Coolboy wrote and submitted his first paper of his life to a machinery journal when he was at high school. It was a special period in China ’s history that many things went quite unusual ways. School educations were highly politicized and also heavily made into practice at the time. For example, in middle and high schools, we studied how four-stroke engine worked in physics class and how ammonia was manufactured in chemistry class, etc. In math class, we spent one semester on learning how to make machinery drawings. Students would spend several months per year in countryside and factories to learn from peasants and workers and also to practice what they learnt at school. I practiced many kinds of different works in factories at the time. One time, I was assigned to a factory drawing room ( 绘图室 ) to join to reproduce a set of more than one thousand blueprints for a new machine. There was no photocopy machine at the time. So, we had to trace a diagram from a blueprint onto a transparent paper. The drawing on the transparent paper then became the original copy of the diagram and additional blueprints could be reproduced from the transparent diagram by a blue-printer ( 晒图机 ). For the first time, I also designed and used my signature because one needed to sign and date at the completion of each tracing diagram (and also to sign and date after checking a traced diagram by another person). Since the signature at the old blueprints was un-readable I thought at the time that my signature meant my handwriting of my name that can only be recognized by myself.

I had two mentors for my practice. One was a technician whose main task was to trace blueprints everyday and the other was an (old) engineer who most likely had been in Germany because I saw several German technical books on his bookshelf. I sometimes chatted with the engineer about math and physics. The drawing room belonged to the factory technical department so there were some technical books and journals/magazines in a room next to the drawing room. Occasionally, I also read some of those books and journals in that common room. One day, when I was reading a machinery magazine I got an idea based on my previous practices in other factories that I can make an improvement in measuring/testing the smoothness of an arc part. I thought that I can use the drawing room facility to write a paper/article to submit to that journal and I did.

At the time, it was my big secret and nobody knew that I was doing this. I was excited about it though I was not very confident. After completing my paper and nice drawings I decided to drop my paper in the mailbox of city’s central postal office rather than mailboxes on the road. I walked a long way to the central postal office, standing next to the mailbox and taking a deep breath, and dropped my envelop. I waited there for about five seconds to gather my thoughts and turned to walk away when I heard someone yelling inside the counter: “Who just dropped an envelop here?” I paused and replied timidly: “It was me.” “Please wait, don’t leave,” the person yelled again. My thought went quickly: “I have my return address on my envelope and I do not think any writing in the envelop is counter-revolutionary. This is a purely technical writing.........” “Your envelop is over weighted and the regular 8-cent stamp is not enough. You need to pay additional 10 cents.”--- What a big relief!

I waited and patiently waited. I waited for “ 一 举成名天下 知 ” but I did not get it. I received the rejection letter from the editorial office about two weeks later. It was a hand-written letter by an editor with lots of encouragements. It also came with a free copy of the latest issue of the journal. I showed all these to the senior mentor and he was excited and very encouraging too.

In one whole afternoon of each week, the whole section of about ten technicians and engineers would gather together in that common room to have political studies. This kind of political studies was common to most organizations at the time, i.e., people studied similar materials around the same time. They were studying two articles by Chairman Mao: “On Contradiction” and “On Practice”, which we just studied at school not long time ago. Since I was only a student so I did not join their afternoon study of each week but stayed alone in the drawing room to trace the blueprints. I can hear their discussions while doing my work. While listening to their discussions, I often had the thought that the person who led the discussions was not good at all. He and many others did not understand or misunderstood Chairman Mao’s articles. I would do a much better work if they let me lead the studies and discussions.