While, from the perspective of later generations, a female educated youth choosing to marry into a local family might seem like a poor decision, nobody at the time knew that the college entrance examination would be reinstated or that they would eventually be able to return to their hometowns. To be sent to the countryside was to see a future of nothing but despair. Take Zhong Yu, for instance—she is twenty-six now. She arrived when she was twenty; by the time the exams are reinstated in four years, she will be thirty. The best decade of her life will have been wasted here. Life is bitter, and on top of that, she has to endure the exclusion and bullying from the village. Many people, unable to hold on, eventually choose to assimilate. Those female educated youths who couldn't persist, Jiang Hongxia included, all compromised in this way.
But not Zhong Yu.
"It is likely for the sake of the ideal I hold in my heart. One day, I will leave this place."
Chapter 45