I opened my 2014 photo album and turned to the June, the day I graduated from high school. A few days before that day, I had just finished the exam called "Gao Kao"，which is also known as National Unified College Entrance Examination. At that time, I was probably experiencing the happiest moment in my life because I was finally free from those repeated voices of "I'll leave you alone when the exams are over, so you'll be free". The college entrance exam seemed to herald the end of a miserable life of being controlled and disciplined and the beginning of a bright and free life.
The name "gaokao" may be unique to China. But this high school graduation and university entrance exam is not: Japan, South Korea, India, and Taiwan, among others, also place great importance on high school graduation and university entrance exams. 12.91 million people took the gaokao in mainland China in 2023, which is a new record, while only less than 5% of the students will be enrolled in Top100 Universities and Colleges in China, As Jia and Li (2021) demonstrate in their study, and the ranking of your school will largely determine the level of job you can fine after graduate. Such a brutally competitive system makes parents and children prepare for the exams they will take 18 years later almost from the time the children are born: students start attending tutorial classes in elementary school, hiring tutors for one-on-one individual lessons, and even studying beyond the knowledge level of the student's age, e.g., Cambridge English KET, PET exams, etc., which are very popular in China. In China, there is a saying that goes something like this: Q: Is 5,000 an enough English vocabulary? A: It's enough to live in the U.S., but it's not enough for elementary school students in Beijing's Haidian District.(Haidian district in Beijing represents very high level education, from elementary school to universities. )
Imagine this kind of pressure started to be part of your life from a early age as a kid, and it’s all related to this one specific exam that it’s in your “destiny”: it almost becomes a metaphor. A Taiwanese friend of mine talked to me about her dream related to attending exams, she gives them a conclusive name: “Pressure dreams”: “Having dreams about big exams is almost like a habit of mine, one month before every big exam of mine, I would start to have recurring dreams ‘about missing the exam because of getting up too late’, it’s pretty annoying but there’s not much I could do, because this dream will keep coming back to me again and again. ”
2. “Even as a Chinese I know that South Korean people don’t sleep, especially their high school student”
It seems to be a similar situation in South Korea, as my Korean roommate told me in a casual conversation that the time leading up to the college entrance exams was the most stressful time of her life. “I had terrible dreams related to the exam back then, and even after I got into college”, she said, “I dreamed about attending this exam again and after the exam started suddenly it jumped to the end! There is another type of exam dream I had, that is when I’m doing the exam, the characters on the paper all started to flow everywhere, I could not read them anymore…” There is a saying circulating in Korea: if you sleep 3 hours a day, you have a chance to get into SKY school (the top 3 universities in South Korea: Seoul National University, Koryo University, and Yonsei University), if you sleep 4 hours, you can get into other universities, and if you sleep 5 hours, don't dream of going to university. The competitive nature of South Korea’s college entrance exams is evident.
Interestingly, my roommate told me that she actually realized later that there is more to life than just taking the entrance exam and going to college. There are many more choices and possibilities in life. But at that time, she was so adamant that this was the only way out and the only way to go that she even repeated a year of schooling for the exam.
"College entrance test is the only way to the future" seems to be a kind of consensus created in some East Asian countries. In fact, this consensus was not established when students entered high school, but rather, it began at a time that we cannot even remember. From a young age, the phrase "get into a good university" was a common refrain, and the cult of the most prestigious universities was ingrained in us early on. In China, the top universities (Tsinghua University, Peking University) are the places middle school and high school students visit during their summer vacations. Xiaofei Tian, now a professor at Harvard University, mentioned in her article “a turning point at the age of 13”, which was selected into the Chinese middle school Mandarin text book, she was travelling to Beijing when she was 7 and her family took her to Beijing University. After 6 years at the age of 13, she got accepted by Beijing University due to her outstanding brilliance. I guess part of the parents might want their kids to be the same as Xiaofei.
Before I entered high school, I heard more than once from my parents' friends that they think my parents should take me out to have fun, because I wouldn't have time to do so in high school. This made me unconsciously accept that "the college entrance exam is a big deal, and the three years of high school before it will be the most stressful time of my life."
3. “When I am watching “A bite of China, which is a famous documentary about Chinese food, I always try to skip that part features college entrance exam…it is too triggering.”
Is the tension that comes with high school entrance exams something I personally feel? Perhaps not. In the widely acclaimed Chinese food documentary "A bite of China", there is a scene in which a high school girl, Gao XinYa, studies hard for the college entrance exam in Mao Tanchang Middle School, which has 90 classes for the college entrance exam, and her mother gives up her own job to take care of her child full-time for ten months: cooking and washing clothes for her. The documentary records the mother cooking all kinds of food for her daughter. This symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter, extended by the exams, reflects the importance that Chinese people attach to the exams: students don't need to "waste time" on anything except preparing for the exams, and their parents do everything for them. The difficulty and pressure of taking an exam that makes everything but the exam unimportant can be imagined.
There is more than one such movie and television production: another documentary called "Gao Kao(The High School Entrance Exam)" focuses on the very high school where Gao Xin Ya prepares for the entrance exam: Maotanchang Middle School. In Japan, the TV series "Dragon Sakura", which depicts the preparation of high school students for the exams, describes how a lawyer helps several students with poor grades to get into the University of Tokyo, a prestigious school in Japan; while the movie "Flying Colors" tells how the female high school student who is ranked at the bottom of the list gets into Keio University; in the South Korean TV series "Please Reply 1988", there is a scene in which the female protagonist gets a nosebleed because of hard studying…But what I find particularly interesting is that this pressure seems to be a one-time thing: in my life after the entrance exams, I have hardly met anyone or anything else with such pressure to contend with. The college entrance exam itself does seem like a dream I'm going to study; it may only appear once in your life, and then it fades away with the passage of time. But it doesn't seem to fade away. It may be dusty and forgotten, but it will attach itself to the iceberg of your subconscious mind as a memory that may be recalled at any time.
4. “I still have that dream that the whole class turned and looked at me just because I could not figure out one simple math question”
A dreamer mentioned her dream to me as above, this is the 6th year after she attended college entrance exam in Yunnan province.
Nine years after my GaoKao, which is this year, when I was doing making research for my thesis, I made a fake English GaoKao paper. As I stared happily at the printer and held the printed "paper" in my hand, a strange and familiar panic came over me. No images came to my mind, and I seemed to have forgotten what I had seen when I faced each and every paper in high school, but holding this "paper" in my hand, which was similar in size to the actual GaoKao paper, suddenly made me realize that all the things that the GaoKao exams had brought to me had never disappeared. They are still triggered by something as trivial as "a fake test paper".
Many of the people I interviewed said that taking the college entrance exam and going back to their high school days or earlier student days was a recurring dream they had. This major event before the age of eighteen and minor events on the road to life in the future, seems to be a regular theme that haunts some East Asians.
Even after so many years, some of us still try to block this period of time out of our memories, to run away from the used-to-be live “nightmares” of ours.