Born a Loser

Over the past fifteen years, Bu Ting has almost perfectly demonstrated to those around him the equation "loser = idiot = waste": bottom of the class, hopeless at sports, sleeping through classes all day, going home to read comics online, post on forums, and copy the homework of his childhood friend Jin Jing. After entering high school, a soccer expert named Zang Jian who claims to come from the Southern Song dynasty falls from the sky into his home, and his peaceful, get-by existence is thrown into disarray. The school beauty Wang Wei, the sharp-tongued but soft-hearted Jin Jing, his good friend Yang Wei, and the later-arriving coach Li Ling push a boy who has never known what he wants step by step onto the soccer field. From a substitute who cannot finish a 3,000-meter run and is shunned in the draw, to the school team roster, the league final, and a penalty shootout, Bu Ting slowly finds his place through sweat, failure, and the trust of his companions. The novel uses soccer matches as its skeleton, interspersed with campus daily life and the troubles of family and growing up, discussing the place of genius and the ordinary, whether it is still worth persisting when no one cheers, and the seemingly simple but hard-to-answer question of whether a loser can have a dream. The end of the book touches on Bu Ting going to the United States and the demolition of the old alley, writing the farewell of youth with restraint and lingering warmth. At roughly 927,000 Chinese characters, it was first published on a web literature platform and later became one of the works readers call representative of "campus soccer fiction." This entry is based on the web serialized version; no official print publication information is available.