“Nerd” and “score-oriented” are two of the most common stereotypes people attribute to Asian students. However, not many people understand the value of test scores in the Chinese educational system. These scores represent more than numbers. The college entrance exam is the quintessential cornerstone of the Chinese educational system, the most authoritative and the most impartial measuring stick for selecting talented young people around the country every year. Back in the 1970s, the most straightforward and promising way for a rural Chinese family to move up on the social ladder was to have a child graduate from a famous college and receive a decent job assigned by the government. With a government-assigned occupation, one could transform from a farmer into a city worker, provide for a family, and forever change one’s citizenship from “rural” to “urban.” Mother was one of the pioneers who succeeded in changing her family’s life through becoming a rural college student.
In the 1960s northern China experienced a severe famine. In order to find a job and provide for his family, Grandpa traveled south for about 220 miles from Henan Province to Shanxi Province. Having never attended any type of school, he managed to obtain a stable job as a cook in the local county government. After settling down, Grandpa brought his family over. The village had fewer than 50 households and only about 200 residents. Born in the village, Mother grew up there as the fifth child in her family.
For some reasons I didn’t understand, when Mother was old enough to eat her own food, Grandma still didn’t stop breastfeeding her. Once, after Mother performed a self-choreographed dance for her elementary school, she stepped off the stage, turned around, and drank some milk from Grandma. A spectator, probably one of Mother’s classmates, teased and shamed her for still drinking milk from Grandma at that age. Neither Mother nor Grandma remembered how old Mother was by then. Though Grandma didn’t care about others’ judgments of her child-rearing techniques, Mother felt deeply embarrassed and stopped drinking breast milk. Yet, now my illiterate Grandma still stubbornly thinks that there must be some relationship between Mother’s later talents in school and her more-than-necessary intake of breast milk.
There was no kindergarten in the village. Before elementary school, Mother spent most of her time playing with her slightly older brother in the field in which Grandma always worked. When Grandma was too busy plowing and forgot about her two young children, Mother and Uncle would sometimes take an apple from the orchard, sometimes a tomato or cucumber from the field, split them in half, and eat whenever they were hungry. Then they would continue chasing each other until Grandma discovered two mud-covered kids throwing peach seeds at each other near the cornfield.
At the age of six, Mother enrolled in the only elementary school in the village. A single teacher had to teach all the subjects of all five grades of students in the same classroom. It must have been a miracle and perfect example of time and space management for this teacher to coordinate five grades of students on his own. When he lectured students in one grade, students in other grades would review what they just learned and work on their assignments. Students in different grades sat next to one another. Older kids helped younger ones with their homework and younger kids had the chance to listen to higher-level classes. Mother really took advantage of such a class system: she always listened attentively to the higher-level classes and prepared herself to stay ahead of her peers’ academic schedules. Because of her diligence, Mother excelled in math and Mandarin and even helped older kids with their homework.
In the town educational resources were scarce. Without pencils and papers, all 1st to 3rd grade students had to use stone tablets and chalk. Students would write on both sides of the stone tablet and erase the chalk with their hands after the teacher examined their work. Over the years, the stone tablet became enclosed by a thin layer of white dust. The surface felt slimy and the edges smooth. Tables and chairs were also insufficient; students adjusted by sitting on granite stools and placing the tablet on a stack of bricks in front of them. Despite such harsh learning conditions, the children’s enthusiasm to study or simply stay in the classroom never diminished. In the winter after classes, one could still feel the warmth left by the kids on the tablets and stools. For some children, coming to school provided a perfect excuse to avoid chores. For Mother, genuine desire for knowledge, innate competitiveness to appear more excellent than others, and hope for a better life altogether motivated her to dedicate herself to study.
The elementary school teacher served as a bridge between Mother and the world outside of the village. He told her about the two best universities in China, which are both located in Beijing. Mother secretly told herself that one day she would study in one of them and the dream became rooted in her mind for the next ten years. Mother recalled that she felt happy during her childhood because during that time when nobody had news, TV, radio, or even books other than textbooks, she had a dream, a pure dream that sustained and directed her, supporting her with a purpose for all her efforts in her education. Occasionally when a car arrived in the village, Mother would stand behind its back with other kids, touching the license plate and wondering about the feelings of those people sitting inside the car window. When the car started to drive away, Mother and the other kids would run after it, inhaling the dust and smoke released behind. However, they had to slow down their pace eventually, eyes and hearts still fixed on the rear of the car until it disappeared beyond the horizon. Once Mother hurried back into the classroom and bumped into the teacher, he smiled at her, “There is no need to chase the car. If you stay a good student, when you grow up, you can even sit in the planes that fly in the sky.” To Mother, the irksome smell of gas and the teacher’s descriptions of planes symbolized the world, so distant from her, yet constantly spurring her to chase her dream of getting into a good college.
