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The Highest Exam

The gaokao is the most formidable test in the world. Literally “the high exam,” it is China’s National College Entrance Examination, taken every year by nearly 10 million students. It represents the best and worst of the country, inducing the most aspirational of dreams and deepest cycles of despair.

June 26, 2019, Yangyang Cheng,

The China Project

Peking University closed its gate on me.

Literally.

It was the summer of 2003. I had just finished middle school. At age 13, I traveled to Beijing for the first time to participate in an English public speaking competition hosted by China Central Television. My mother decided that we would stay an extra few days in the capital, cramming in as many tourist spots as possible. Topping her list of must-sees were the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen), where “Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic,” as my mother emphasized, the Old Summer Palace, whose relics after the destruction by British and French troops in 1860 symbolized China’s “century of humiliation,” and Peking University, the country’s preeminent institution of higher learning.

It was late in the afternoon when we arrived at the venerated red gate, one stone lion on each side. The sun was still bright in the sweltering July heat. On top of the facade adorned with imperial splendor, four golden Chinese characters in the handwriting of Mao Zedong read: 北京大学 — Běi Jīng Dà Xué, Peking University.

A young uniformed guard, not much older than me, stopped us by the entrance. Only members of the university and their guests were allowed inside, he said.

“We come from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC),” my mother explained. Known as the Caltech of China, USTC was founded in Beijing in 1958 before being forced to move south to Anhui Province during the Cultural Revolution, where its academic prestige would be forever shadowed by the backwater location.

The guard shook his head.

“I am a teacher,” my mother pulled out her work ID. A single parent, she taught at the elementary school affiliated with USTC. Her profession is her forever pride and shame, the latter reinforced by the upper rungs in the academic hierarchy around her: professors, lecturers, high school teacher, middle school teacher. At least she did not teach kindergarten or work in a factory, my mother would often say, as her mother had done both.

“We are not hooligans,” my mother pleaded. “We came all the way here because my daughter would like to take a look at the campus of Peking University.”

Neither her credentials nor our sincerity could persuade the stone-faced guard. In an exasperated last attempt, my mother, who had never spoken positively of me, played her trump card: “Do you know how good my child’s grades are?”

The question was rhetorical, as my mother continued, “She just took the high school entrance exam, and her score was in the top five of the entire Anhui Province. Do you know how many people there are in Anhui?”

Sixty million, I thought to myself, as I stared at the young man’s expressionless face. The hallowed grounds inside the Harvard of China, at least on that day under his watch, would remain forbidden to outsiders.

As she pulled me away, my mother spoke in my ear but loud enough for everyone around us to hear, “Wait till you take the gaokao. Then you come back and open that gate with your grades!”

Gāokǎo 高考 — “the high exam” — is the world’s most fearsome standardized test. Each year starting on the seventh of June, millions of high school graduates across China sit inside intensely monitored classrooms and pour everything they’ve learned over 12 years into a handful of subject tests: Chinese, math, English, plus the sciences or the humanities. After two or, in some areas, three days, it’s all over. With few exceptions, a three-digit score, the sum of all subject test results, is the sole criteria to determine a student’s entrance to a university and, in the minds of many, their future.

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