Chapter 10 — The Test Has No Name

The Years of Learning From the Beginning Again

Six years is a long enough time for a small town to forget a once noisy story, but also long enough for a young person to rebuild his entire life from broken pieces.

During the first three months in the city, Nguyen worked as a waiter at a restaurant near an industrial park, slept in a shared room with three other people, and returned every night with tired legs and hands smelling of grease. He still registered for the free graduation exam as planned, passed with a score that was not too outstanding but enough to get the necessary degree, even though he knew that the degree would forever be missing a note that no one could see: the scholarship opportunity that should have belonged to him went another way.

In the evening, after his shift, he started hanging out at an internet shop near the dormitory, at first just to read free news, but gradually got hooked on basic programming tutorial videos online - a logical, strict language with no room for bias or relationship, where a correct line of code always produces the right result, regardless of whether the person who wrote it is rich or poor. Perhaps that absolute fairness is what made him stick with it from the first lessons.

He studied from midnight until dawn, taking notes in an old notebook, writing and rewriting each piece of code until he understood it thoroughly. There were nights when he fell asleep right on the keyboard of an internet shop and was woken up by the shop owner to close the door. There were months when he had to skip breakfast to save money to buy more hours of internet access. But he never thought about giving up, because every time he felt exhausted, he remembered his mother's saying: Whatever you do with your own strength, even if it's slow, is sure.

At the end of the first year, a small but important incident happened: he accidentally learned about a programming contest for self-taught people, no degree required, just submit the contest product online. He spent his rare two weeks off building a small application to help manage expenses for low-income workers — directly inspired by the way his mother has been recording every income and expense with a pencil on a worn old notebook for many years. His application reached the final round, did not win the top prize, but received praise from the judges for its practical application and meticulousness in every interface detail.

"This product shows that the person who wrote it clearly understood the problem he was solving, not just coding for the sake of it," a judge commented during the award ceremony, a statement that Nguyen remembered many years later as the first confirmation that the path he chose was not meaningless.

In his second year, Nguyen applied for an unpaid internship at a small software company, just to have the opportunity to practice on real projects. He worked so hard that he caught the attention of his manager, and after three months, he was accepted as a full-time employee with a modest salary but enough for him to send a portion back to his mother each month, while saving the rest for a vague plan in his mind.

At the same time, Duong Nhat Khoi entered an information technology university in the city, and the two old friends happened to meet again at a technology seminar for students, where Nguyen was invited to share his experience as a successful self-taught programmer.

"I didn't expect to meet you here, as a speaker," Nhat Khoi said, hugging you in the middle of the hall hallway, his voice cracking with emotion. "You've changed so much."

"You too," Nguyen replied, smiling, for the first time in many years he felt complete joy without bitterness. "Study information technology? So we're in the same field."

From that meeting, the two began to exchange ideas more often. Nhat Khoi, with a thorough academic background from the classroom, and Nguyen, with actual combat experience accumulated from solitary nights of self-study, complemented each other in a way that neither of them could have predicted. One evening, while drinking iced tea on the sidewalk after work, Nhat Khoi accidentally asked about the old story - something both of them had secretly avoided talking about for the past few years.

"Do you ever think back to that time?" Nhat Khoi asked, his voice cautious.

"Yes," Nguyen replied, twirling the glass of iced tea in his hand. "But now I think about it in a different way. Back then I just wished someone would believe me. Now I think, if only there were a system that was transparent enough, objective enough, so that there was no need to rely on anyone's belief — just clear, irrefutable evidence."

That idea, initially just a blurb on the sidewalk, gradually grew into a concrete project over the course of the next year. Nguyen and Nhat Khoi began researching monitoring and authentication technologies applied in many different fields, thereby developing a small platform specifically for the educational environment - a tool to help exams transparently record the entire process of managing exam materials, being able to clearly trace the time and person who accessed each candidate's personal items, minimizing unjust situations like he himself experienced.

They named the project Demonstration — meaning clear, transparent evidence — and launched the first test version at a small high school willing to cooperate in the pilot. The first three years were a series of difficult days: lack of capital, lack of personnel, and nearly had to close many times because of not having enough money to pay salaries to a few employees. There were months when Nguyen and Nhat Khoi had to pay out of their own pockets to maintain activities, living more frugally than the years he lived in a shared room.

The turning point came in the fourth year, when an article about an exam cheating case that shocked public opinion nationwide accidentally mentioned the Minh Evidence platform as a potential technological solution to prevent similar incidents. After that article, the number of schools contacting for cooperation skyrocketed, a venture capital fund noticed the project and poured capital, helping Minh Tinh EDU - the official name after expanding its scale - to develop into a famous educational technology platform in the field of school integrity across the country.

He still vividly remembers the day the company received its first investment. The first thing he did was not to buy anything for himself, but to take the car to the old boarding house where his mother used to receive processed garments, to go to the factory owner in the past to pay off a small debt his mother had borrowed to cover the most difficult times but had not been able to pay it off before leaving home. The factory owner, who had grown much older, looked at him for a long time before recognizing him, then emotionally held his hand tightly, saying that she had never thought that the once skinny student would become someone who could dignifiedly return to pay an old debt that she herself had forgotten.

"My mother taught me that I have to pay any debt, no matter how little or how much," Nguyen said, his voice choked. "I'm just sorry I couldn't come back sooner."

Nguyen, now in his mid-twenties, has become a face sought after by many television stations and technology magazines, not because of his story of being slandered in the past — something he rarely talks about publicly — but because of his extraordinary self-study journey and vision of a more transparent education system. He bought a small apartment and took his mother to the city to live with him. Although Mrs. Dieu still keeps the habit of sewing every day, the only difference is that now she sews because she enjoys it, no longer for a living.

In interviews, when asked about what motivated him to pursue the field of school integrity, Nguyen often only answered briefly that he had witnessed a classmate suffer because of the lack of a transparent system, without going into personal details. He never mentioned his name in that story, much less the name of Vong Khe High School or anyone involved, although sometimes he wondered if he was avoiding it, or simply not ready to turn his most private pain into a media story.

But there was one thing Nguyen never did during those six years: return to Vong Khe. He sent money to support a few distant relatives who were still in difficulty, occasionally called to check on a few old friends who came to Nhat Khoi, but never once set foot back on the road leading into town, never once passed the gate of Vong Khe High School. There were wounds that, even when healed, still needed more time before one was brave enough to touch them again — and deep down, he knew, what he was really avoiding was not the school or the town, but the possibility of having to face again a name he had never truly forgotten.