From Darkness to Sight

by Ming Wang

  “Wait, can’t I just start where I left off, right after the ninth grade?” I asked. I assumed that I would start the tenth grade and proceed through high-school to the twelfth grade. as usual, taking the college entrance exam three years later.

  “No, Ming, you need to jump up straight into the twelfth grade right away,” my dad said, “since only the twelfth-grade graduating class will be allowed to take the national college admissions test.”

  “He’s right,” my mom agreed. “You’ll have to catch up on those years of school that you missed between now and the day of the exam.”

  “But the exam is in two months! How can I possibly do that? And even if I can somehow magically jump instantaneously more than two years ahead into the twelfth grade, what are my chances of actually getting into college as a twelfth-grader?”

  Dad was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke slowly, knowing that what he was about to say was not good news.

  “Given how many people are vying for the very few spots available this year, twelfth-graders probably only have about a few percent chance of getting into college.”

  Dad explained that 1977 would likely be the single most difficult year to get into college in modern Chinese history. The lack of entrance exams for ten years created a ten-year backlog of students, and therefore ten times more applicants for college that year.

  I gaped at my parents, wide-eyed and speechless.

  “There’s no way I can pull this off!” I cried, and buried my face in my hands.

  I hadn’t received any schooling in more than two years. How was I supposed to learn the entire high-school curriculum in just a few months, and then compete with millions of other twelfth-grade students for such a small number of university openings? Surely my parents couldn’t be serious. I was in tears.

  “Can’t I just start my tenth grade in high-school now and take the college exam in three years?” I begged.

  “No, my son,” Dad said, his voice tender but serious. “Remember, this is not a free country. No one can guarantee that the government won’t shut down colleges again next year, for another decade! So you have to try your best to get into college this year, because you may never get another chance like this.”

  My parents had lived their entire lives watching China convulse and shift through numerous drastic changes caused by government dictatorships. They knew we couldn’t count on any lasting freedom or stability. They had no confidence in the system and feared that such an opportunity for me to go to college would never come around again.

  I knew they were right. I thought about how much I had struggled during the last few years to avoid the feared deportation. Everything I tried had failed—dance, erhu, medical classes, and music composition. I resolved that I would do whatever it takes now to avoid having to suffer such deep distress and hopelessness ever again.

  I sat quietly as the weight of having to learn so much material in such a short amount of time, and to score in the top few percent of the twelfth-grade class, bore down on me.

  “So how can I possibly do all of that?” I was perplexed.

  “Leave that to us.” My dad glanced at my mother. Joy lit up her face and her eyes danced.

  Though my parents were optimistic, I was not, at all. I was facing perhaps my only shot to escape darkness and find hope for my future, but now I realized what an impossible shot it was! I felt the weight of my entire future and my family’s legacy on my shoulders. I was burdened and afraid, but I had no choice but to fight with my “back against a river,” as the Chinese proverb says. I could not retreat because if I did, I would “fall into the water” and lose all hope of a better life.

  One of my father’s patients happened to be Teacher Yang, the vice principal of Hangzhou No. 11 High-school. My father approached Teacher Yang and asked for her help. Not long afterward, I was back in a classroom, sitting among other regular twelfth-grade students. Teacher Yang simply told school authorities that I was a transfer student from the twelfth-grade class of another high-school. None of the students knew me, and no one asked any questions.

  Soon after I started school, Teacher Yang took me aside and said there would be an important math exam in just two weeks. It was imperative that I pass this test or I might fail the class entirely. If I couldn’t stay enrolled, then I wouldn’t qualify to register for the college entrance exam.

  I panicked and felt weak. I had to learn two-and-a-half years of math in just two weeks! As always, my parents came to the rescue. Dad reached out to several of his patients who were educators. He offered free medical care to them and their families in exchange for tutoring me in math and other subjects, such as physics, chemistry, biology, Chinese, politics, and English.

  The tutors came to the house several times a week to drill me on their designated subjects, strategically attacking selected portions of mountains of material. I studied day and night, fifteen to eighteen hours a day. When I thought my brain would melt, I would switch subjects and study something else. If my eyelids started to droop and I felt I was falling asleep, I would splash cold water on my face and plunge back into the topic at hand.

  Luckily, I did manage to pass the math exam, my first victory! But math was actually one of my easier subjects, since I enjoyed it the most. Like physics, it was logical and suited my style of thinking. Passing that test was like conquering only the lowest hill of a very high mountain range that I would have to scale in the coming weeks.

  My family supported me wholeheartedly. My mother walked in from work one day clutching a huge stack of papers to her chest. She had borrowed old college entrance examinations—from before the Cultural Revolution—from colleagues and friends. My father came home with his share of practice tests as well. Since there were no copy machines at the time, the two of them sat at the table after dinner and spent countless hours writing out every question and problem set by hand.

  My parents then took turns coaching and quizzing me on various subjects from science to the humanities. When we got closer to the date of the actual college entrance exam, my parents staged mock exam sessions, assuming the roles of exam officer and assistant exam officer.

