For the vast majority of Chinese high school students, applying to university means one thing: passing the country’s notorious college entrance exam, the gaokao (pronounced “gow-cow”). Their score on that two-day test will be the sole determinant of which—if any—college they gain admission to. High school grades get thrown out, extracurriculars don’t exist, and no college wants to see your “personal statement.” It all comes down to gaokao.
The test is sometimes compared to the SAT, but in reality there is no comparison. Gaokao is an all-consuming black hole at the end of high school, the culmination of over a decade of intellectual cramming that makes American high schools look like daycare centers. High school seniors often study more than twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week. Some extreme schools have even hooked students up to IV drips during cram sessions and installed suicide nets at student dorms.
Xuanyu’s high school was progressive by Chinese standards, but hearing him recount his gaokao preparation regimen left me feeling pathetically weak of will. Monday through Friday he would be in class, taking practice tests or studying from 8 a.m. to 11:25 p.m., with an hour each for lunch and dinner. He would take Friday evening after dinner off, and then put in two more eight-hour days of studying on both Saturday and Sunday.
As draining as gaokao may be, it has the virtue of simplicity: a single test score and a single standard for admissions. It is also widely perceived as a fundamentally fair system in a nation where personal connections and casual corruption often erode public trust.
By choosing to study in America, Frank opted out of the gaokao pressure cooker. But what American college admissions lacked in intensity, they made up for in complexity: AP classes, extracurricular activities, TOEFL tests, the SAT test, SAT subject tests, letters of recommendation, and personal statements.
That last item can be particularly puzzling for Chinese students. Frank is an engaging and curious student with good English. He likes to dance and sketch and will reference eighth-century Chinese poetry while discussing current New York fashion trends. But when it came time to write a personal statement, his ideas about the essay reflected Chinese values that do not translate well to the American admissions context.
“I thought maybe in a good personal statement you’ll just show off your strong will to the guy reading this,” he told me. “Like you’ll just say, ‘I focused on studying math for four years.’”
Some time working with an education consultant set Frank straight. The company Frank’s family hired for the process was on the more legitimate end of the spectrum, helping him brainstorm topics and proofreading the essays. He ended up writing about the inspiration he drew from Joyce Carol Oates and his nostalgia for fishing in his family’s ancestral village. Those essays helped him gain entrance to the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he enrolled that fall.
Frank’s decision to go abroad was a personal one: a chance to explore a new country and culture. But for his twin, Xuanyu, the choice of where to study was imbued with broader social dimensions.
“If everyone just goes to America, China will never truly develop,” he told me. “If China wants to grow into its own country—not just a second America—Chinese people need to feel more responsibility for their nation.”
For Xuanyu, that meant cultivating and reimagining the intellectual traditions that made China distinct.
“Lots of people in my generation love entertainment and international things. They’re going toward a kind of uniformity, where everything is the same across countries,” he said. “China has its own unique things, like Confucius and Taoist thinking. It’s just that they haven’t been fully expressed.”
That fear of losing Chinese culture in the whitewashing of a Western education goes back as far the 1880s, when Confucian officials ordered By-jinks Johnnie and his classmates to return immediately to the Middle Kingdom. But as I spent more time on American campuses, I began to hear echoes of that age-old concern coming from the Chinese students themselves. To understand how they handled this cross-cultural tug-of-war, I signed up to be a judge at a Mandarin-language speech contest down the road from my apartment, at UC Berkeley.
“THAT’S WHY WE TRY TO FIT IN”
First up at today’s qualifying round is a Chinese student who goes by the English name Ham. Dressed in a black jacket and a crisp Golden State Warriors baseball cap, Ham is holding forth in Mandarin on one of today’s three speech prompts: When a fellow student says they’re depressed, are they just trying to get attention? Ham doesn’t think so. He cites statistics on mental health and draws out a metaphor around sneezing, colds, and cries for help. He’s a great public speaker, and I recommend that he advance to the next round.
Today’s contest is being put on by a Chinese coworking space in San Francisco. A dozen students, almost all of them Berkeley undergrads, are competing to be a contestant on the internet TV show that the company will film in a few weeks. Tryouts are being held in a small classroom on the third floor of a building on UC Berkeley’s campus. Tomorrow we’ll head down to Stanford and repeat the selection process with Chinese students and recent graduates in the area. My friend Tina is managing this event for the coworking space, and she invited me to act as a judge.
I’ve been on a decent number of Chinese internet and television shows, and I know what my role is: speak some Chinese for the cameras and add that “international” flavor. I agreed to do it as a favor for Tina, but also because I wanted to hear what these students thought about the third debate prompt: “Should Chinese students pretend to be different than they are to blend into American culture?”
It’s a question close to my own heart. I spent over five years in China desperately working to pick up the language, inflections, and mannerisms of the people around me. I wanted so badly to be able to understand what made them tick and to express myself in a way that resonated. It mostly worked. By the end of my time there I felt totally comfortable navigating those worlds, using Mandarin to express my own thoughts. My favorite thing to do was put those skills to work sharing parts of California culture with Chinese people. I started an Ultimate Frisbee team with one of my best friends there and put up goofy online videos teaching the sport.
All of that feel-good cultural exchange was facilitated by a form of national and racial privilege: many Chinese people are excited to learn about American culture, and they’re often very happy to meet an American (especially a white American) who is interested in their culture. Speaking even a little bit of Chinese wins undeserved accolades, and there’s often a tacit understanding that when it comes to the best movies, TV, music, and sports, America is the place to be.
Linghong Zhang got a much different reception when she tried to share her own culture with Americans. She’s a freshman at Berkeley, and the fifth speaker in today’s contest. Linghong talks about growing up in a part of southern China where locals still valued sons over daughters, a tendency that put a chip on her shoulder from a young age. She came to Los Angeles during high school, living with a Mexican family while attending local schools.
But Linghong felt isolated. She spoke English with a heavy accent, didn’t get her classmates’ jokes, and felt that they looked down on her. So she went to work learning their culture. She watched six seasons of The Vampire Diaries and pretended that she liked the same shows as the other girls. But she still felt like they didn’t really accept her, and she thought she knew why: people don’t want to be friends with someone pretending to be interested in the same stuff as them. She decided to stop faking it and take pride in her own culture.
A couple years later, Linghong was volunteering at an international film event, staffing the desk for one of China’s most famous animation companies. She was a big fan of cartoons and was proud to be representing the company as it promoted The Monkey King, an animated film inspired by the protagonist of China’s most famous novel, Journey