為適應教育事業發展的需要，1978年，上海市教育局決定委託華東師範大學舉辦一期教輔人員培訓班，學習期限為兩年，畢業後給予中專待遇，由市教育局統一分配至本市有關高校大專和新辦的各分校，從事實驗員教輔工作。
當年校招生辦人員在上海市郊區，近十個國營農場報考大學落榜名單裡挑了30名考分接近錄取線的報考生，我也有幸在被選之列。那是恢復高考的第二年。前一年的77級高考我沒考上，而78年我的高考分數是290分，比300分的錄取線差了10分。讀兩年拿中專，雖然不盡人意，總比繼續當漁家女強。而且，小時候心心念念、無限憧憬的地方，竟然就是華東師大的校園。
我們的高等數學、普通物理、晶體管電路、數字電路、計算機原理、計算機語言等基礎課程，是和77級的大學生一起上的大課，其他專業課程是在小教室上的。我們當時的課程還有：英語、機械製圖、攝影、黑白電視原理、彩色電視原理、錄像機原理、 錄像製作等。
在校期間，我很喜歡畫那些電子線路圖、方波圖、與非門邏輯電路圖等，而且成績都很好。7管半導體收音機組裝是電子技術實驗課最後完成的作業，我沒花多少時間就組裝好了。我的動手能力較強，要歸功於小時候。
自我有記憶起，就經常看到爸爸在搗鼓家裡的那台電子管收音機。一臺用舊了、壞了，過一陣子他又不知道從哪兒弄來一臺繼續琢磨。那時候我不記得牌子，但裡面什麼樣子我卻記得清清楚楚：那一個個電子管，像高樓一樣立在機盤上。那些零件兒，像帶開關的電位器呀、功放管、整流管、還有線圈兒、磁棒等，我都能認出個七七八八。爸爸拆下來的那個雙聯可變電容器，更是成了我的玩具，拿在手裡轉呀轉的，能玩兒好久，激發了我孩提时代的想像。
那時候我總想，爸爸怎麼這麼厲害？拆下來的東西每次都能完好無缺地安回去。後來才知道，爸爸在廠裡是「八級工」，那是當時工人能達到的最高技術等級，有一百零幾塊的工資。那時候他們的工廠是個頂級的保密單位，大門口有軍人站崗。不像現在的印鈔廠那樣直接掛著「印鈔」兩個字。那個時候，職工都簽過保密協議，連家屬也不能知道他們工廠的性質的。我也是聽小哥哥阿六神神秘秘地說過那麼一句：「爸爸廠裡是印鈔的。」而且說要保密，我當時聽得汗毛倒豎，覺得緊張又神秘。六哥也是聽其他小夥伴兒們說的，當時村裡住的基本上都是五四二廠的員工家屬。看來保密雖然保密，但是總有嘴巴把不住關的人，但大人基本上是心知肚明的。
爸爸彷彿對所有能動、能響的機械和電子玩意兒都著迷，家裡的那台三五牌台鐘也經常被他打開後門，直接掏出裡面的「內臟」零件擺弄；至於那小鬧鐘，更是動不動就被他「大卸八塊」。
只要爸爸一開始在家幹活，手裡總是拿著電烙鐵，往松香裡輕輕一點，「哧——」地一聲冒出一股白煙兒，空氣裡頓時散發出一股特殊的松香味。接著再點一下焊錫，爸爸就在那裡點點，這裡焊焊。他的上衣口袋裡總插著一支電筆，身旁擺著測量電壓電流的萬用表，那錫條則是繞成一卷一卷的。
後來，我們家終於升級到晶體管收音機了。童年最快樂的時光莫過於每天傍晚六點半，時鐘還沒敲響，我和年紀相仿的哥哥們，還有鄰居家的男孩們，就已經圍坐在收音機旁，一天不落。我們焦急地等待著播音員陳淳的聲音，他那充滿魔力的嗓音彷彿能將我們帶入戰火紛飛的年代，讓我們沉浸在《紅旗譜》、《紅岩》、《烈火金剛》和《小兵張嘎》等作品所描繪的世界之中。像高老忠等鮮明的人物、肖飛買藥的故事情節使我們聽得入神，深深地印在了我們的小腦瓜裡，為我們的兒童時代增添了無限的想像力。
不料，在大學裡讀中專造成了我嚴重的心理障礙，一樣的美麗校園，一樣在階梯教室裡上大課，一樣的大學教授講課，一樣的努力學習，可別人讀四年後是大學生，而我們只能讀兩年。
當時物理樓門框上的三個牌子分別是：計算機科學系、現代教育技術研究所、和物理系。底層大門東側，走道北邊第一間135教室，是我讀了兩年中專班的專用教室。在兩年中我們學習了19門與電教技術專業相關的課程。畢業後全班同學被分配到九所大學和教育機構工作。
