He just smiled but didn’t say anything. The next day he went to the village committee asking the secretary to issue a certificate. He emphasized that because of his previous failure on the pre-exam and he’d like to change his bitter fate, he’d changed his name to “Zhou Xiaotian.” Thereby the certificate was issued as: “Zhou Haonan, also known as Zhou Xiaotian...”

    After that, accompanied by Fuqiang, he brought a blank student’s learning record to Nawu Middle School where he would meet Mr. Zhu, the educational chief.

    At noon they both stood in front of Mr. Zhu’s door, which was situated on the 2nd floor of the teaching building. Mr. Zhu was asleep. Fuqiang said, “I don’t know when he’ll wake up.” Suddenly he saw that the drawer on Mr. Zhu’s table was open and unlocked. The Nawu Middle School of Huazhou County stamp was just sitting there. After waiting for a long time seeing that Mr. Zhu was still asleep, Fuqiang tiptoed into the room and quietly stamped the blank form.

    Carrying the form home, and comparing it with those comments in the old learning records of his, Zhou Haonan copied the handwriting on his previous form and wrote on his new form plenty of positive comments.

    Afterwards, Zhou biked more than 100 kilometers to meet his mother’s brother who lived in Gaozhou, with whom he went to the local police office to get the temporary residence certificate. Finally, he turned in all his documents to Gaozhou Middle School.

    The next day he staggered into Gaozhou Middle School. It could be seen that the name of “Zhou Xiaotian” had been written on the list of who’d been admitted.

    Zhou Haonan had succeeded! He couldn’t help but smile. But he was nervous...

    After the new term started, he explained to the teacher in charge of his class, “My name is strange and odd because Xiaotian sounds like I laugh at the sky; so I’d prefer to be called Zhou Haonan, is that ok?” The kind teacher smilingly approved.

    For the coming school year there, Zhou Haonan studied harder. He passed the pre-exam in 1987 and in July when the college entrance examination was held, he passed.

    Gaozhou County had been upgraded to city and in the autumn of 2011, Zhou Haonan said, “Today I feel so guilty for what I’d done before. I want to atone.”

    The school leaders started discussing. After a while, Chen Wenchao summarized, “All of what Zhou Haonan said today reflects that his conscience hadn’t vanished. So, even if he didn’t donate today, we can still forgive him...” Everyone applauded. Haonan raised his head and looked around, finally smiled tearfully.

    After Zhou Haonan came back from Shenzhen, he could finally transfer his residence identity to the city. When he took his personal files from the Human Resources Bureau of Maoming City, the old paper bag broke open, from which he caught sight of the old test papers from the pre-exam in 1986.

    He then curiously looked through the test papers and shockingly found that on the Chinese language test, the total score should have been 116 instead of 115, which meant that one score was unfortunately wrongly totaled. He was shocked but then to make sure it was correct, he recalculated it six times. Yes, the fatal one score was tragically omitted.