Explore "Snow Falling in Spring" by Ming Li on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
OFTEN DURING THE PAST TEN YEARS, I HAD FELT LIKE A SAILOR STRANDED IN SHALLOW WATER, WAITING DAY AFTER DAY FOR THE TIDE TO RISE and the wind to blow. In the meantime, I had been fixing my vessel and studying my charts to make sure that when my chance came I would be prepared.
Then the wind changed. In 1977, for the first time in ten years, a national examination system for college enrollment was put in place. During the Cultural Revolution, the only qualification most colleges were allowed to use was that their candidates came from working-class backgrounds, narrowly defined as factory workers, farmers, and soldiers-so most of my friends and I had been immediately disqualified. Now I was turning twenty-three, the age limit for my school of choice, Beijing Foreign Language Institute. There was no time to waste. I filed my application as an English major.