The First Half of Life Seeking a Way Out; the Second Half Seeking a Way Home

I was born in the seventh lunar month of 1979 and will turn 47 in a month. My generation has lived through the greatest social transformation. When we were children, rural China still followed the farming patterns that had not changed for thousands of years. In those days, our southern paddy fields were plowed by water buffalo; every family also raised pigs and chickens, so as children we helped our parents tend the buffalo and feed the pigs and chickens. When a little older, we did whatever farm chores we could. Once we grew into young men, we did the heaviest, hardest farm work like the family's strongest laborers.

My hometown, Huanggang in Hubei, is a major rice-growing region of China. The hardest farm work I did when young was carrying rice on a shoulder pole. In those days our village divided the threshing ground by production team; my family belonged to the fifth group, and some of our paddy fields were over half a mile from the threshing ground. We bound the rice into bundles and carried them to the threshing ground. A shoulder pole load of rice usually weighed over 50 kilograms, and along the way we could not set the pole down to rest, because once the rice was set down, much of the grain would be lost.

Both my brother and I did this work; transplanting and harvesting rice were even more routine, and compared with carrying pole-loads of rice they were easy work. But transplanting and harvesting usually lasted a whole day, so they were actually exhausting too; after a day's work we would collapse with fatigue. During summer vacation and the spring and autumn agricultural busy holidays, rural children all had to work the fields alongside their parents.

Economic conditions were generally poor then, and no one could afford meat. Although we burned huge calories every day, we had no means to supplement nutrition; we ate only vegetables like eggplant and cowpeas, plus rice. Occasionally my mother would steam a bowl of egg custard with a single egg for the whole family to share. July and August were usually the lean season for vegetables; even fresh greens were hard to come by, and we relied on various pickled vegetables to go with rice. Only after the busy farming ended would the family buy one kilogram of meat for everyone to share a meal and replenish.

When the holiday ended, we carried the family's rice and pickles on our backs to school. Throughout my junior high years, I ate mostly pickles with rice at school. I was not alone; over 90% of my classmates were the same. The school cafeteria also sold dishes, some for ten cents and some for twenty cents, but they were all thin, watery vegetables.

Looking now at a group photo I took with classmates when I entered college in 1998, I was dark and thin, yet bright-eyed and full of spirit. Some of my college classmates recall our days together; they say I could barely get enough to eat back then, sometimes only one meal a day. But of all the classmates, I was probably the toughest, always thinking of ways to help my family through its financial hardships.

My family had two children in college at the time: my brother in his third year and me in my first. In 1998 the whole of Southeast Asia was gripped by the financial crisis, and money was far harder to earn than now. On top of that, Hubei suffered catastrophic flooding that year, so my parents were already doing their utmost. My brother recalls that period as the time he developed a psychological illness. In fact, I too collapsed many times under the pressure back then.

But children from our grassroots background are not so easily crushed. Besides farming, my father always ran small businesses—growing sugarcane and melons at home, and making pine-flavored century eggs to sell. I helped him deliver and sell goods from very young; I should have been only six or seven when I first helped my parents run a stall. I liked the work not because I was born a businessman, but because, compared with other chores and farm work, it was the easy job. That childhood experience made me a natural when I later went into business.

When a bit older, I helped my father deliver goods to shops in neighboring towns. He pulled a handcart loaded with 100–150 kg of goods, and I pushed from behind. Going uphill, we had to strain every muscle to move the cart. But in those moments one could not shrink back; if we hesitated and a wheel slipped, the whole cartload would be ruined.

Doing this work often left me parched, and I coveted the orange soda at roadside kiosks. But to save money my father always said, "Son, hold on a bit further; there is a well ahead, and the water is sweet and cool, much better than soda." I could only swallow and keep going with him.

The roads then were nowhere as good as now, and security was worse; bandits and local bullies often harassed us. My parents suffered no end of mistreatment in this business; once, my mother was even beaten by a local thug who came to extort us. I learned of this when I was in my second year of high school; hot-blooded and impulsive, I longed for a chance to avenge the man who had hit my mother.

