing where it was being taken, but his father's eyes were red. Afterward, he had borrowed money from relatives, scraping together just over two thousand yuan, which was an astronomical sum for a rural family at the time."Yu'er, you are our family's only hope. You must establish yourself in the city," his father had said before he left, his hands, calloused and caked with dirt, gripping his shoulders tightly. His eyes were full of expectation and reluctance to part. "The national policies are good now. An educated person can always find a way out. Our family has been toiling in the soil for generations; we're counting on you to leap out of this farmer's gate."His mother quietly wiped her tears at his side, packing his luggage. She packed the best things the family had—a piece of smoked Suichuan cured duck, and a jar of candied kumquats—carefully wrapping them in oil paper and stuffing them into his bag. Suichuan's kumquats and Gougunao tea were famous in Jiangxi, but the family never sold them, saving them all for him.As he was leaving, his mother repeatedly reminded him, "City people have sharp tongues, don't pay any mind to gossip." His father squatted under the eaves, silently smoking his pipe, the embers glowing and fading until only a pinch of black ash remained.But reality was far crueler than he had imagined.Chen Yu rented a small room of less than ten square meters in the suburbs of Nanchang for 120 yuan a month. For him, with less than 400 yuan to his name, this was a huge burden. The room contained nothing but a bed, a table, and a wardrobe that he felt would collapse sooner or later. Large patches of lime had peeled off the walls, revealing the mottled brickwork beneath, and water stains from past leaks near the ceiling looked like a smudged map.Every morning, he would put on his only "decent" outfit—a knock-off brand suit he bought from a street stall for 60 yuan. Although the workmanship was shoddy and loose threads were everywhere, it at least made him look like a presentable college student. Then, with a heart full of anxiety, he would embark on another day of job hunting.This morning, Chen Yu was rejected again by a foreign trade company. The HR manager didn't even look at his resume carefully, just tapping a finger on the education section and shaking his head disdainfully, too lazy to even utter a complete sentence of rejection. His expression seemed to say that Chen Yu's very existence was a waste of time.Walking out of the air-conditioned office building, Chen Yu stood on the street, watching the bustling crowd. Everyone was walking briskly, with a clear purpose. At the newsstand on the street corner, the headlines of Southern Weekly and China Youth Daily were all reporting the heartening news of economic development—"GDP Growth Hits New High," "Employment Situation Excellent." But this scene of prosperity seemed separated from him by an invisible layer of glass. The excitement was theirs; he had nothing.He was like an outsider, standing on the edge of this era, watching helplessly as opportunities, like a school of fish, swam by, none of them for him.