Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  “Sarah has a gerbil,” I offered.

  “We’re not Sarah’s parents,” Mom responded.

  As my fourteenth birthday approached, the mosquitoes and summer heat yielded a stroke of luck. Via my grandmother, we received news about my cousin Fong: The girl had been invited to play a regional piano concert in Pennsylvania (she’d eventually play a solo at Carnegie Hall as a teenager, the ultimate honor for a pianist). Motivated to action, my parents made an offer.

  “Take first place—Number One—and you’ll get your gerbil,” my mother said. The goal would be a piano competition that drew contestants from all over the Houston area. It was a calculated bribe, designed to coax out as much effort as humanly possible.

  At the time, the rivalry between Fong’s mother and mine—sisters two years apart who gave birth the same year—was legendary. In Chinese culture, not only is it fine to use competition as an incentive, but even better if the competitor is a relative. After all, a failure against a cousin-competitor dished up proof that your genetics are perfectly fine and that it’s a lack of effort that has slotted you for a lifetime of mediocrity.

  “Fong plays piano so well. You should practice more like her,” my grandmother told me once, egging me on. Fong was also twig-thin whereas I was fleshy, and she stayed porcelain pale during the summertime, while the sun browned my face in a hot second. But I figured I’d focus on one thing at a time.

  Like any good Chinese daughter, I’d been playing piano since I was potty-trained. My parents have pictures of my four-year-old self tapping out scales while perched on a piano bench, a phone book propping up my tiny feet—photographic evidence of forced musicality. By my preteen years I’d been practicing at least an hour a day for eight years; to me, piano was an eighty-eight-key beast that sat in our living room and kept me away from Kirk Cameron and Growing Pains reruns.

  But for a gerbil I could eke out one last triumph.

  “You’ll play ‘Für Elise,’” my mother decreed. Beethoven is much beloved by the Chinese, because, as conductor Cai Jindong explained, the Chinese value those who chiku, or “eat bitter,” and Beethoven definitely was a man who worked hard. Born a commoner, Beethoven lost a string of paramours to class differences, battled an ongoing string of serious illnesses, and began going deaf in his twenties. Still, he continued to create music and remains one of the world’s most influential composers. Beethoven is a classic story of hard luck overcome by effort.

  For two months I practiced, sweated, and labored over Beethoven. At night, I dreamed about Beethoven, and during the daylight hours, my mother tapped out time on my shoulder with a ruler while my fingers cavorted like horses trotting on the keyboard. Some days I practiced so much that I was surprised when I looked down to see slender and intact fingers rather than overworked red nubs.

  In this way, for two straight months, our little mother-daughter ensemble moved toward the finish line.

  I don’t remember much about the day of competition. Before a panel of judges and an audience of mostly Asian parents, I got through “Für Elise,” but my fingers jerked when they should have frolicked like prancing ponies and plodded where they should have been light as a butterfly’s landing. I remember the smugness of the winner—also a Chinese daughter—in the large, raised brown mole that stared at me from above her eyelid. As our eyes caught briefly during the awards ceremony, I thought I detected a flicker of darkness, and perhaps a hint of her own unspoken hell.

  On the way home, I pleaded and cried and made excuses. “I’m a good pianist, you know I can play ‘Für Elise,’” I whined to my parents from the backseat of our car. “I had a stomachache today.”

  My parents were silent.

  “Can I have the gerbil anyway?” I asked.

  My parents did not buy me a gerbil, despite the fact that I practically went on a preteen hunger strike. I plotted to run away from home. I cursed Fong, though she deserved every accolade (as a teenager she developed De Quervain’s tenosynovitis in her left wrist, likely from overpractice). Still, no gerbil.

  That’s how I learned that in the Chinese way, there are no rewards for second place.

  Certainly, overemphasizing competition can be dangerous.