我被分配在本校電教所工作，具體是為攝製組拍的教學片後期編輯配音。能留校工作應該是很不錯的了，可是在高等學府工作卻沒有高學歷~~ 無形中的自卑感、壓抑感、加上虛榮心折磨著我年輕悸動的心。古人常說「寧為雞口，無為牛後」，而在這大牌雲集的高校裡，我成了最微不足道的「牛後」，那種「鶴立雞群」的驕傲滋味兒是再也體會不到了。
1982年我還參加了物理系的暑期加班，組裝12吋黑白電視機。近水樓台，低價大約80塊人民幣買了一台，從那時起，我們家也有了電視機。老同學說：「當時的黑白電視機剛開始進入家庭，而且9英寸的居多，以當時人們的收入水平看還是很貴的，一台黑白9英寸的凱歌電視機要賣225元(帶收音245元)，我們中專畢業時工資是每月49元，儘管這樣電視機還要憑票購買，物理系一些搞實驗的老師們就自行採購元件，自行組裝，而且是12吋的，以成本價賣給教職員工，所以會覺得便宜。 」
1982年3～4月的某一個午後，我在二樓編輯室裡看書，忽然有人在我桌上「砰——」地一聲，放了一摞書。
「給你的。」同事小W的聲音同時傳來。
「幹嗎呀，你嚇我一跳！」我抬起頭，條件反射地照著他的左手臂就是一拳，當然力道不重。
「嘿嘿～」他笑道：「6月份夜大入學考試，你趕快複習了去考。」
「考什麼？什麼夜大？」我驚訝地看著他。
「哈！你還不知道啊？人家小Z已經在夜大數學系讀了一年了。」
小Z是我的好友，但這事我卻不知道。「你也準備考嗎？」他點點頭。
「啊呀！怎麼不早告訴我呢？」
「急什麼，這不還有兩個月呢。」
「有什麼專業？」
「甭管有什麼專業，考數學系！我爸說只有讀數學系才有前途，三年拿大專文憑，繼續讀滿五年拿本科。你聰明，你能考進的，你肯定能考進的，讀三年後你就可以考我爸的研究生，然後咱們一起出國。」
「什麼時候報名？怎麼報名？到那裡去報名？」我沒想得像他那麼遠。望著他憧憬未來的迷離目光，一連串地發問。
「我會通知你的。」
小Z的父母也都是華師大的教授，他們消息相當靈通。 6月我們都參加考試了。我的數學考了85分。7月錄取榜上沒有他的名字。
因為個人的原因，我從數學系轉去了中文系。人們也都說女孩子讀理工科沒前途。說實話，要我考文科，我絕對會落榜的。當年就是作文与政治的分數低，躍不過高考入取分數線。
但是一切的努力都無濟於事，都無法解開我心裡的病結。畢竟是「夜」幕沉沉啊~ 抬不起頭來。為什麼中專畢業後就不能考正規大學了呢？ ！遺憾 ！
**********************************
The Glow of the Vacuum Tubes and the Heavy Shadows of the "Night" University
To meet the growing needs of the educational sector, in 1979, the Shanghai Bureau of Education commissioned East China Normal University (ECNU) to host a special training program for technical and educational support staff. It was a two-year program. Upon graduation, we would receive a technical secondary school (Zhongzhuan) status and be assigned by the Bureau to various local universities, colleges, or newly established branch campuses to work as lab assistants and instructional aides.
