I have plenty of friends. Some of them have been close to me for more than twenty years; others came into my life later, but we clicked because our values matched. Out of all of them, there is one I especially want to write about today. Among my oldest brothers, he is probably the least outstanding by conventional standards, the one who has struggled the most, had the worst luck, and yet kept the calmest mind. I’ll call him K.
I transferred into our middle school class in the second year, moving from another city. Back then, the permanent number one student in the class was a boy with an upright, almost righteous look about him. That was K. I was nowhere near that level. I was the kind of student who could only be described as a full-on underachiever. Under pressure from my strict father, I tried to learn from the top students, and as time passed, I became friends with K.
After spending enough time around him, something unexpected happened. Along with three or four other guys—people I still regularly end up with at barbecue and grilled fish places even now—I somehow worked my way into the top ranks of the class too. K had that kind of influence.
Then came the high school entrance exam, and for reasons nobody could quite explain, K bombed it. He failed to get into the elite class he was supposed to enter. As for me, I only managed to stay in an elite class for one year before getting kicked out after finishing second from the bottom in the whole grade. The only reason I was not dead last was that the last-place student did not show up for the exam. How I later went from almost the very bottom of the grade to the top ten is another story entirely.
For K, that entrance exam was the turning point.
During the three years that followed, his grades never really recovered. The atmosphere around him was not especially academic either, so by the time the college entrance exam ended, he had only made it into a junior college. He went to a coastal city to study shipbuilding and completed the program in a fairly unremarkable three years.
The original plan was to stay there after graduation, but finding work turned out to be much harder than expected. In the end, he returned to Guiyang. There was hardly any local demand for shipbuilding-related work, and with both his degree level and his major working against him, he could not find a job in his field.
So he did what many ordinary people do when life leaves no room for pride: he took whatever work could keep him going.
He delivered packages for SF Express for a while, then switched again before long. After that he drifted through one trade after another—food delivery, small-scale subcontracting jobs, even working as a service employee at KFC. Later he joined Xibainian, a home renovation company, where he supervised construction sites. In time, he struck out on his own, taking renovation jobs directly and doing much of the work himself. He is still in that line of work today.
K has always been a simple, honest man. He is not good with words, and the work he does is physically exhausting. The money has never been especially high, and it has rarely been stable. Because of that, his personal life did not come together easily either. Eventually, through an introduction, he met the woman who is now his wife. She is capable, hardworking, and good at handling both people and household matters. The one problem is that her personality has never blended especially well with his parents, so from time to time the house turns tense and noisy, with everyone on edge.
Still, they had one stroke of timing on their side. By scraping together money before housing prices in Guiyang took off, they managed to buy a three-bedroom apartment for under 5,000 yuan per square meter. That gave the family a place to settle and allowed them to truly plant roots in the city. If they had needed to buy later, when prices went up, it almost certainly would not have happened.
A smooth life tends to look similar from one person to the next. Hard lives each come with their own mess.
Just as things were beginning to improve, K’s mother suddenly became partially paralyzed. The family spent their savings at the provincial hospital. Fortunately, she recovered fairly well and is now largely able to take care of herself. Given what happened, that was the best outcome they could have hoped for.
K and his wife are raising two sons, both of them wildly energetic. Because of his mother’s condition, and because his father also needs to help K’s younger brother by looking after that side of the family’s children, and because the relationship between his wife and his parents has always been delicate to begin with, the burden of raising the boys falls mostly on the couple themselves.
Every day is the same long chain of obligations: taking the children to and from school, going to work, cooking, cleaning, dealing with groceries and bills, handling all the little necessities that make up ordinary life. It is the kind of pressure many families know well. Their life is tight, stretched thin, and never easy, but they keep it going.
As someone who has known him for more than twenty years, I truly admire K.
He is exactly the kind of person most people overlook: ordinary to the point of disappearing into the crowd, honest to the point of being almost defenseless, sincere to the point that you never need to question him. The three pandemic years hit him hard. His income could not cover his expenses, his credit was ruined, debt piled up around him, and all of this came on top of his mother’s illness. Even so, he still meets life with a smile.
That is what I respect most.
I hope the years ahead treat K more kindly.
And I hope our friendship lasts for a very long time.
