Fifty-fourth, The Story of Blue Ribbon

  "Unlike the wheat bag, my family is a rural one and I have a younger sister who is currently in her second year of junior high school. Like many rural families in China, my primary, secondary and high schools were not too much trouble for my family to worry about, went to town to read middle school, and then smoothly passed the entrance examination of our county's No. 1 Middle School. During high school, I was always among the top five students in my class."

  Later, during the college entrance examination, due to great pressure, I only scored enough for a third-tier university. The tuition fee for a third-tier university is over 10,000 yuan per year, which was beyond our family's financial capacity. So, under the persuasion of my classmates and teachers, I decided to retake the exam for another year.

  I originally thought that in the second year, I could smoothly get into a good university. As a result, just before the college entrance examination, I caught a cold and had a high fever.

  So, in that year's college entrance examination, I didn't perform well again. My score was about the same as the first year, only enough for a third-tier university, not enough for a second-tier one.

  I hesitated at home for a long time, and finally made up my mind to apply for a vocational school. Because I was very confident, so I only filled out one volunteer, the Department of Life Sciences, and refused to adjust. Unfortunately, that year, the major just happened to be full, later, during the supplementary enrollment, I went to a higher vocational school, studying tourism management, and then took a tour guide certificate and became a tour guide.

  After graduating from college, I went to a travel agency in Hangzhou. Like all young people who have just entered society, I felt that my life had just begun and my future was bright. Because the salary was not high, and I still had to send money back home every month, at that time, I could only rent a house of less than 10 square meters, cook for myself every day, and live a tight life.

  It wasn't until later, by chance, that I realized I didn't have to live such a hard life and could choose another way of living.

  That coincidence was when I had been working for more than two months and accompanied a colleague to have an abortion at the hospital.

  I was surprised why it wasn't her boyfriend who accompanied her to the hospital, but me.

  In the hospital, she told me that her pregnancy was actually caused by a tourist, not her boyfriend. She asked me to keep this secret for her.

  She said that in this society, there are two professions that appear glamorous on the surface but are actually dirty behind the scenes. One is a tour guide and the other is a model.

  Tour guides and models are professions that rely on youth, which means you only have over a decade to work in this field. And these over a decade, for a girl, is exactly the decade when she is at her youngest and most beautiful.

  It's really hard to make ends meet with just that meager salary every month. As a tour guide, the best way to earn money is to take kickbacks and accompany tourists in eating, drinking and having fun, flattering them until they're happy. Once they're happy, the money comes.

  Actually, tour guides and those girls in bars and KTVs are basically the same, they just put on a more glamorous front.

  If you want to be a good tour guide and make money, you have to bow to the fact, take advantage of your youth and beauty, as for morality, as for conscience, to put it bluntly, that's all nonsense.

  You can call it an invisible rule or a gray area, but it's just there, forever real.

  This society is not our voluntary decadence, but a helpless situation. Life is too heavy, the society is too realistic, and we just want to live a little better.

  When I was in school, I still believed in a saying: "A poor man is not short of ambition."

  But now, in this society, the poorer you are, the shorter your ambition will be. Don't deny this fact, think about it, when you wear those clothes bought from street stalls and go to those luxurious brand stores, how will the salespeople look at you? And how will you look at yourself?

  After being a tour guide for more than two years, I feel that I have changed a lot. Some things that used to be very annoying now slowly become habitual.

  At the same time, passion has slowly faded away, enthusiasm has been gradually exhausted. Now, for society and for life, I just hope that I can live a little better, my family can live a little better, that's all.

  I know that I have slowly transformed from a simple and naive little girl who didn't understand the world into a realistic and mature young woman.

  What is called growth, what is called maturity, is actually the process of ideals falling from high altitude to ground, slowly descending. The thread that pulls it, binds it, is called reality.

  I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I am an uncompromising realist.

  At any time, anything, I don't want to be at a disadvantage.

  "This is now my principle for being human."