The Child Who Only Had to Study

This is a reading of chapter 8 of 王医生与张医生, by Yi Xianfeng and Yang Ying, published by Wenhui in November 2021. The chapter is called “Society” and the scholarship boy. I am working from the Chinese edition. The passages below are my translations, not an official English text.

In the 1980s, demolition in Shenyang began to spread. Across a stretch of one-storey houses, if a few old people suddenly set up stalls by the road, you knew the neighborhood was coming down.

Shenyang in the 1980s, Beijing in the 2020s: twenty years apart, and still that swing from a neighborhood that feels like home to one that does not. Watching Shenyang thin out, I keep asking whether Beijing will follow the same road. People who never caught the payout from those demolitions went south — to Guangzhou, to Shenzhen. After 2010 I went to Shenzhen to start a business, and a startling number of the factory bosses I met were from the Northeast. I still cannot quite map the whole path.

When you have no standing, you barely have a chance to prove yourself innocent in front of a teacher. In fact a student before a teacher is never believed. Say too much and you are labeled as talking back. The teacher’s authority decides that the teacher is right. If you go home and complain, you may run into another classic question: why didn’t he suspect someone else? Thirty years later, a friend of mine was taken into a detention center on suspicion of occupying someone else’s property. He said the officers there had a theory they liked to lecture everyone with: Don’t think you are so tough. Don’t think you are so wronged. Don’t think it is always someone else’s fault. Ask why it is you, and not someone else, who ended up here. Even if you fell in with the wrong people, even if you stood in the wrong line — isn’t that your own affair too?

I grew up in the 1980s. This I know in my body: authority is right, and the weak are expected to assume they are wrong. Our generation learned to start from our own guilt. When we are wronged, we rush to prove ourselves innocent, and fall into that trap. Our children are still put through it. Chinese history has a long curriculum in shutting up, swallowing it, accepting that the winner writes the story. If you lost, you lost. No excuses. That is the weather we grew up in. Even when the fault is not yours, you are supposed to endure it, and tell yourself it is. So our parents’ generation, and ours, have spent a great deal of life absorbing exploitation — physical and mental — from people who learned to work the gaps. Nobody can quite say why.

Working-class children grow up with a great deal of improvisation. If a boy is willing to study and might get somewhere in school, keep him as far as possible from social interference. If he has no academic future, he must acquire the ability to survive in society — become more social. Nobody presents the whole of society to a child. For a minor, it would be too hard to understand.

This is not only Shenyang. I have asked classmates and colleagues from the north. In a house with several children, the one who can study is put on the path of school and fenced off from the rest. The family’s scarce advantages tilt toward that child. The one, or the ones, with no academic future have to enter society early: the dinner table, business, knowing how to talk, how to read a room. Two educations under one roof, especially in northern families. The student is allowed to do nothing but study. The sibling who cannot study — older or younger — is, sooner or later, cut off from school, whether they chose it or not.

The book 大地上的亲人 is a rural version of the same split: a younger brother who reads all the way to a doctorate at Sun Yat-sen University, an older brother who leaves school early and works in the village. Readers who know that book will recognize the fork.

After Zhang Xiaogang got into the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an, Zhang Xiaoxiang, as his brother’s protector, had to escort him to school. The younger brother’s role was the bookish boy who did not know the world and could not look after himself — it was enough that he studied well. Many families treat this as the most important demand, even the only one. The older brother, who had also never been far from home and had no experience of travel, had to take on the work of communicating with society. He was supposed to understand it better, and to handle whatever happened out there.

When I got into university, my older brother had already gone out to work. In truth I did not think his social experience was greater than mine. Because he had left school first, everyone assumed he should look after me. Some of what he did still looked younger than I felt. If I showed that I was more adult, more rational, more at home in the world, our parents treated it as a failure of duty. The house turned around my exams. I was not supposed to have time for relationships. Family, school, the friends from childhood — they all agreed. Friends who did not study well were told to stop playing with me. We were no longer on the same track.

In China, keeping the good student away from “society” produces a later confusion. Many of the upper posts in this society are not held by those good students. They are used to completing a goal that has already been set. When the goal disappears, the life can feel like nothing.

Not every good student is allowed to stay inside that system. Most of them, sooner or later, are thrown into the same social world as their siblings. The rules they trained for no longer apply. Being obedient stops working. Nobody is asking them only to study well. Every unworldly habit they were praised for becomes a wound.