  “Too many years of competition, and you start to see everyone around you as someone to outrank,” Amanda told me. By the end of Rainey’s first year in Chinese kindergarten, I’d begun meeting with Amanda more frequently, usually at a downtown Starbucks. I had questions about Chinese education. Teachers Chen and Cai would be of limited use; they thought my son was an animal and that his mother needed reeducation. So I sought out Amanda, knowing instinctively that any Chinese high school student who quoted Nietzsche was a deep thinker.

  “Coffee black with lots of sugar,” Amanda had told me at our first meeting. “I drink a cup a day now.” Just eighteen years old, she’d spent her junior year in high school studying alongside US teenagers, and I laughed at the idea that among America’s gifts to her was a lingering caffeine addiction.

  The first time we’d arranged to meet, I’d scanned the crowd of young professionals chatting animatedly over lattes at a Starbucks near our home, and my eyes were immediately drawn to a tiny figure whose stone-white windbreaker hung on her waiflike frame. The girl had straight black hair that swung past her waist, and she was bent over an e-reader, reading through lenses with no frames, oblivious to the bustle around her. There she is, I thought, the product of a Chinese education. Amanda was stellar in almost every way valued by the Chinese: a top-ranking student, a Model UN delegate, an exchange student to America. From the outside, she was exactly what I’d expected. The inside, I’d come to discover, would be a surprise.

  “Shanghai kindergarten never suited me,” Amanda said. “Neither did elementary, middle, or high school, for that matter. I was always the odd girl out.”

  When I stared at her, I imagined a teenage Rainey or a full-grown Little Pumpkin. “Why?” I asked her from across the table.

  “I like reading Proust and Camus,” she said. “No one else did.” While her classmates memorized Mao Zedong quotes, she preferred reading snippets of Western philosophy. She cared nothing for Chinese pop stars, which her female classmates idolized and chattered about during breaks. There was also the fact that during her twelve-year school career, she’d never been selected banzhang, or class monitor, a position of power and influence in the classroom.

  “I was always on the outside. It might be hard for you to understand,” she told me.

  Looking across at her, sipping her Americano with two packets of sugar, I imagined the adult version of a young schoolchild, suffering the invisible bruises of being pushed into a cast-iron mold. Was she the kid who goes down the slide headfirst?

  “Actually,” I told her, “I think I have an idea.”

  The picture she painted was grim. After years of being forced to gulp down lunch—a ritual that she says started in kindergarten—she’s neutral to food and doesn’t view eating as a pleasure. On her first day of preschool she’d cried so violently that the teachers walled her off in an empty classroom. She remembers feeling shame and embarrassment. Then there was the psyche cultivated by years of existing inside a classroom with pressure to conform. “Every time I’m in a crowd . . . it’s so weird. I lose my autonomy,” she told me. “If there are a lot of people, at a party, I try to blend myself into the conversation, I try to imitate their emotion. I make myself like everyone else in the crowd. I lose myself.”

  Then there was the feeling of being trapped in a race that never relents. “When I’m not studying, I feel like I’m being lazy. When I am studying, I feel that someone is always doing more,” she said. It was a mentality cultivated by a lifetime of competition. “There’s only one definition of a kid in China. A good student who rises above the rest—I don’t know how else to be.”

  “But something is working,” I pressed her. “You say your value system is flawed, that competition has ruined your mind. But if you look at just the academics, you
’re a star.” During her year at that New England high school, Amanda had found her math abilities “three years” ahead of her American classmates, and she soon confirmed her prowess on a larger stage: She’d entered a nationwide math competition with thousands of entrants, and placed in the top fifty.

  “Does competition make you a better student?” I asked.

  She bobbed her head, slowly. “Maybe. My parents told me, just wait, you’ll see. It will all be worth it.”

  “What will be worth it?”

  “The sacrifice. The pressure, the competition,” she said. “Feeling like I always needed to work harder.” Amanda’s family was shooting high. This year she would be applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the California Institute of Technology, and a handful of other top American colleges.

  “‘The sacrifice would be worth it,’ they said,” Amanda repeated, almost to herself.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Amanda said, slowly. “We’ll see.”

