A Long Talk with My Son

After his first monthly exam since starting the third year of junior high, my son did not do very well. After the exam, I had a long talk with him.

First I told him that no one wins every battle; if you bomb an exam, you bomb it—it is no big deal. What matters is not how you do on this or that exam, nor even the results of the high-school or college entrance exams. What matters is that he gradually finds the direction he truly loves; once he finds it, he should walk in that direction for the rest of his life, considering nothing else. He should not compete with anyone over winning or losing; he only needs to keep being himself.

Then I told him he must get eight hours of sleep every day and must never stay up late studying. My son said: 'Dad, do you know how many hours the other students in my class sleep? Most get only six hours; those who get seven are doing well. If I go around saying our family gets eight hours, my classmates will kill me.' I told him: I want a healthy son, not a son who tops the exams; whether empty fame or real achievement, neither matters to us. If he can score better, great; but if it costs his health to raise his exam scores, then absolutely not.

I basically make sure he is asleep before ten every night and wakes at six in the morning; an occasional late night is fine, but I do not want him forming the habit. I do not believe people can study clearly when sleep-deprived; rather than studying at high load and low efficiency, it is better to lighten the mental and physical burden and study more easily. Humans, having evolved to this day, seem to grow ever more foolish: we forsake the root for the branch, growing ever better at competing yet ever worse at living happily.

This year I also made up my mind: I set aside a day to tidy my son's room into order and gave it a thorough cleaning, clearing away his mountain of test papers and homework. The pile of unfinishable extracurricular books on his bookshelf was also cleared, and I reorganized his shelf into a genuinely functional one, holding the reference books he uses and the extracurricular books he likes to read. Once a test paper is done, throw it away; once a batch of extracurricular books is read, replace it with the next. The desk is completely bare, not a single spare sheet of paper on it. I want him to glide through his third junior-high year lightly and cleanly.

I do not want my son to live under such pressure, nor to study for exams. If he loves reading, there should be only one reason: his own thirst for knowledge drives him to read.

This year I bought him a very good pair of running shoes and a very good pair of basketball shoes. I have never been willing to spend a thousand yuan on shoes for myself, yet I bought my son two pairs at a thousand yuan each—one pair of Adidas running shoes and one pair of Nike basketball shoes. I only wanted to improve his sports experience. He now runs two to four kilometers a day and plays basketball two or three times a week; the Adidas running shoes make his knees hurt less while running, and the Nike basketball shoes make playing basketball easier than before.

Coming home, my son joked that when classmates saw his shoes while he was running, they asked why he had suddenly splurged on such expensive shoes. He said, 'My parents saw how much I'd be running this year and were afraid I'd hurt my feet, so they bought a pair of professional running shoes.' His classmate immediately asked: 'Does your family still take sons?'

Health matters more than grades—this is what I keep emphasizing to him. Physical and mental health are equally important; only when one is healthy in body and mind and happy to learn does learning have meaning.

I talked with my son about life's ideals. I told him our family can give him a truly humanistic education. He need not study for entrance exams; he can study for his own interests and ideals, like people such as Bill Gates. In future he need not struggle merely to survive; he can strive purely for his own interests and ideals.

I hope he sets his mind on becoming someone who can help human society solve some real problems: to learn knowledge, create wealth, and use that knowledge and wealth to solve certain social problems—such as disease, the environment, and poverty.

I told my son: when you limit your life's goal merely to solving your own survival, you lose a great deal of joy. Over a long life there are many bored, listless hours; only when we set our life's goal on solving some problems for the human community do we become people full of passion, always brimming with vitality and energy.

My son is not, at this stage, very willing to take medicine as his life's calling; he prefers math and physics. Though I feel a little regretful, since the child has his own aspirations, I will respect his own choice of life.

I do hope he can carry on my legacy and continue on the road of fighting cancer. He is a remarkably bright child, and I once thought that if he inherited my mantle and researched deeply along the road I opened, the two of us, father and son, might do something truly meaningful. But if, in a few more years, he still does not feel a strong calling to medicine, I will not force him to live his life according to my ideas.

This talk went very smoothly; my son listened attentively and was affectionate with me, and I could tell he took my words to heart. I know what a father means to a boy's growth. A father is the most important guide in a boy's life, and I want to lead my child onto a happy and accomplished road. I do not want him to live under the pressure of all kinds of comparative competition, losing his enthusiasm for life and ultimately becoming a passive, dispirited person.

I conveyed my love and expectations to him through affection and words, very clearly. At the same time I expressed my own worldview and values, hoping he will take my understanding of life and values as one of several references. When he faces life's difficulties in future, recalling this talk we had may keep him from feeling so hopeless and lost.

I am grateful for the profession I chose; it has shown me the roots of so many people's physical and mental suffering, and shown me how I should live and how I should raise my child to be a healthy person in body and mind.