Back then, ECNU's admissions officers traveled to nearly ten state-owned farms in the suburbs of Shanghai. From the list of students who had narrowly missed the cutoff score for the regular university entrance exam (Gaokao), they selected 30 candidates whose scores came closest. It was only the second year since the reinstatement of the National College Entrance Examination. I had failed to get in during the legendary Class of '77 exam the year prior, and in 1978, I scored 290 points—missing the 300-point university admission cutoff by a mere 10 points. Fortunately, I was among the chosen few. Going to school for two years to get a technical diploma was not entirely ideal, but it was far better than remaining a state-farm fisher-maiden. Moreover, the very place I had daydreamed about and longed for since childhood turned out to be none other than the ECNU campus.
Our foundational courses—including Advanced Mathematics, General Physics, Transistor Circuits, Digital Circuits, Computer Principles, and Programming Languages—were large lecture classes taken alongside the prestigious ECNU undergraduate Class of '77. Our specialized courses, however, were held in smaller classrooms. Our curriculum was diverse and demanding: English, Mechanical Drawing, Photography, Black-and-White Television Principles, Color Television Principles, Video Recorder Principles, and Video Production.
During my time at school, I fell in love with drawing electronic circuit diagrams, square wave graphs, and NAND gate logic circuit layouts. My grades in these subjects were excellent. As the final assignment for our electronic technology lab, we had to assemble a 7-transistor semiconductor radio. It took me very little time to put it together. My strong hands-on ability was a gift rooted deeply in my childhood.
For as long as I can remember, I always saw my father tinkering with the vacuum tube radio at home. When one grew old or broke down, he would somehow procure another one after a while and continue analyzing it. I couldn’t recall the brand back then, but I remembered exactly what its inside looked like: those vacuum tubes stood on the metal chassis like miniature skyscrapers. I could recognize almost eighty percent of the components—the potentiometers with power switches, the power amplifier tubes, the rectifier tubes, the coils, and the magnetic rods. The dual-gang variable capacitor that my father dismantled became my favorite toy. I would turn it round and round in my hands, playing with it for hours, letting it spark my imagination.
Back then, I always wondered, How could my father be so incredible? Everything he took apart was always put back together flawlessly, without a single missing piece. Only later did I find out that my father was an "Eighth-Grade Artisan" at the factory—the absolute pinnacle of technical ranking a worker could achieve back then—which brought in a monthly salary of over one hundred RMB. At that time, their factory was a top-secret enterprise, with armed military guards standing watch at the main entrance. It looked nothing like today's banknote printing plants, which boldly display the words "Banknote Printing" right on the gates. Back then, all employees had signed strict confidentiality agreements; even family members were forbidden from knowing the true nature of the factory. I, too, only found out through a hushed, secretive whisper from my slightly older brother, Ah Liu: "Dad's factory prints money." He emphasized that it had to be kept a complete secret. Hearing that made the hairs on my arms stand up; I felt a rush of intense nervousness and mystery. My sixth brother had actually caught wind of it from other neighborhood kids, as the village we lived in was almost entirely populated by the dependents of Factory 542's employees. It seemed that no matter how strict the secrecy was, there would always be lips that couldn't quite hold a secret. The adults, however, were mostly keeping their understanding unvoiced.
Perhaps because of the innate precision of an Eighth-Grade Artisan and his obsession with all things mechanical, the Sanwu brand grandfather clock in our living room could never escape his "clutches." He would frequently open its back door, pull out its mechanical "guts," and fiddle with them. As for the small alarm clocks in the house, they were routinely ripped to shreds by him.
Whenever my father started working at home, he would hold his soldering iron and tap it lightly against the pine resin. With a loud Chiii—! a plume of white smoke would rise, instantly filling the air with that distinct, comforting scent of rosin. Then, he would tap the solder wire, welding seamlessly here and there. A test pen was always tucked into his shirt pocket, a multimeter for measuring voltage and current sat by his side, and the tin solder strips were wound into neat, tight coils.
Later, our family finally upgraded to a transistor radio. The happiest moments of our childhood were surely every evening at 6:30 PM. Before the clock even struck, my brothers, who were close to my age, the neighborhood boys, and I would already be sitting in a tight circle around the radio without missing a single day. We would wait impatiently for the voice of the announcer, Chen Chun, whose magical tone would carry us away into the war-torn eras, immersing us in the worlds depicted in works like The Red Flag Chronicle, Red Crag, Steel Meets Fire, and Little Soldier Zhang Ga. Vivid characters like Gao Laozhong came alive, and plots like Xiao Fei sneaking out to buy medicine captivated our young minds, leaving an indelible mark on our childhood brains and adding boundless imagination to our early years.