  Amanda had returned from the United States buzzing with doubts about her own educational experience, and I’d landed in China with just as many questions about our son’s place in the system.

  “Let’s figure it out together,” I told her, and she nodded.

  Where Amanda was uncertain, Darcy knew very firmly where he stood on competition. “Competition motivates me. Rankings motivate me,” Darcy told me.

  Darcy was a tracksuit-clad teenager of seventeen when I first met him in Shanghai, a boy with smooth skin and a shy smile book-ended by dimples. A teacher friend put us in touch around the same time I’d met Amanda, and we found that our interests aligned perfectly. I wanted to interview a Shanghai high school student, and Darcy wanted to befriend a foreigner.

  We began meeting every two weeks.

  Where Amanda was the odd girl out, Darcy seemed to have everything neatly in place: He liked to tease his thick, black hair forward, so that it sat, frozen, like an ocean wave about to break on his sloping forehead. He was of good height. He dressed out of the pages of a teen sports magazine, with Nikes on his feet and latest model mobile phone in hand. He’d chosen the English name Darcy because he was drawn to the aloof yet debonair quality of Jane Austen’s character. If Darcy’s mother and father were to write a marriage advertisement to post in Shanghai’s People’s Square, where many anxious parents gather to match-make and try to marry off their children, it might say: “175 cm, born in 1996, a top Shanghai high school graduate, good moral standing, good qualities, destined for a top-tier university.”

  Darcy’s only flaw, in his words, was his physique. “A body wasted away by study,” he liked to joke.

  At one of our early meetings, I was intent on drilling down the meaning of competition. “Competition might motivate you, but what about the shame that happens when a student finds out he’s not at the very top?” I asked.

  “When my scores get lower, a ranking gets lower, it motivates me to think about how to achieve more,” he told me. “It pushes me to action.” Once his math teacher complained that his former students were far superior. Darcy, sitting in the classroom that day, told me he felt ashamed. The next week he scored No. 1 on his math final.

  “I wanted to prove my worth to him,” he told me.

  “But you are talking about external measures of worth,” I told him. “Isn’t there a downside?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Low-ranking students might eventually give up. But for those who are ambitious, rankings can give you a short-term goal to shoot for.”

  I looked over at him as he stirred his coffee. Like Amanda, he liked a strong cup of Americano. Unlike Amanda, he had few questions about his path.

  “The Chinese education system is not perfect,” he said, as if anticipating my skepticism. “It’s a growing tree, and right now they can only focus on making the trunk strong. If the trunk grows well, then the flowers can blossom.”

  Part of making the trunk strong, I knew, was to continue this practice of filtering out students in a country of 1.4 billion people: Not everyone could make it through. Ranking and sifting the masses is a practice that dated back to dynastic times, when entire towns might gather in the main square or marketplace to await final results of the imperial exam. Back then, it was the Zhuangyuan Ban—the Champion List—that drew the crowds, just as Big Board drew the attention of parents and grandparents today.

  The Champion List changed the fates of families, almost overnight.

  * * *

  I decided to read up on student life in imperial China. What was the day-to-day like for those kids whose sights were set on that Champion List? It turns out it was no easy road—then or now.

  If you were a Chinese boy in the year AD 605, you spent most of your waking hours huddled over classic texts. Your future depended on how well you could memorize passages such as this one from the I Ching:

  When flowing water . . . meets with obstacles on its path, a blockage in its journey, it pauses. It increases in volume and strength, filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it. . . .

  The words were flowery, the meanings arcane. And there were a lot of them—more than four hundred thousand characters in total to commit to memory in the poems, speeches, passages, and annotations of the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucian Thought.

  Daunted, you might feel compelled to drop your calligraphy brush and abandon study—one scholar estimated a young child would spend at least six years or more in seven-days-a-week study—but the emperor of the Sui dynasty needed ministers and officials. He’d decided a grueling, three-day exam would ensure the quality of men who would govern in his imperial court, and so an entire nation of male aspirants bent their heads over books in diligent study.

