The 33-year-old won a place at the university's College of Literature and Law and will join its Class of 2026 in a three-year program. The university says she is the first frontline sanitation worker in its roughly 70-year history to earn a graduate place while still on the job.
Before taking the cleaning job, Li and her husband had run a maocai eatery near the campus, serving the Sichuan hotpot-style dish, until it closed, Red Star News reported. She joined the university's logistics team in 2021 for the work's stability, fixed hours and closeness to home, which made it easier to care for her two children, now in primary school.
Her cleaning route runs through the university's East District, which hosts national examinations from the postgraduate test to the civil service exam. Cleaning around the test halls each exam season, she watched candidates who had come from as far as Xinjiang and Heilongjiang memorize notes under the streetlights and saw grey-haired adults sitting exams of their own, Red Star News reported. She had also added many students on the messaging app WeChat, and each year, as results came out, her feed filled with their celebrations, until she began to wonder whether she might one day post one of her own.
