Following A Dream With No Clue How To Get There

Recent Stanford MBA Grad Jason Jianyu Tu was born in 1989 in a small village 125 miles south of Xian--in what he termed a sixth-tier city--meaning, "there's a very slim chance you can be successful." (See post one.) His parents, well aware of this, searched for ways out of this small village, and eventually found a path to Xian. (See post two.) The big city of Xian--although only a hop, skip and a jump away--was like a different planet, with buses and fast food and a really tough school. (See post three.) Jason gave up trying to do well in school, instead focusing his energy where his passions lay: guitar and blockbuster movies. (See post four.)

His grades just got worse and worse.
“By the time I was going to take the college entrance exam, the headmaster came to me and asked, ‘So where do you think you’re going to end up?’
“I didn’t know how to answer. Everything that flashed into my mind was Jimmy Hendrix, American Rock Music, and Hollywood Blockbusters. So I told him, ‘I’m going to America.’”
While Jason held onto the dream of an American college, he had no idea how to get there.  The internet was in its infancy, so not many people had access. He fortunately had a friend with a connection and he blocked out times to go visit and do research. He learned that he would need to take two tests: a TOEFL "and something called an SAT." The TOEFL was offered in China, but the closest SAT-test site was about 900 miles away in Hong Kong.
“It took me a lot of time to prepare for that. A lot of Chinese students pay agents to help them prep for the test. I learned from scratch.

filing out of a Hong Kong SAT (WSJ)

“I scored perfectly in math. I got 800. But for verbal? Super bad. The highest score you could get was 800. I got 380.”
Jason still had this dream of getting into an American college--a top American college. “I applied to four or five: Princeton, Yale, Duke, Wash U. I got rejected by all but one. I got waitlisted at Wash U. I searched on the website to look up, ‘How do I get in once I get waitlisted?’
"They said that you have to send in supplemental materials that shows that you’re special. So I wrote a song, played guitar, recorded it and mailed it to them. I got accepted.”

It was then Jason realized that while he had the talent, he didn’t have the funding.
“When I moved to the city I kind of forgot the identity that I’m from a small village. I thought I was one of the city folk. I thought my family at least had some savings. I never thought about how would I finance myself. Being admitted out of the waitlist means that you have no scholarship at all. And it’s a private college: 40,000 a year. I had no way to get that money.”
All the family's effort--the saving, the bribing, the moving, the test-taking--seemed all for naught. It was a tense, depressing time.

(To be continued: The Box That Saved Jason)