When my son served as a teaching assistant for the lab sessions of Physics 101 in an American University, there was one Asian student having fun by coining all sorts of fake quotations attributed to Confucius. It would be a somewhat difficult task to refute him as Confucianism has shaped the collected subconsciousness of East Asians for ages, so every idea that seems right might as well came from him.
It could be said that Confucius was the Chinese who received most significant recognition posthumously, from kingship to godhood. When he was alive, three centuries before the first feudal dynasty of China, he dreamt of a renaissance of a lost golden age, a restoration of ancient orders, customs, and rites. He travelled extensively on a divided continent to promote his ideas, but without much success. Luckily, just like Plato and Aristotle, he started his own “academy” and nurtured generations of gifted students who inherited and developed his ideas.
After the rise of Han, the second Chinese dynasty, counselors and emperors saw the ills of Qin’s harsh rule.
“Confucianism should be our sole path.”
“‘Sensei, do explain the concept of ren, the ideal mode that governs our interactions with one another.’ Confucius said, ‘Ren is all about self-restraint for the restoration of rites. Once each of us achieves that, the whole world shall find peace in ren. The practicing of ren relies upon thyself, not someone else.'”
Despite all the efforts, in the following centuries China were still ruled by strong noble families who earned their privileges by birthright. Constant power struggles and reduced social mobility sowed the seeds of instability. Almost a thousand years after the death of Confucius, the founding emperor of Sui dynasty created ke’ju, the systematical approach of promoting talents to the bureaucratic system. The many test subjects symbolized by ke were eventually reduced to essay writing on the canonical works of Confucius and his students. The recommendation component, ju, was scrapped all together as it inevitably led to conflicts of interest.
The two golden moments in the life of a typical Chinese man would be his wedding night and when he saw his own name on the “admitted” notice of ke’ju exam.
1977, Deng Xiaoping, the de-facto leader of China emerging after the end of the Great Cultural Revolution, attended a national conference on education planning. A Chemistry lecturer from the University of Science and Technology of China, the Chinese counterpart of MIT which was to have its twentieth anniversary by then, brought forward a daring proposal: Gaokao, the national college entrance exam, should be restored and the state might as well send young scholars to study abroad.
“We can’t sit on the issue. It shall be done,” Mr. Deng affirmed.
During the cultural revolution, students enrolled into college by recommendation of their local governments and (state-owned) employers, but this was soon going to change. The Chinese reverted to the old way of their ancestors — admission by merits in examination relatively fair for everyone.
In December of that very year, the annual Gaokao resumed, but at the time I realized that I did not possess much advanced STEM knowledge other than how a vacuum flask works. Without textbooks and reference materials, I tried my luck and failed miserably.
Dad did what he could to help me with the ’78 Gaokao. He wrote to his students in Shanghai to borrow materials and exercises published in the 50s. Assuming the Chinese subject exam would still be essay-oriented, he constantly challenged me with the prompts that just came to his mind. “Learning from Comrade Lei Feng,” was one of the many inspirations he conceived, in the restroom as a matter of fact.
He also pleaded to let me audit in the graduating class of the Railway High School, leveraging his few privileges as a teacher. After my first day as an auditor, he tried to set up a few rules for me by the dining table, for the sake of displaying his and my appreciation of the “special arrangement.”
“Help erase the blackboard after the class, and clean up the classroom after the school day, will you?”
As a pompous young man, I already felt somewhat ashamed to repeat a grade, not to mention being seen in the role of a janitor in front of my peers. Thus, I turned down his request right away and never set foot in that classroom again.
I did spend many hours reviewing in my attic, plowing through thousands of problems of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In the evening, I took a break by watching the news with Dad. When we had those blackouts again, I visited old classmates and friends for some chitchat or a walk in the Hood.
Being the pessimists they were, dad and his colleagues did not think I would have much chance in my second Gaokao. He ended up sending some of my problem sets for grading by a previous student of his. Being informed that I had gotten most of the problems correct, he was still far from convinced, thinking that I might have been making up the solutions based on the teacher’s guide.
I really went out of my comfort zone to cover a dozen or so topics which I never learned back at school. To my dismay, the knowledge tested in ’78 Gaokao was different: I solely focused on the essay part, but the Chinese paper covered classical Chinese and reading comprehension as well. I used significant time and energy to crack and even memorize solid geometry proofs, which never found their way to the Math paper.
