I see this movie as a tribute to those dare to dream.
An elitist whose father and grandfather had both been educated in the states, a country bumpkin with horrifying accents and a poetic long-haired hippie: three friends met as freshmen in the fictional Yanjing University in what seems to be the immediate post-cultural revolution Beijing in the late 1970s to early 1980s.
At the time there was such a thirst for knowledge as the decade-long cultural revolution had closed the door of higher learning to practically everyone except a few proletariat with approved background.
I have heard moving tales of how people formed long snake lines outside of libraries for hours before the crack of dawn just to secure seats to study all day. Today, I think it's not an exaggeration to say the few things that can still command such display of enthusiasm are iPhones and concert tickets (not the classical music kind mind you).
Like most students from top universities, the three friends dived into their dogged pursuit of the Chinese brand of the American dream: to score high on standardized admission tests such as the TOEFL, GRE and GMAT and through the studying process to be as linguistically and culturally prepared as possible. The goal was to go to America for graduate studies. Undergraduate and direct prep school admissions for non-immigrant Chinese students didn't become more of the norm till the 21st century.
Getting a student visa was brutally difficult for Chinese students back then even though all of the applicants went into the U.S. consulate offices had already been accepted and some even with guaranteed academic scholarships. And for those lucky few granted visas, many didn't flourish as their later counterparts would. 1980's just wasn't the time for Chinese yet!
This is exactly what happened to the elitist. He fed lab rats at Columbia University while telling friends he was conducting research; his piano-playing girlfriend worked in a laundromat while telling others she was tutoring piano in Long Island.
Meanwhile back in Beijing, two remaining friends started a small enterprise, borderline illegal at the time, to teach English, for commercial profit, to U.S.-bound students how to score high on standardized tests. Demand for test preparation was so high that one makeshift classroom quickly mushroomed into auditorium-sized lectures. Elitist abandoned his own dream of "making it" in America to join force and help thousands of Chinese students realize their own. The three friends would eventually take their company a NASDAQ-listed public one.
Heavily based on the true story behind the formation and rise to fame of New Oriental, the US-listed Chinese educational service giant with the appropriate ticker EDU, this movie is an homage to all of the post-Cultural revolution, Deng Xiaoping-era first generation of daring Chinese business leaders such as Sohu's Charles Zhang, Vanke's Wang Shi, Alibaba's Jack Ma and of course, New Orient's Michael Yu.
Three of the China's currently most bankable actors star as the three friends: Huang Xiaoming (黄晓明), Deng Chao (邓超), Tong Dawei (佟大为).
Chinese subtitles with lots of English dialogues. Enjoy the movie.
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