Tiger Woman on Wall Stree Read Online Free PDF

the top students would be rewarded with decent-paying jobs.
    My dad, obviously, had begun preparing me for those games much earlier. After being savagely drilled by him at home on almost all the subjects I studied in school, I didn’t learn much from the teachers themselves. For me, going to class gave me the chance to leave home—and to show off. But I also got into trouble by interrupting and sometimes even correcting the teachers without solicitation. This was, of course, utterly unacceptable. As a result, I would often have to spend the rest of the class period standing with my back pressed against the blackboard. I didn’t mind it; it may have been exhausting for my legs, but it was a breeze compared with the punishments my dad delivered. I actually liked the view of the class from the teacher’s perspective, and I enjoyed making faces at the other students.
    Despite my tendency to interrupt, I knew even then that the teachers liked me. With my consistently perfect scores, I was the ideal student to set an example for the others. At the same time, the teachers were concerned that indulging my brazen behavior would lead to a disorderly classroom. Order was the ultimate goal at school; we had to sit with our hands clasped and backs straight at all times. We always had to repeat what the teacher said verbatim, even mimicking her tone of voice.
    In addition to remembering the rigid classroom environment, my other distinct memory was the endless stream of tests. We took hundreds of them throughout the semesters, the results of which were always announced in front of the entire classroom, from the highest to lowest scores, distinguishing the “good” students from the “bad.”
    My favorite moments were having my name called for first place. But the worst times were when the teacher called the name of my desk neighbor, Yianjie. Her name was almost always at the end of the list. Yianjie would then duck her head and suck mournfully on a corner of her red scarf. Good students were purposefully paired with bad students in order to mentor them. Yianjie and Iwere the perfect desk mates in that sense. She was a sweet, bubbly girl from a big cadre-filled family, but that didn’t save her from the heartache of failing tests. I figured that her father was not hard enough on her.
    Memorization, not creativity, was the key to academic success. One story we all had to learn was Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” which is about a poverty-stricken little girl who spends New Year’s Eve trying to sell matches to passersby. Though chilled to the bone, she is afraid to return home where she knows she will face a beating from her father. So she lights the few matches she has left to try to keep warm. Tragically, she eventually freezes to death during the night.
    There was one thing and one thing only to remember about the story: that although it was written by a Danish children’s writer in the 1800s, China’s Communist Party taught it as an example of capitalism’s brutality and heartlessness. Capitalist class divisions exploited poor workers like her, and the little girl’s very life depended on her commercial enterprise. It was a mouthful of a lesson, but after learning it once, you never had to memorize it again. This kind of lesson eventually became intuitive—it was a safe go-to answer on all our tests.
    We rarely asked any questions in class. Very occasionally someone would whisper something. If the teacher didn’t like the comment or the question, he or she dismissed our interruption, saying, “It won’t be on the exam. Don’t get distracted by a minor point.”
    Opinions were not required or encouraged. Instead, there were countless formulas, stories, and poems we had to memorize for our tests—which we were allowed to then forget so we could free up brain cells for future tests.
    Cheating was rampant throughout grade school and high school. Sometimes we wrote formulas on the backs of our hands,