Chapter 5

Chapter 5

My first meeting with Ju Bingyuan was, to be honest, not exactly a dignified affair for me.

I had grandparents who were bedridden with chronic illnesses, a mother who was a housewife, and a father who worked odd jobs.

From the time I was a child, money was always tight at home.

But we managed to scrape by somehow.

Back then, I thought that if I studied hard, got out into the world, and made a lot of money, I could stop them from worrying about finances.

So, trapped behind a wall of information asymmetry, I didn’t hesitate to apply to the School of Economics when it came time for the college entrance exams.

I figured a major that studied money surely wouldn’t be short on it, right?

But I gradually learned that in this field, money only flows toward those who already have it.

This was a major that relied on networking, resources, and background more than any other.

I had none of those.

The dark irony was that my investment professor was a master of the trade. Once, he recommended a stock in class; while my classmates were all investing and making money, I couldn’t even produce a thousand yuan in principal.

I had nothing to my name, so I had no choice but to try and polish my credentials.

Going abroad was out of the question, so my only option was graduate school.

However, it was at this point that the cold, hard reality of finance revealed itself: the tuition fees for this major at various universities were outrageously high.

During my undergraduate years, I used every means possible to make money-securing every scholarship and grant available and working part-time jobs from dawn till dusk.

I supported myself for four years and exhausted every effort to scrape together the 130,000 yuan needed for tuition.

To a child from a wealthy family, 130,000 yuan might just be the price of a bag or even a single meal.

When a person has ten thousand, earning another ten thousand isn’t difficult; but when a person has nothing, saving even a single yuan is hard.

Because they have to survive first before they can save.

No one could truly empathize with how much effort I put into that 130,000 yuan.

But on the third day after I confirmed my admission offer from my dream school on the postgraduate recommendation system, I saw my parents approaching me at the school gate.

My father, who had kept his back straight his entire life, bowed before me.

And my mother, who had always relied on my father for money to treat my grandparents, actually knelt down in public.

Horrified, I scrambled to help her up.

I finally learned from their mouths why they had come.

My father had started a business venture with someone else and had been swindled, losing everything.

But where did he get the principal?

Loans, of course.

They said if they couldn’t pay it back, they truly couldn’t go on living.

In that moment, my voice was unexpectedly calm:

“How much?”

Yet beneath my sleeves, my fingers were already ice-cold.

“One hundred thousand.”

How ridiculous.

Now, a hundred thousand yuan is just pocket change in my bank account, but back then, it was enough to drive my parents to their deaths.

I didn’t say a word. I even withdrew an extra five thousand from my card, took them out for a meal near the campus, bought their return tickets, and saw them all the way to the station.

I wasn’t going to be able to save enough anymore anyway, so what did it matter if I spent a little more?

To be honest, I didn’t hate them.

It wasn’t that they didn’t love me; it was that they truly had no money.

What I hated was poverty.

It can easily cast a family into the abyss, slowly eroding affection and humanity, to say nothing of dreams.

I still remembered three years ago, when they carried bags large and small, proudly seeing me off to school; now, I stood there watching them, hunched over, walking into the station together.

They didn’t want to live a life where they had to reach out to me for money, but the rules of the world are just that cruel. They couldn’t make money; that casual phrase “cheap labor” in geography books actually only provides a basic subsistence that cannot withstand the slightest hardship.

I can’t describe how I walked back to school that day.

From the station to the school was 5.7 kilometers; every step was a testament to my powerlessness.

I walked from noon until dusk, only to be stopped by someone the moment I reached the school gate.

Ju Bingyuan was a famous alumnus of our university.

On this day, while he was here to donate a building, he had witnessed everything at the gate.

I could hardly imagine that a man who made money hand over fist would actually wait at the school gate for me to return.

He opened his car door, stepped out, and handed me a business card:

“I can sponsor you.

“Tuition and living expenses.”