(Left) Mr. He and Mr. Wang shake hands 6 years after meeting through an English exam question – credit, retrieved from social media (Douyin)
A young student has been accepted into a prestigious university thanks in part to an unusual source of inspiration: a strawberry farmer he met because of a question on an English exam.
Now a postgraduate student in artificial intelligence, He Ziqi was in middle school when he was taking an English language exam and saw a question he found rather odd.
It was one of those test sections where you have to read a passage and then answer questions about it to test your reading comprehension. The passage concerned an advertisement by a Beijing strawberry farmer, and included a phone number.
Curious, He saved the phone number so he could check whether it and the paired business address were simply fictional embellishments to the test, or real contact information.
Searching on WeChat, the most popular Chinese messaging app, He was amazed to see that the number belonged not just to a real person, but to a real strawberry grower in Beijing named Mr. Wang.
In a text exchange, Mr. Wang explained the situation. He had been receiving students’ messages for more than 10 years.
“I don’t know which English teacher took the advertisement I wrote and turned it into an English exam question,” he wrote to He. “The thing is, it seems this set of questions of yours is being studied all over the country. People ask me about it every year.”
Wang has been growing and selling strawberries for 21 years, and was at first surprised and confused when students from outside Beijing began calling him every so often.
It seemed he wasn’t aware of his number being included in the English exam in the first place, and he supposed that the test preparer had seen his strawberry advertisement signs.
The novelty of it all charmed the farmer, who told Chinese-language news media that between 10 and 20 students call or message him every year.
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He usually has the same thing to say to them all: study hard, be good students, and, once they graduate, come visit him in Beijing. It’s one of those throwaway lines that’s kind while also being completely acceptable to ignore for both parties.
Yet young Mr. He never forgot his exchange with Mr. Wang, and once he was accepted into Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, he reconnected with Wang and explained he had followed his advice.
Delighted, the strawberry farmer took the lad out for a dinner of Peking duck, where, in a dash of yet further serendipity—all the crazier in a country of 1.4 billion people—he told He that his daughter attends school right next to the Central University campus.
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