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The Highest Exam

Learning the unforgiving statistic was a cruel revelation. It was the first year of middle school. After a period exam, we were ranked by the combined score on all subjects. Getting into the top 10 in a class of 50 was considered an achievement, their names announced at the class conference.

Returning home, I told my mother the 10 names I had memorized, nine classmates and myself at the top.

“Most of them will not get into university,” my mother said, not impressed. “Just because you ranked first does not mean you are safe.”

In the early 2000s, about half of middle school graduates in China passed the high school entrance exam. Combined with the gaokao acceptance rate, if my middle school class reflected the regional average, two, at most three, of us could advance to a Tier 1 university, leaving the remaining four dozen behind. My mother was right.

My stomach was in knots when I walked into the classroom the next day, seeing all the familiar faces. Where would each of us be in six years’ time? Even if I maintained my spot at the top of the school, which I did, hundreds of thousands of my peers elsewhere in the province also served as competition.

To maximize my chances, life outside of schoolwork was kept to a minimum. No TV. No after-school time with friends. No leisure reading. One of the few creative outlets I found was penning love letters, some ghostwritten for classmates, some for historical figures that caught my fancy, and the rest addressed to a boy in my class, never sent. In our final year of middle school, my first real-life crush moved back to his hometown in the far north. China’s residential policy dictates that one take the gaokao where one’s household is registered. For my young self, the draconian rule led to one afternoon of tears and months of sorrow. For the children of 300 million migrant workers, the geographical caste system demanded a choice between staying behind in the countryside, alone or with aging relatives, or following their parents to the cities but giving up on the dream of college.

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