Once Mother grew older, she had to start helping out with family chores, just like the other kids in the village. When not in school, Mother would carry a bamboo basket and a sickle, collecting weeds to feed the pigs. Yet chores could be fun when friends worked together. Without being forced by their parents, Mother and her friends would voluntarily go out together and collect weeds, but when they were bored, they would have fun and play games. Jump ropes, shuttlecocks, hide-and-chase. In a world without worries about competition, without video games and social media, without worries of complex relationships teenagers nowadays have to deal with, without overwhelming tutoring and schoolwork, Mother was able to derive her pleasure from reading, playing with friends, and even doing chores.
After graduating from elementary school, Grandpa transferred Mother into a better- supplied middle school in the nearby town. Teachers were surprised to discover that Mother didn’t need any additional tutoring to catch up with the progress of other students, probably because of her habit of always staying ahead of her peers in the village. In fact, Mother soon became the “super student” in the new middle school. Her test scores always came out the best among about 150 students, most of the time at least ten percent higher than the second-place score. Yet, while she always obtained peerless scores, nobody knew how she managed such an achievement. When Mother enrolled in the middle school, she moved out of the village and started living with her sister, who was married to a man in the relatively wealthier town nearby. Aunt had to work in the afternoon, so the job of taking care of my two cousins who were five and three rested on Mother’s shoulders. Every day Mother would wake up early to prepare breakfast for three mouths and return home immediately after school to babysit her niece and nephew. Teachers and classmates didn’t understand how she managed to maintain her academic performance with such heavy family chores that most kids in the town weren’t responsible for.
Once out of curiosity, I asked her what tricks she had. Mother first made fun of me by claiming that it was a talent that I didn’t inherit from her, yet later she explained her strategies for time management. When her niece and nephew were playing on their own, Mother would recite the equations or new Mandarin passages needed to be memorized and brainstorm for her essay assignments. When her niece and nephew fell asleep, she would light a candle and efficiently finish her homework. When she was preparing breakfast, she would review the materials she learned the day before and preview the passages to be learned on that day.
With good study habits, Mother’s scores for high school entrance exams ranked first in the whole county and easily qualified her for one of the best high schools in the Shanxi Province. For the first time in her life, Mother’s dream of one of the two universities in Beijing became not so distant: every year about thirty students from her high school could successfully enroll in either of the two best universities.
However, life once again put a barrier between Mother and her dream. In her last year of high school, Mother was afflicted with tuberculosis. When every other student was staying up reviewing for the possible life-turning college entrance exams, Mother lay in bed, moaning and fighting against the bacteria in her body. Suddenly it seemed like all the hopes were gone: both of my uncles didn’t finish their education due to expensive tuitions and started working in the field with Grandpa when they were fifteen. While Mother remained the last person to change the family’s future, tuberculosis demolished the last strain of hope in every family member’s heart.
Except Mother.
I imagined her dream shattered, but she picked up the pieces and glued them together with diligence and persistence. In March, three months before the college entrance exam, Mother obtained the doctor’s permission to return to campus while continuing to take syringes of medication during class breaks in the school infirmary. I imagined she studied crazily. However, she told me she was calm because during her recovery at home, she would study the materials herself, despite the discomfort in her lungs. With only three months of preparation, she took the test and waited for the judgment of her twelve years of effort.
Mother told me she wasn’t exactly nervous on the result-revealing day. However, she remembered my uncles and grandparents sitting in a row on the edge of the bed, fists clenching, eyebrows frowning, sweat dripping, and eyes blinking. When the county radio announced Mother’s name after Peking University, the whole family was ecstatic. Grandpa hugged Grandma; Uncle couldn’t stop laughing; Aunt pointed to Mother and told my cousins they should be like her when they grew up. Mother, bursting into tears of joy, laughed while wiping her face with a towel. To a rural family like mine in 1988, a child getting into Peking University didn’t just mean the child was smart. It meant moving into the cities. It meant obtaining urban citizenships. It meant no more labor-intensive farming jobs. It meant pencils and papers, wooden desks and stools. It meant TVs, radios, bicycles, washing machines, and refrigerators. It meant cars and planes. It meant the world. It meant everything.
Just as Grandma guided Mother, Mother instilled in me her principles of education. She was always very attentive to my study techniques and habits, believing that attention to detail helped her achieve excellence. After hearing about her story, I realized how important these habits were to her and to me. Mother’s experience convinced me and herself of the values of education in changing one’s life. Now whenever she blames me for procrastinating or scolds me for making careless mistakes on tests, I can empathize with her. Her family, reputation, and wealth all originate from her stubbornness to avoid any single mistake. A two-point deduction on a test paper might have ripped everything away from her. Although I find her attitude and principles somewhat contradictory to American education values, I recognize that both societies value intelligence and diligence, yet in different ways. Chinese students are trained to demonstrate their academic ability through standardized tests, which are the most effective and fairest selection processes given the massive population and insufficient educational resources, while most Americans are raised to believe in the virtue of freedom, the possibility to develop any skill they personally prefer. The American society provides the platform for diverse types of teenagers to thrive and succeed. Therefore, I hope that before one can comfortably place judgments on others for working diligently, one can consider different societal values and remember the significance of education to someone like my mother.