Dear John Doe,

It is a great pleasure for me to hear from you, though quite unexpectedly.

I believe that your industry will be rewarding sooner or later. Just "keep walking," as the liquor ad famously runs.

As a Fudan undergraduate, I began backward (Your English now can't be poorer than mine then.), so much so that only one fellow girl student of mine ranked behind me in terms of the score of the Municipal Matriculation Examination of English of the year 1998, when we were enrolled in this University. But today, I am a Fudan lecturer, and she, far more amazingly, works in HK SAR with a prestigious banque. With strenuous efforts, both of us turn out to be no losers.

Yes, I know it clearly that my course is very difficult for many first-year English majors. But I have to be cruel only to be kind, because I want you to become GREAT. This is my long-cherished dream as a green-hand educator. Now I regret misspending many of my collegiate days, youthful and halcyon, playing card and computer games in the dorm, hanging out with "mates of mead and meat," dozing away lectures, and so forth. Fully awakened, I cannot bear or rather afford to allow any of my students, my juniors, to live in such abandonment. You are the cream of your generation, and so you must fight as hard as possible for a glorious future of our nation, which is getting worse, if not decaying, in many a way. In this sense, I am trying to be kind to myself, too, by being cruel to you.

Prompted with your previous email, I have made a point of analyzing the results of the quizzes that you have taken so far. They are not first-rate; nor bad by any means. Judging by them, you are now "in the mid-stream." So the best policy for you, as my mentor would say, is to bite the bullet and fight to the death (figuratively).

You WILL prove yourself!
In and with you, I have and will keep FAITH.
 
Best regards,

Dr. Boarhead of Shanghai