But my parents would never tell me who he was; instead they urged me to endure, study hard, take the college entrance exam, and leave this poor backwater. Because in that era such things were all too common; without endurance, one simply could not survive.

When I was young, parents always told their children, "Study hard, and don't spend your whole lives as we do, facing the loess with your backs to the sky." I do not know whether it was good genes or whether family hardship made us work harder than others—or both—but my brother and I did exceptionally well in school. We both could rank at the very top of Hubei province; my brother was our local top scorer in the college entrance exam.

What our whole family wanted most back then was for us to take the college exam, go to a big city to make our way, and escape generations of farming. Few of my peers even attended high school; many went off to work before completing the nine-year compulsory education. But before I even started primary school, my father had already planned for all his children to go to college.

My father's mantra was: "Money is not your concern; that is my business. Your task is to study well." From Zhuge Liang's famous saying that "one's ambition should be lofty," he named his two sons Zhigao and Zhiyuan—two well-chosen names that also embodied his own soaring ambitions.

When I first started primary school, my grades were not outstanding and I was particularly mischievous—fond of fishing, catching fish, trapping birds, grabbing snakes, diving, and sliding down slopes. I was one of the naughtiest children in the village. From first to third grade, I ranked in the bottom three every year. My brother and I attended the same primary school; he was two grades ahead, showed exceptional learning ability, and usually ranked first.

A few years ago I joked with my father: when we brothers were little, did our parents think I would never go the scholarly route, but would be a village man making a living from the water? My father said gravely that this was absolutely not the case. He said that soon after I enrolled, he had discussed with my first teacher (who is also my wife's maternal uncle, so I later called him Uncle too) whether I was suited to study.

My first teacher had told him that, although my exam results were a shambles, I had the best brain in the class. He said that sometimes, in spare time, the teachers would test us with tricky, outlandish questions; whenever a complex question required thought, I never got a single one wrong, while the other classmates were lucky to get even one right. My first teacher told him at the time: "Your boy will definitely be a scholar one day; he is just too naughty now, and his heart is not yet in his books."

After COVID broke out, this teacher-uncle of mine died of illness; I visited him on his deathbed. He said to me: "Zhiyuan, soon after you enrolled, your father asked me whether you were a scholar-to-be. I told him then that you had a good brain; I still believe your future is boundless, and you must grasp your life well." The two old men's words corroborate each other, showing this really happened.

I feel ashamed that my naughty, playful nature was not rooted out until my second year of high school. In my sophomore year I seemed to suddenly wake up, stopped indulging in fishing and chess, and studied hard; from then on I was unstoppable, ranking first in the whole school in every subject. At my best, the second-place student in the whole school trailed me by over a hundred points in total, which badly affected the morale of my classmates. I also won awards in competitions back then.

On this trip home I met one of my beloved high-school teachers; we talked about how studying clinical medicine now depends on memory, and I am glad that, though already 47, my memory still seems quite good, so learning is not difficult. I asked him how my memory had been when I studied under him. He said my memory back then was of the never-forget-after-one-reading level: classical texts, once read, could be repeated completely and accurately. Clearly my talent was good in those days.

A few years ago, a junior-high classmate asked me about his sister's meningioma. When we were in junior high, his sister was a teacher at our school. When he mentioned me to her, she said: "I remember Zhou Zhiyuan; he was too playful in junior high. He was a good friend of yours back then, and it even affected your studies." I had no idea I had left such an unflattering impression on a teacher; later I told my wife this story—she was my junior-high classmate—and we almost laughed ourselves sick.

Looking back, my parents never pressured me about studying; they let everything take its course and simply waited patiently for us to grow. Most parents back then had this attitude toward their children's schooling. How could parents of that era be so calm about their children's education? Seen today, compared with today's so-called highly-educated young parents, my parents' generation of rough-hewn folk actually seems wiser in raising children.

From age twenty I fell in love with the library, and from then on there was no stopping me; I have spent nearly thirty years at the National Library. I even bought my home near it, and whenever I have free time I go there; I still keep the habit today, and perhaps few people in all China are like me.

