The Anxious Tiger Mom and the Old Lady I Met at the Library
Last Saturday, as usual, I went to the library to review. The weekend library is packed, and seats have to be grabbed. I am usually among the first batch to enter, so I always manage a good seat. A mother of a 10th-grader grabbed the two seats next to mine. Seats in the National Library come in groups of four; as soon as she arrived she had claimed half of our group. She sat in one seat and saved the other for her son.
I have seen this mother and son at the library several times; twice they sat in the same group as me. On summer holidays and weekends, the boy is brought to the library by his mother to study. Because he sat right beside me, I could observe how he studied. Usually his mother would arrive and sit there for ages before the boy finally showed up — no guesswork needed: the child did not want to come to the library at all. This Saturday he did not arrive until around three in the afternoon; until then his mother had been holding the seat for him.
His mother sat opposite me with a stiff, unhappy face. The online teachers for the courses I chose were each more entertaining than the last, with wonderfully humorous lecture styles. Wearing headphones, I could not help laughing whenever something was funny. Though my laughter was silent, with an unhappy woman sitting opposite, I always felt that laughing like that was somehow offensive to her. We Chinese have an idiom, "be sorrowful, not joyful, at another's misfortune"; laughing when someone else is unhappy is surely an offense. So with her sitting opposite me, I felt nervous; wanting to change seats, there were none left in the library — a real dilemma. I had seen this mother many times, but never once seen a smile on her face.
After the boy arrived in the afternoon, he opened his book and stared at it, not turning a page for a long while; his mind was probably already a thousand miles away. He coughed violently, the cough coming from deep in his chest; he clearly had a cold, and a heavy one. Again and again I wanted to persuade the mother to take her child home to rest and stop forcing him to study. But from years of experience I knew this mother was anxious and irritable, and that a casual word might set her off, even sparking a loud scene in the reading room. So in the end I held my tongue.
Sure enough, that very night I developed cold symptoms. As if some invisible power were reproaching me in this way for standing by and doing nothing. The next day, thinking my cold should be manageable, I went back to the library to review for another day. By evening I felt waves of dizziness; I knew it was bad, quickly gathered my books, slipped away, and went home to crawl into bed.
The new National Library reading room becomes, on weekends and holidays, the main battleground for local high-school students. Many come here to study on their own, but few are driven here by their parents like this pair; this mother and son were the only ones I saw. The mother may have wanted to cultivate her son's self-discipline, but unfortunately her child deeply resents it. From the way the two of them stared at each other with hard faces, I sensed something: their parent-child relationship must be in a fairly tense state, and the boy lives with no relaxation at all.
In fact, many high-school students who come to the library on weekends are also in a taut state. I have met many at the library who look as if they are studying but actually cannot read a word; they are just finding a place to space out. Coming to the library is, for them, more or less a compulsive behavior.
There was once an 11th-grade girl who often sat beside me; sometimes I could clearly feel she was in an agitated state. Once I quietly said to her: "Child, my son is two years older than you, in his second year of university, about your age. I would not want my son to be as worn out as you are; being this exhausted will eventually make you hate learning. Don't come to the library on every holiday. You are in the bloom of youth; your life cannot consist of study alone — you need entertainment and socializing too. Learn to balance work and rest, to relax yourself, or your body and mind will not stand it. And if you occasionally relax and enjoy yourself, your study efficiency will be higher when you return to it." The child was quite receptive; after hearing me, she happily gathered her books and went out to play with friends.
In my own student days, I actually balanced exertion and rest. A childhood friend recently told me that when he mentioned me to his ailing sister (who had been our middle-school teacher), she recognized my name at once: "Zhou Zhiyuan, I remember him; that fellow loved to play so much it affected your studying." I smiled and said to the child's mother: Du Mu wrote, "Ten years awake from a Yangzhou dream, earning but a fickle name in the pleasure houses"; the reputation I left at our alma mater (the child's mother and I went to the same middle school) was not a good one. In fact, now that he is middle-aged, this childhood friend laments that he was protected by his family too much back then, which hindered the development of his adaptability.
When I was in high school, at least three students in my school — including me — were helping their families with farming or business while attending classes. All three were excellent students; one of them and I consistently ranked among the top two in the school. While other students were in class, we might be hawking through the streets or plowing the paddy fields. I had both parents; the other two were orphans who had lost their fathers in early childhood and were already the main laborers at home in high school. After graduation, I have kept in touch with both; their careers, work abilities and capacity for continued learning are all good.
Parents today seem to want their children only to study, with no other life. That is truly rather sad. Wang Xiaobo said that breeding boars kept only for mating are eventually forced to mount; sex holds no pleasure for them. Today's full-time students have their curiosity killed off, often already in middle school, by monotonous studying, and easily develop a hatred of learning. This does them far more harm than good over a lifetime; unfortunately, few parents can do that arithmetic.
Of course, ordinary parents are not too extreme; only a minority of tiger moms and dads go too far. From a medical standpoint, such parents may well have anxiety disorders; their nerves are constantly taut, and they may need treatment. Their children also easily develop compulsive tendencies and may never, throughout life, be able to relax.
Such anxiety can worsen in old age, and there is such an elderly lady at the library. The National Library's internal canteen is now open to the public; an elderly paralyzed couple often eat there. Both sit in wheelchairs, and they employ a caregiver to look after them. I have run into them several times in the canteen, and each time I hear the old lady's loud shouting. She is always furious, abusing their caregiver, repeatedly calling her "a stinking hired hand"; scolding and insults never cease. Her husband has clearly grown used to her temper and does not dare utter a sound.
Once I shared an elevator with them; as we were about to exit, the old lady loudly ordered me in a tone that brooked no refusal: "Young man, push the old man's wheelchair!" I silently complied, imitating their elderly master by not saying a word. I helped push them out of the elevator; she offered not a word of thanks, and even looked at me impatiently, as if blaming me for not helping on my own instead of making her ask.
In fact, before she said a word, I had already begun helping the elderly couple out of the elevator. This old lady was most likely paralyzed from a cerebral infarction; some stroke patients develop secondary emotional disorders, becoming irascible, irritable and hard to control. In front of such elderly people, silence is the only way to slightly calm their emotions.
Patients who develop emotional disorders after a stroke mostly had anxiety disorders when young. Cancer, stroke sequelae and mental disorders are my research focus, but regrettably such patients are very hard to treat, and I do not yet have the ability to solve their problems easily. But I know that for such patients, prevention matters far more than treatment — preventing disease when well, and preventing deterioration when ill, both matter greatly.
Anxiety usually relates to both genetics and upbringing. The tiger mother and son in this article, together with this elderly lady, form in combination the life arc of an anxiety-disorder patient: inheriting anxiety genes, growing up in a tense environment in childhood, being anxious and uneasy in adulthood, and finally losing emotional control in old age, with some patients progressing to Alzheimer's disease. Unless the patient becomes aware in time and breaks this vicious cycle, anxiety disorders will pass down through their family for generations, creating many tragedies.
The purpose of this article is not to judge anyone, but to use this living example to make people aware of the harm of anxiety, to respond to it scientifically as early as possible, and to cut off its intergenerational transmission in their own families. Our ultimate purpose in studying medicine is to bring happiness to others.
In our era, social media constantly amplifies people's anxiety, an environment very unfavorable to anxiety sufferers that worsens their condition. But there are also many professional self-help books that can help people reduce anxiety. Those with anxiety should consciously learn to save themselves, creating a happier life — for themselves and for their children.