Excerpts

They don't put enough attention on the responsibilities they actually have. Because their hearts are set on somewhere else, ambition works against them. It's important to find the balance: do the job in front of you well, be patient, look for chances to contribute, and grow from them. Use your attitude, energy and focus to become the person your boss feels they have to hand an opportunity to when it comes up.
— Robert Iger

Nothing is absolute, but you at least need the nerve to take a gamble. Without that nerve, there are no great victories.
— Robert Iger

The credit doesn't belong to the critic, to those who point out how the strong stumble or where the doers could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.
— "The Man in the Arena," Theodore Roosevelt

My Brother Starts High School

This week I settled something big: getting my brother into high school. It sounds simple, but what happened along the way gave me a concrete feel for what moving up a level of school really means.

First, there are just too many test takers in Chengdu. By the numbers, over 160,000 registered for this year's entrance exam. Nearly 38,000 of them are admitted without an exam, which leaves about 130,000 who have to fight it out in the exam hall.¹

I never went to a regular high school. After my own entrance exam, I easily got into a vocational school in Chongqing, so I never had much feeling about this step. My brother's grades are about what mine were, so at first I didn't worry about his schooling at all. I'd always known I'd send him to a vocational school.

But right after the New Year, I'd already looked into how Chengdu vocational schools admit students. Going by what I found, I worked out a cutoff of 320 points. Reach 320 and you can basically attend a local public vocational school.

I'd also told my brother that 320 was the safest target and he'd basically have nothing to worry about. At that point his scores were still well short of 320, so I told him to work harder.

My brother seemed to really want to go to that school too. He doesn't have many friends, and the few he has told him they'd be going to the same school I'd picked for him. So he put in a bit more effort.

Sadly, things didn't go our way. In the end my brother scored only 310. It's just a hair short of 320, but with high school admission, a miss by a hair is a miss by a mile.

The day after the scores came out, I took him to the school to register. At the gate there were at least two or three hundred people in a long line. Counting one parent per student, there were at least a hundred students there.

I went over and asked, and found out that everyone lined up outside the gate was below 320.

320, exactly 320. Meaning that even if my brother had scored 319, he'd have had to line up outside like everyone else. Meanwhile, at the far left of the huge crowd, there was a small door you could barely make out, and every few minutes a security guard came out and shouted: "Students with 320 or above, you can come in this way."

You didn't even have to queue.

I never dreamed that at this moment 320, which is hardly a high score, would become a "privileged class." No blood, no tears here, only the most objective numbers.

I won't go into everything that happened afterward. If you're interested, you can read about what I ran into at this school on my blog.²

Anyway, the outcome was that this school was off the table.

I think it happened because there are just too many test takers in Chengdu. Everyone who takes the exam goes on to school, and they all swarm toward schools at every score level.

Chengdu does have vocational schools that don't set a score requirement, but we weren't satisfied with those.

So my brother has to take the road I took.

To Chongqing.

Vocational education in Chongqing is quite different from Chengdu. In Chongqing, almost all vocational high schools are called "[District] Vocational Education Center," plus a few other schools.

I graduated from one of them.

My old school had a deep influence on me. I first opened the Selected Works of Mao Zedong during my high school years.

But because it was so late to register, a lot of the good programs and classes at the vocational centers were already full. So I could only get in touch with a teacher from my old school.

He was my skills competition coach and my homeroom teacher back then and has since been promoted to department head. I sent him a message.

He told me they were still enrolling. With his guidance, I found the admissions office teacher and got my brother registered for a class his score wouldn't normally have qualified for.

These days, most of the good vocational schools have set up bachelor's-track classes, or even integrated high school sections. In Chengdu these are called "vocational-academic integration classes."³ I think the first thing to check when judging a vocational school is whether it offers these two types of classes. Generally, schools that do won't be bad in teaching quality or study culture.

The other thing is whether its partner college is a public institution. Many vocational schools now promote a 3+2⁴ program, usually run jointly with a junior college, and it makes a big difference whether that partner college is public or private.

When I finally got the admission letter, the weight lifted off my chest. My brother hadn't been able to sleep or eat well those days either, afraid he'd have no school to go to. His grades aren't good, but I think that kind of worry is a good sign. At least he isn't thinking about going out to work right now.

My brother is about as tall as I am now, a six-foot kid, though the childishness hasn't gone from his face yet.

Thinking about him going to my old high school, I can't help remembering something a teacher named Feng Mei once told me in high school: "You're tall and good-looking, and your outside is already great. You just lack some depth."

I've remembered that line ever since. I don't know whether I count as a person with depth now, but at least I've always set out to become someone with a bit of it.

When my brother got registered, my mom was taking her mother to see a waterfall in Qionglai.

When she got back, she took me out for barbecue. While we ate, she told me that on that day my brother had called her and said: "Mom, I'm going to school so far away by myself. I don't know anyone there. What do I do?"

My mother told him: "You've stumped me with that one. Your brother never asked me anything like that."

I think for my brother, who's been by my mother's side since he was little, going from Chengdu to Chongqing to study alone really is a challenge.

But luckily we have some close relatives in Chongqing, so he won't be completely alone. This is also a chance to toughen him up.

I think the reason I never asked my mom those questions back then is that I usually don't overthink things.

No friends? Cross that bridge when I get to campus. At the very least you get assigned to a dorm, and a dorm room will get to know each other somewhat. As it turned out, on the first day we were already teaming up to play Honor of Kings.

All alone? On weekends I either stayed at school, messed around on my phone and exercised, or went out for a part-time job to earn a little money and see a bit more of the world.

A lot of problems hold up while you're only thinking about them, but when you actually run into them, you find what you'd worried about doesn't hold up at all.

What matters, though, is that you think for yourself, and don't just clam up whenever you hit something that feels hard.

For me, high school was the crucial stage when my worldview gradually took shape. I started shedding my childishness, thinking independently and having big ambitions.

I hope my brother does too.

But if you really make me say something, I still want to say this.

Real growth is not forgetting that you were once a child.

This morning I was on a work trip in Deyang, Sichuan. On the bus I saw a little girl, five or six years old, with her grandma.

Her eyes had light in them as she took in everything on the bus and outside the window.

Just that look made me feel full of life.

I wondered, when was the last time I looked at the world with eyes like that?

I'll tell myself in the plainest, most direct, simplest way: I don't remember.

Footnotes

1. See "Registrations for Chengdu's 2026 High School Entrance Exam Top 160,000," Sohu News, https://news.sohu.com/a/1020324479_121124323 ↩

2. See "Education," https://xiluluke.com/jiao-yu ↩

3. A vocational-academic integration class combines general and vocational education. Students are enrolled as vocational high school students but study the general high school academic curriculum, and can sit either the vocational college entrance exam or the regular gaokao. Some schools call it an "integrated high school section." ↩

4. The "3+2" track: students study three years at a vocational school, then pass a transfer exam to continue for two more years at a matching higher vocational college, and graduate with a full-time junior college diploma. ↩