At that time, three plaques hung on the frame of the Physics Building entrance: the Department of Computer Science, the Institute of Modern Educational Technology, and the Department of Physics. On the east side of the ground floor, the very first room on the north side of the corridor—Classroom 135—was our dedicated home for those two years. During our time there, we completed 19 courses related to educational technology. Upon graduation, our classmates were distributed among nine universities and educational institutions.
I was assigned to work right at ECNU’s Institute of Educational Technology. Specifically, my job was post-production editing and voice-over dubbing for instructional films created by the film crew. To be able to stay and work at one’s alma mater should have been considered a stroke of great luck. Yet, working in a pinnacle of higher education without a prestigious degree meant that an invisible sense of inferiority, oppression, and youthful vanity constantly tormented my restless heart. The ancients said, "Better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox." But in this university crowded with towering intellectuals, I felt like the most insignificant "tail of an ox." The proud feeling of standing out like a crane among a flock of chickens was something I would never experience again.
During my first year, I volunteered for summer overtime in the Physics Department, assembling 12-inch black-and-white televisions. Being close to the source, I managed to buy one at a cost price of about 80 RMB. From then on, our family had a TV to watch, too. An old classmate later recalled: "Back then, black-and-white TVs were just beginning to enter households, and most were only 9 inches. Relative to income levels, they were incredibly expensive. A 9-inch Kaige TV cost 225 RMB (245 RMB with a built-in radio), while our monthly salary upon graduation was a mere 49 RMB. Even if you had the money, you needed a special ration coupon to buy one. Some lab professors in the Physics Department bought the components themselves, assembled them into superior 12-inch sets, and sold them to faculty and staff at cost. That's why it felt like such a steal."
One afternoon in March or April of 1982, as I was reading in the second-floor editing room, someone suddenly dropped a heavy stack of books onto my desk with a loud Thud!
"These are for you," came the voice of my colleague, Xiao W.
"What are you doing? You scared the life out of me!" I looked up, reflexively throwing a punch at his left arm—not too hard, of course.
"Heheh," he grinned. "The entrance exam for the Night University is coming up in June. Hurry up, review these, and go take it."
"An exam for what? What Night University?" I looked at him in utter bewilderment.
"Ha! You don't know yet? Xiao Z has already been studying in the Night University's Mathematics Department for a whole year."
Xiao Z was my close friend, yet I had been kept entirely in the dark. "Are you going to take it too?" I asked. He nodded.
"Oh my goodness! Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"What's the rush? There are still two months left."
"What majors do they have?"
"Doesn't matter what majors they have, just major in Mathematics! My dad says that studying math is the only path to a real future. It takes three years to get an associate degree, and if you stay for five, you get a full bachelor's degree. You're smart; you can get in. You will definitely get in. After three years, you can take the entrance exam to become my father's graduate student, and then we can go abroad together."
"When is registration? How do we sign up? Where do we go?" I hadn’t thought as far ahead into the future as he had. Watching the dreamy look in his eyes as he envisioned our future, I fired off a barrage of questions.
"I’ll let you know when the time comes."
Xiao Z's parents were also professors at ECNU, so they were incredibly well-informed. When June arrived, we both took the exam. I scored an 85 in Mathematics. But when the admission list came out in July, his name was nowhere to be found.
Due to personal reasons, I eventually transferred from the Mathematics Department to the Chinese Department. People always said that girls had no future in STEM. To be completely honest, if I had been forced to take the humanities entrance exam initially, I would have failed catastrophically. Back then, it was precisely my low scores in essay writing and politics that kept me from crossing the threshold of the regular university admissions cutoff.
Yet, no matter how hard I tried, none of my efforts could untangle the knot in my heart. After all, it was a "Night" university, and the heavy shadows of that word still made it hard to lift my head with pride. Why was it that after graduating from our technical program, we couldn't just directly test into a regular, full-time university?! What an eternal regret.
Special thanks to Gemini AI for providing the spirited translation and text refinement.
第三百六十二篇
