The Generation Born in the 1970s Who Pushed Themselves Too Hard

When my son was in junior high, a classmate lived in the neighborhood next door. The boy got on well with my son, and his mother became close with my wife. The boy was always rather morose; from early childhood he was under great pressure and enrolled in many tutoring classes. His parents are my contemporaries—we were all born in the 1970s and all fought our way from the countryside to the city through much hardship. Growing up, our generation demanded too much of ourselves, and so in raising our children we have, in fact, pushed too hard.

Several times I saw this boy trudging along with a heavy schoolbag, sometimes storming angrily from one tutoring class to another, a look of total world-weariness on his face. His parents had signed him up for many classes, holding the belief that only by enduring the bitterest bitterness can one become a superior person; they wanted their child to fight and achieve as they had.

This may be a common ailment of parents in Haidian District. There is a saying online that Haidian has no nightlife, because parents and children are all busy studying. Haidian gathers China’s densest concentration of highly educated people; not only do they study hard themselves, they drive their children to study hard too. Competition among Haidian’s primary and secondary students may be the fiercest in the nation, because their parents were the last generation’s “grinders.”

I partly agree. My son went to kindergarten through high school in Haidian; before the pandemic our home was a gathering place for his classmates. Our tiny apartment was often packed with children. I was glad they liked our home and would happily trot off to the market to buy treats for them.

The children came to my house perhaps because it was far more relaxed than theirs: here they could play games freely and speak without constraint. My wife and I are parents with no airs, never lecturing with a stern face. One of my son’s junior-high classmates came to our house every evening for a while to do homework. His home was a distance away, a twenty- or thirty-minute bus ride, so around nine each evening I would urge him home, fearing his parents would worry.

Only later did I learn that after leaving my house he still did not go home, but went to KFC to do his homework, not returning until very late, because his home suffocated him—his parents were too harsh, scolding him at every turn, making him live without ease. By the time I learned this, the boy had already graduated junior high. I felt guilty: had I known, I would not have hurried him home; at least while doing homework with my son he was not alone.

Because of my profession, I also have some influence among my son’s classmates’ parents. Some came to me for treatment, others for counseling about their children’s psychological problems, and so I knew some of these children were depressed. These parents themselves also have anxiety and depression; I see no ease on them. They have lived such tense lives, and now they pass that tension and that tense lifestyle on to the next generation.

Raised in the exam-oriented system, this generation found the brutal competition of their student years a lifelong nightmare, yet they have been tamed by it. Though their own upbringing was anything but comfortable, they expect their descendants to grind away as they did, because they were instilled with the belief: if you don’t study hard and get into a good university, your future will be miserable. This is the warning I heard from teachers and parents throughout secondary school; they used fear to drive us.

So many of us 1970s children never escape this shadow, convinced that without hard study we cannot live well. I have a male cousin who played excellent basketball and drew well, but my uncle, who taught at university, dismissed it all; he told my cousin that all those talents count only if your exam scores are good—if your grades are bad, they are just flaws.

Anyone who went through education in our era should recognize this attitude. We obsessed over exam scores as if bewitched, treating the gaokao as the only road in life, one exam deciding a lifetime. Good scores and we were beaming; bad scores and we mourned as if bereaved. To me nothing is more absurd: because of this exam, so many people lost their hobbies and joys.

Many of our generation now are the backbone of society, and they try to impose their warped values on it. For instance, I have seen hosts on national media, my contemporaries, interview the Chinese-American Nobel laureate Samuel Ting and express a kind of special adoration for his lifestyle, his scholarship, and some of his life views, urging everyone to emulate him.

I bear no grudge against Professor Ting and admire his achievements and character. But I do not think others need to imitate him, nor that he should become a new moral benchmark. I even think that if people live happily on their own, they may well be indifferent to his way of life. Professor Ting and I are cut from the same cloth—we like research, and politely speaking we are so-called cultured people. But should cultured people be society’s benchmark and be idolized?

The answer is no. All beings are equal; cultured people are just one small group in society, no nobler than street vendors, and their lifestyle is not necessarily the best. Making them moral models is the old habit of 1970s people electing model students at school. In America, a waitress may refuse to marry a scientist; why? She thinks scientists are bookworms with no joie de vivre, and life with them is dull.

If we happen to love learning and research, let us study and research all our lives—that is our own affair—but we have no right to demand it of others, let alone to presume that our way of life is nobler than anyone else’s. In the living world, only humans are foolish enough to spend twenty or thirty years in school before going out to earn a living.

People are essentially no different from other animals; we all come to this world to live one life. To live is enough; making a living need not be so complicated. I find many less-educated people less miserable than the highly educated, because they lived relaxedly from childhood, experienced more joy, and have a positive felt life; it is the supposedly cultured who often live more repressed lives.

I am glad to see that the post-2000 generation has finally seen through their parents’ tricks. They now pursue quality of life rather than grinding as their parents taught them. Making one’s life easier and more comfortable is entirely above reproach. Some accuse them of being inferior to the previous generation; I think the opposite: they are saving their over-exerted parents—it’s just that the parents have not realized it. It was foolish enough for us to sacrifice our happiness chasing the tide of the times; why must our descendants be just like us?