  Girls, of course, needn’t apply: Women with ambition could only educate themselves in hopes of supporting a spouse or son in their testing quest.

  The ladder to social and economic status had many rungs, and on each rung sat an exam. First were the provincial-level tests. Then came the district tests, the metropolitan exams, and finally the national-level exams. The most extraordinary men might find themselves entering imperial court for the mother of all tests: jinshi. Passing the jinshi meant the possibility of catapulting to the top and snagging an imperial bureaucratic post in the country’s capital. The emperor himself might look over your essay.

  You cared about ascending this ladder, because to succeed meant a prize that was life-altering. An imperial position brought nothing less than prestige, status, and wealth for you, your family (and ancestors already long buried). Each rung afforded more status, and as you climbed, you distanced yourself from the carnage piled up at the base of the ladder.

  And that carnage was thick, as pass rates were impossibly low. At the first rung, the district level, only one or two of every hundred candidates advanced to the next level, and the odds worsened from there. As each dynasty morphed into the next, passing the exams got less and less competitive, but as recently as the year 1850, still only one man in six thousand succeeded at all stages of the selection process.

  The process was mentally trying. Painter Pu Songling of the seventeenth century sketched out the emotions of an exam candidate. The man was a “bare-footed beggar” when he entered the exam hall, and a “sick bird out of the cage” when he finished. After he failed to advance, he became a “poisoned fly” who burns all his books and thinks to “abandon the world.” That “poisoned fly” might later decide to continue study, but this path required Olympic-level steadfastness: During certain dynasties the exam was offered as rarely as once every three years. It was a long time to wait.

  This system was lauded for being a meritocracy (though, in truth, schools weren’t universal and typically only nobles and merchants could afford tutors and books). In theory at least, both the peasant who can afford only rice for dinner and the noble man with turtle on his dinner plate could take the same test and advance through study, rung by rung. “Archaic, laborious, and daunti
ng,” researcher Justin Crozier called the imperial exam system, but it was also a “remarkable attempt to create an aristocracy of learning.”

  Today, just as in imperial China, that ladder theoretically drops from the sky into every corner of the far reaches of China. The message of hope is clear: Any child can hook a thumb onto a rung of the ladder, from the daughter of a nomadic shepherd in Xinjiang province, to a son of Beijing or Shanghai’s urban elite. The student need only study hard, pass tests, and hope to advance to each successive level.

  Of course, girls may participate now, and the system has experienced a number of changes, some brought about by emperors and others prompted by war or revolution. Yet the basic system of high-stakes testing and advancement remains: A child walks that same, narrow road for success that he always has.

  For most Chinese today, particularly the lower and middle classes, a college degree is still the surest way to secure a stable job that provides upward mobility and employs the head, not the hands: Teacher. Doctor. Government worker. Marketer.

  Yet the ladder to that degree is steep, with many rungs, and advancement still requires years of backbreaking, eye-straining study. At the first rung, five- and six-year-olds sit for entrance exams and interviews at the best urban primary schools. Then it’s entrance testing for middle schools. From there things get really competitive with the National High School Entrance Exam, or zhongkao. Near the top of the ladder sits the vaunted National College Entrance Exam, or gaokao, which each year decides the fate of nearly ten million students and determines what college he’d attend and what field he’d study.

  At these last two rungs of the ladder, the falloff is steep; between sixteen and eighteen million students take the high school entrance exam each year, and fewer than eight million go on to an academic high school (the cleanest path into a four-year university).

  Each year, a population the size of London’s will sit for the college entrance exam. Yet, only two-thirds of the nearly ten million teens who take the gaokao will get a university spot at one of China’s twelve hundred colleges, and only 3 or 4 percent will ascend to what’s called the top tier of colleges. The biggest losers on the ladder—roughly two million teenagers—are often relegated to non-skilled work or years of scrabble through self-employment or entrepreneurism in an increasingly competitive and resource-constrained economy. That’s a lot of carnage at the base of the ladder.