An aspiring artist bound in body but not in spirit (3)

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“Being in Shanghai has been an eye-opener for me,” she says.

She did not return home until late July for the summer vocation because she had to finish part-time work as a private tutor.

On this trip home, which takes 27 hours by train, she treated herself to a sleeper berth with her earnings.

“It was much better than the experience during the winter holiday, when I had only a hard seat for the 41-hour slow train back to Chongqing,” she says.

Ye Ronghua, 21

“My dream is to one day become an assistant engineer at Shanghai Metro. That would be really cool.”

Ye Ronghua, 21, has just started his work life as an inspector of digital signals at Shanghai Shentong Metro Co.

This summer, under scorching heat, his job is to visit Metro stations, near and far, as part of job training for new employees.

“My dream is to one day become an assistant engineer at Shanghai Metro,” he says. “That would be really cool.”

Ye would hardly have imagined that dream three years ago. At that time, he was obsessed with basketball and wanted to become a superstar like Yao Ming.

Ye, who is 1.95 meters tall, was singled out as a good basketball prospect at the age of 12. In the ensuing six years, he practiced more than three hours almost every day, finally achieving the status as a city-level player.

“It is really hard to be great in sports,” he admits. “There’s the endless training, which can be quite boring, and a lot of injuries.”

Ye finally dumped his sports dream in 2010, when he suffered a serve chest injury.

“The doctor told me I could no longer do intense exercise, which meant the end of my sports life,” he explains.

By that time, it was too late for Ye to switch to an academic path because he had neglected his studies for basketball.

“I’m not very good at studies anyway, and I hate to recite things, English in particular,” Ye says, still amazed that Jeremy Lin, a rising NBA player, managed to graduate from Harvard while pursing his sports talent.

Ye later enrolled at the Shanghai Xingjian College, a vocational school, and plans to attend night school to get certification as an assistant engineer.

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