I was utterly defeated when I returned, as I was only confident with subjects like physics and chemistry. To make the matter worse, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Q took the exam as well. Considered to have some learning difficulties by many neighbors, she beamed with pride that evening.
“I got them all! Ab-so-lutely!”
I became the laughing stock of the Hood in the next couple of weeks, before the arrival of my offer letter.
Indeed, my grades did not look pretty, failing Chinese with a score just above 40 and receiving only 8 points for English. Nevertheless, I passed the key university admissions line with a net score of 380. I was not able to enroll in my dream college, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and was going to attend the Jiangnan Institute of Technology instead. On the contrary, Miss Q didn’t receive anything from the postman and annoyed her parents immensely. She did not show up in the hood for a month or so, allegedly the result of taking a vicious beating.
Many of my classmates and pals did not pass the admissions line and gave up. As an alternative, they took the Worker Recruitment Test organized by the city. Yue, who did not join any Red Guard faction just like me, earned a place at Jiangnan Radio Factory. After he took a wife and started a family, he managed to arrange a transfer and worked together with his wife at the provincial printing house. Ai joined Jiangnan Candy Factory, which went bankrupt two decades. As both he and his wife were out of job, they put their luck to trial by being hawkers in local farmers’ market. Zhong managed to get a post in Jiangnan Glass Plant.
Let the Sun be my golden shuttle and the Moon my silver shuttle, I shall weave the fabrics of my life with each day. I got up as early as 5 am for morning reading of English and worked so hard to make the fullest of every day. The students and faculty of the nearby provincial normal university, the alma mater of my future wife, were pushing a reform of democracy and autonomy. Being supportive in spirit as we were, many other students and I still distanced ourselves from activism and politics, channeling all our youthful energy into the grand undertaking of learning.
Canteen was an indispensable part of my university life. Thanks to the generous subsidiary of the state, I could purchase meal coupons for a mere 14.5 yuan to cover every day of the month. The catch was that if coupons were to be used, I must take all three meals at the canteen. As the dorm was shared by eight students, I really missed the quiet attic at home most suitable for studying. But in order to enjoy the perk of cheap breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, I had to spending prolonged periods on the road. That kind of dilemma was what I had to cope. The most memorable day for us would be the university anniversary, not because of the school spirit or collectivism, but for the free, succulent braised pork. Each dorm would send out a representative to retrieve its due share with a full-sized washing basin. The fatty delight truly completed our college experience.
It was certainly a privilege to learn directly from the experts on challenging subjects like Microwave Theory, Informatics, and Electromagnetic Theory. And we soon found out that the Cultural Revolution had left irrevocable marks in their lives. Prof. Lei, who taught us EM Theory, was a fellow Jiangnanese. As early as 15, he was admitted to Tsinghua, arguably the best university in the entire country. Four years later, he already earned his master’s degree and published his own book. Then, he was branded as a reactionist in the Revolution and wound up in the affiliated factory of the Jiangnan Institute of Technology. Only after our enrollment did he finally earn the right to return to the podium and teach his favorite topics like Maxwell’s Equations. Allegedly, the province intended to promote a scholar without political affiliation to the post of Deputy Governor. Prof. Lei would be the top candidate, but at the time he had already submitted an application to join CCP. Ah, those were the intricacies in politics and life.
We would initiate our capstone projects in Nanjing Insititute of Technology and interned in the 714 Factory, one that manufactured radio stations for the army and the popular Panda television and radio sets. After attending lectures in Nanjing Institute of Technology, we unanimously felt that those accented professors were no better than Prof. Lei and his peers back in Jiangnan. During the internship orientation, the Training Director of the Factory elaborated on the problems in the recruitment exams. We were utterly surprised to learn that some workers would get ridiculous results such as it would take years to walk from the Factory to the local railway station. Later on, we interned in the manufacturer of the famous Kaige monochromic television in Shanghai. Local workers on the assembly line were quite proud about the metropolis and could not wait to brag about local attractions like the Bund, the Temple of City God, and the Park in the West Suburb (Shanghai Zoo). When we returned home, I spent another couple of months to complete my prototype — a satellite dish that could pick up live USSR News program in 3 pm. It was an unprecedented project in my engineer career at that point.