I have wide-ranging interests throughout my life, differing by age; but in every period I was immersed in my hobbies, so I was happy most of the time. Once absorbed in a hobby, the outside world could not affect me much. Fortunately, neither my family of origin nor my current small family interferes with me. Or, as my wife puts it, my aura is too strong for anyone to interfere, so in the end everyone could only let me do as I wished.

Though I seem willful, I have always been dutiful to my family, pouring great devotion into loving them and shouldering responsibility; this is the real reason my family has always supported my decisions.

I have spent the better part of my life fulfilling the expectations my parents had for me, escaping the rural life of "facing the loess with my back to the sky." But at my present age, what I want most is to find a way home, returning to the life of my childhood.

The most important assessment my beloved teacher gave me in high school was "daring to think and daring to do"; he said that whenever I had an idea, I acted at once, swiftly and decisively, never dragging my feet. In the matter of finding a way home, I also intend to act with the same decisiveness.

My focus over the last twenty years has been medicine; as everyone knows, the ultimate aim of medicine is health. But after studying TCM, Western medicine, and psychiatry, I have gradually realized that for modern people to be healthy and long-lived, the most important thing is not medicine but a good lifestyle.

The life I lived as a child is not a good life in many people's eyes, because the food was poor and the work was hard. Yet it was a very healthy way of life. Both for the body and for the spirit, that life was healthy. Sometimes I urge my child to do physical labor, and he always tells me, "That's choosing hardship where there is none." These four characters are the mantra of today's young people, yet they are also the truth of healthy living. Perhaps one has to reach my age to understand this.

Both our bodies and our spirits are forged by toil and undone by ease. The amount of labor directly determines the health of body and mind. My generation is less healthy than our parents', and my son's generation is less healthy than ours. Over recent decades, China's economy and society have developed rapidly; people's lives have grown better and better, and the amount of physical labor less and less.

What followed is that over half of China's population now has hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia, overweight, or abdominal obesity; the incidence of malignant tumors is rising daily. The incidence of anxiety and depression is exploding. The epidemiological spectrum has changed markedly, and lifestyle-related diseases now account for the bulk of the human disease burden.

I had originally planned to give up the vegetable plot I rent in Beijing, but on the way back from my hometown, my wife and I agreed that I could not give it up. Not only should I keep it, but I should consider expanding the planting area. If I gave up the lease, our physical labor would decrease and we would lose the chance to exercise.

On the day we returned to Beijing from the countryside, after handling various affairs, I went to the vegetable plot and worked for over two hours, breaking into sweat after sweat. Back from the plot, I watered dozens of potted plants on my balcony, until I was soaked through. But after labor, body and mind are joyful.

I also discussed with my wife and son that our family will henceforth follow the family tradition, eating mainly a light vegetarian diet. While increasing physical labor, we will reduce high-salt, high-fat, and high-protein foods, keeping caloric intake in balance with expenditure. To lose weight, we should even periodically let intake fall below expenditure.

I hope that by adjusting our lifestyle we can avoid disease, and that the medical skills I have learned will ideally be of no use to my own family.

Even regarding where I will practice medicine in the future, I prefer a township health center in some poor rural corner to other places. I do not wish to become a famous physician known the world over; I only hope to safeguard the health of a group of familiar villagers at some township health center.

The core of medical care is trust. Mutual trust between doctor and patient is the best guarantee of efficacy, yet trust is now generally lacking between them. So the best way for a doctor to practice is to provide care in an acquaintance society. Treating patients in an acquaintance society makes communication easier, doctor-patient conflicts far fewer, and the sense of achievement from healing much greater.

My ideal life is to grow some crops and ornamental plants myself, treat familiar villagers, read books, study medicine intently, and write something every day. A few achievements in this life would be nice, but none would be fine too.

Two years from now, after I graduate from my current medical school, I intend to live this life.

I have always kept a measured distance from the world: too deep an immersion makes it hard not to be stained by society's dye vat; too deep a withdrawal easily pushes one to extremes. So I choose a middle-way attitude to life.

Though I love studying medicine, I dislike injections and pills; I hope I never have to rely on them to maintain my health, but instead use the medical knowledge I have learned to prevent disease before it arises.