5 National math competition

Many high school principals were negotiating with my parents about benifits if I went to their schools. They do that with all the prize winners.

My parents decided for me, a pretty good high school, RDFZ, which is closest to our apartment. The rational was easy. High school is just high school, when you are a kid, why do you need to go that far for school. (And apparently for university, I went as many places, as far as possible. ) But it was definitely not the best. The school boomed after 6 years to be the best high school in Beijing. If you are in Beijing, you don't know RDFZ, I won't but people will definitely say you don't know anything about child education. 1/4 of the students each year go to Peking or Tsinghua University which are the best universities in mainland China and students work deadly hard to get in. A lot of students went to Yale, Duke, Harvard etc. if only I was prepared or know how... Well, information is part of the competition too. If you know where the chances lie, you are half way successful. But that's OK, I'll still work my way up the hard way. (Developing countries, developed countries, and career.)

We had many opportunities in our high school. I had chances to go to Italy and the US. More importantly, we had good education too. Even though I am not a big fan of collective education(collective education, math), a lot of people are willing to pay 200 thousand RMB (= $20,000) just to get in and they're still competing among the paid students. And if RDFZ could, they would set it 1 million and I believe those classrooms will still be as full.

I've always been in the math competition business but I was never really as good as was. I didn't try very hard either. So that's part of the reason. In my senior two year, the national math competition had a number theory problem for one of the big problems. I was very good at number theory in primary school and I was determined to get this one. I didn't do it very elegantly but rather with brute force. But still, it won me a provincial first prize and I was perfectly satisfied.