  “Pretend this is the official exam,” my dad would say. “Remember that you cannot leave the room for any reason other than a bathroom break. No papers can be removed when you leave. Okay, ready? Now begin!”

  My mother would come in hours later and call “time.” Though they were only mock exams, we took them very seriously. There was no letting down of our guard. I knew that the actual college entrance exam would be the toughest test of my life.

  After my parents and little brother had gone to bed, I sat at my wooden school desk, awash in dim light from a small lamp, continuing my studies deep into the night. I slept for only a few hours each night. I grew thinner and thinner because I was too busy to eat and wasn’t getting enough rest. I was weak and utterly exhausted, but that didn’t matter. The thought that I might fail—that I might be thrown back into the despair and hopelessness of the past few years again—truly motivated me. For once in my life, I actually saw a sliver of light beaming into the prison cell of darkness that had encased me for years, so I was determined to do my utmost to wedge that door open and get free.

  But I knew also that the ten-year backlog of students was going to make the competition for the small number of the freshman spots extremely fierce. The acceptance rate for the 1977 college season would only be three or four percent, the lowest in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

  All over the city, thousands of students were anxiously studying and preparing. I went to school during the day, and at night I rode my father’s rundown bike to group review sessions at local universities. Large lecture halls, like the one in which I had illegally audited medical-school classes two years prior, now brimmed with hundreds of students and young people who had been displaced for up to a decade and were now fighting for the chance of a lifetime.

  Riding home, the roads were empty. Kids had all disappeared f
rom the street corners and courtyards. Inside our apartment building, the halls that normally brimmed with laughter, young voices, and the sounds of family life were hushed and still. The silence across the city was the sound of long-harbored hopes and dreams for the future—for millions of youth and their families—being miraculously resurrected.

  As my classmates and I studied with feverish intensity, the qualifications for test registration were suddenly changed. My parents were right—there was no counting on stability in a communist country. Over the next few weeks, I would constantly be trying to regain footing on ever-shifting ground.

  As the number of registrants for the first college entrance exam in ten years in China far exceeded expectations, officials decided that the qualifying pool of candidates allowed to take the exam had to be reduced substantially. There was simply no way everyone could take the test that year. Those of us in the twelfth grade—the youngest class qualified to register—would bear the brunt of this reduction. Just a few weeks before the university entrance exam, the government decided that the nation’s entire twelfth-grade class had to be sifted through a strict selection process, and only a very small number of us would be allowed to participate in the exam. In each round of the elimination process, a day-long exam further reduced our numbers.

  Hangzhou had about fifty high-schools, with an average of three hundred seniors at each one. Only ten students would be selected from each school to move to the next round of testing. Those five hundred selected students were then have to compete at the district level, and only twenty from each district would make it to the next round. The final round of testing would reduce the total number of twelfth graders from the initial pool of fifteen thousand from the entire city of Hangzhou … to only ten!

  I advanced through each grueling round of the elimination process, exhausted and relieved each time I made the cut. In the end, I somehow managed to survive all three rounds, and I was honored and elated to become one of the only ten seniors from the city of Hangzhou selected to take the college entrance exam.

  On the big day of the 1977 national exam, a clear, cold December morning, I left home and and rode my bike to my designated exam site at a local high-school, one of several dozen test locations in Hangzhou. I was exhausted before we began the exam, so I had no energy left in me even to be nervous. Months of studying, weeks of testing and competing, the long hours, and the lack of sleep had all taken their toll. I barely had enough strength to pedal my bike, and I was in a daze by the time I arrived at the test site—and it was for the most crucial test of my life! I had conquered three enemy defense lines by this point, but I had little strength left for the fourth and final battle … the most important of them all!

  For the next three days, from eight in the morning until five in the evening, several hundred of us at our test site sat hunched over long exams and endless questions on physics, math, chemistry, geology, biology, English, Chinese literature, history, and politics. The exam room remained quiet, as we were all too worn out to be excited or focused, I felt numb and half asleep, as if I were merely going through the motions of answering all the questions. I was only mildly confident that I had done well.

  At supper the evening after the last day of testing, Dad asked me how I had done.

  “I probably did all right,” I said halfheartedly, as I was totally exhausted and ready to collapse and sleep for weeks.

  Checking with the parents of other kids, many of them did not feel that they had done as well, my parents felt optimistic and a new hope had risen in our family that perhaps I finally had a chance now of being able to go to college! All of our struggles and hardships over the years might finally pay off!

  A few evenings later, there was a knock on the door. Like most families in China at that time, we didn’t have a phone so we had no idea who was visiting, but we assumed it was probably another of many colleagues and friends who were stopping by to inquire about my performance on the exam. This time, however, it was Dr. Liu, a physician who had been assigned to provide medical care to the educators sequestered on a nearby mountaintop, grading the thousands of exams.

  “The government has changed the rules again!” announced Dr. Liu.

