Life feels boringly slow when it is nice and peaceful. It can, however, change in a flash, when the peace is removed.

This week’s entry features a boy called Lin Jinhua. I read the story in a journal kept by one of my teenage students, Mr Yi Shiqian. Here I will recount it.

During the Spring Festival, I ran into one of my ex-classmates, Lin Jinhua. When we were in the same class in middle school back at our hometown, Zhushan, he was no worse than me in grades. In fact, most of the teachers and classmates expected Jinhua to shine in the high school entrance exams. He himself was confident that he could get himself admitted to the best high school of the area.

Lin Jinhua lost his father in a traffic accident in 2005. Since his father’s death, his mother had been struggling to support him and keep him in school. The family’s misfortune in turn motivated Jinhua to work hard at school. And he was really good.

We sat the high school entrance exams in the summer of 2007. Unluckily, his score was not high enough to earn him a place at YYHS, the high school that we thought was the best in the area. Instead, he had no alternative but to enrol at the County High.

In order to further support him, Jinhua’s mother left their village behind and moved to the county town, where the mother eked out a living by doing whatever odd jobs there were available. Some days she was peddling vegetables at the street market. Other days she was working as a housemaid for other families, cooking, laundering and cleaning. Juggling a couple of jobs for survival, the mother earned a pittance, 600 yuan or so a month, which was barely enough for the family to make ends meet.

Mrs Lin was fighting tooth and nail for their existence when the son, Jinhua, changed. The teenager began to frequent net bars, where it was not long before he got addicted to online gaming. The allowance that his mother gave him for meals was spent on games. Worse still, his grades dropped gradually with his mind obsessed with the newly found appetite. His teachers tried to wean him off gaming, but to no avail. He would not listen, and the teacher’s words fell on deaf ears. Therefore, the adults predicted that were Jinhua to be getting on this way, it would be impossible for the teen to make it to even a second-tier college at the end of high school.

The mother was heartbroken. During the holidays, an important decision was made. The son was to drop out of school and go and work in a factory in Guangdong when the Spring Festival was over.

Life changes so fast. Everything evaporates like a dream. The days we were classmates are still as fresh in my mind as if it were yesterday, and yet Jinhua has been thrust upon a life course which diverges markedly from mine.