  My heart sank. Each time the officials changed the rules, it nearly toppled all my efforts, and I would have to struggle much harder to survive the next round. So what would it be this time?

  Dr. Liu explained that the number of seniors who would be accepted into college would be further reduced significantly now to just four of the top students from the entire province of fifty million population. “How did little Ming do?” asked Dr. Liu.

  “He thinks he did okay,” my dad replied. “But my goodness, it may not be good enough now since the chance of getting in has been even more drastically cut!”

  I was shaken as I saw my dad look at my mom. They both looked disheartened.

  Dr. Liu said goodbye and left, leaving us all feeling stunned by the news. After making it through all the grueling rounds of the intense selection process, I thought I would finally have the long-awaited chance to go to college. But it seemed that my chance was slashed yet again, and it would be nearly impossible for me to get into college now!

  All the enthusiasm that had buoyed our family these past few months, the devotion and hard work fueled by renewed hope—hope that had been denied for ten years, hope for college and a promising life—all dissipated the instant Dr. Liu delivered this bad news.

  In a few weeks would be the Chinese New Year. Except for the early years of the Cultural Revolution, when it was suppressed as a feudalistic tradition, the New Year has been China’s most important holiday for thousands of years. Factories and businesses completely shut down for an entire week to celebrate. No matter how poor or prosperous, families across the country spend days cleaning, shopping, cooking, and preparing for the festival.

  My brother and I usually enjoyed helping our mom prepare the special dishes we loved and waited for all year long. One of our favorites was zong-zi, delicious rice dumplings filled with pork, wrapped in large bamboo leaves shaped like cones and tied with string. The dish took a lot of time to make, but my little brother and I had fun joking and playing as we worked alongside Mom.

  But this year the joy was gone, the preparations felt meaningless, and our favorite foods were tasteless, since our New Year prospects were bleak. Our family simply went through the motions during the festival that year.

  Weeks went by with no word. It seemed as if I had indeed fallen through the cracks during this last and most crucial round. Only four seniors would be admitted to college from the entire province of fifty million people! Being one of the top four among all high-school seniors seemed utterly unlikely, especially for someone like me who had just “jumped” three years ahead into that twelfth grade. I really should have felt more concerned, but I was so weak from exhaustion that I slept heavily for weeks.

  I thought of returning to the publishing factory where I would again earn ten cents a day. I imagined both the joy and disappointment that I would see on the faces of the older women when I arrived to work alongside them again. Then I began to think about the darkness and hopelessness that had enveloped me during my teenage years, and could still return to hold me captive in darkness forever.

  Then one day, Mom rushed into the apartment with a letter in her hand, waving it toward me. Too excited to speak, she pointed to the envelope, on which I saw the insignia of the Ministry of Education.

  I leapt out of bed. This was it, the moment I had been waiting for all my life, the moment I had both anticipated and feared.

  My hands shook as I slowly peeled open the envelope and pulled out the paper that laid inside.

  The strokes of each Chinese character spelled out my future. “Ming-xu Wang has been accepted into the University of Science and Technology of China to study analytical chemistry.”

  My mother and I shrieked with joy. My little brother giggled and clapped his hands.

  I paused for a
moment. “But where is the University of Science and Technology of China?” I hadn’t applied to that school at all; in fact, I had never even heard of it. On the day of the national college entrance exam, I had listed only three medical-schools as my preferred institutions, including the one where my parents worked and where I had illegally attended classes two years earlier. I wanted to be a doctor; that was what I had always wanted. I later learned that China’s college admissions system in 1977, wildly disorganized after a decade of disuse, had simply ignored most students’ personal choices. Instead, top-tier schools were given first picks of the top-scoring students in each province.

  So this meant that not only was I one of just four seniors accepted into college from my entire province, but I had apparently been the first choice of an elite school in China—the University of Science and Technology of China—the so-called “MIT of China.” My parents were elated. Even though I hadn’t gotten into medical-school as I desired, I was going to college … something I thought would never, ever happen in my life!

  My heart could barely contain the happiness I felt. The New Year celebration now had all-new meaning for me. The famous dragon in Chinese New Year parades represents the monster Nian, a legendary beast that would come out once a year to feast on villagers. According to tradition, the monster could be scared off by the color red, loud noises, and fire. I reveled in the waves of red across the city, a symbol of happiness and prosperity. The terrible darkness that had enshrouded me for so long was now lit up by flashes of light from fireworks exploding everywhere I looked. In Chinese, nian means both “monster” and “year.” The monster of my life, the dark years that had devoured my hopes and dreams, had been vanquished at last.

  Chapter 6

  Little Bird Flies

  The smell of firecracker smoke had barely cleared the air the day my family took me to the Hangzhou train station to see me off to college. I was unprepared for the pandemonium that awaited us. For nearly a mile, students and their families and friends queued through the station like the body of an immense black dragon. I felt anxious at the sight of so many people. How could a train hold so many passengers, and how would I possibly make it on board?