No Effort Is Ever Wasted; the Future Only Gets Better
Over the past few days I have heard from many readers. Some offered help with my gaokao review; others urged me not to waste precious time retaking the exam and studying medicine. I am very grateful for everyone's concern. Some patients worried whether my going back to school would affect the help I give them. I am writing today to answer these points one by one.
First, my resolve to retake the gaokao is firm and will not waver. I hope no friend will spend my time trying to talk me out of it. To my uncle-by-apprenticeship and old classmates, my deciding only now is already too late; I should have taken the exam three years ago. Meanwhile, my high-school principal, teachers, and classmates who now teach high school—none of them doubted I could get in, even though my goal is only a junior college.
Many teachers and old classmates think I could pass after reviewing two or three months, let alone a year and a half. I appreciate their confidence; perhaps my high-school grades were so outstanding that they have formed an illusion. I myself think I still need to study hard to get into a junior college. My wife (also my high-school classmate) and some classmates even think I could aim for a bachelor's degree; of course I think they overestimate me. The cutoff for medical bachelor's programs is well above the general bachelor's line, so it is not easy. I do not aspire to a bachelor's; I will just try to score a bit higher. If by sheer luck I can get into a medical bachelor's, I will study integrated Chinese-Western clinical medicine.
Cancer cannot be treated best with TCM alone or Western medicine alone. So my goal is to integrate TCM, Western medicine, and biology, always focusing on cancer. I have adjusted this public account accordingly: in future I will not limit myself to researching TCM anti-cancer therapy, but will broadly learn about cancer-related TCM, Western medicine, and biology, and spread science about cancer through this account and my personal website. Learning and exploring the life sciences requires long accumulation; I believe that five, ten, or twenty years from now, still working in this field, I will have gained more.
My long-standing wish is to sit the integrated Chinese-Western medicine physician exam, which would give me prescribing rights in both systems. Under current policy, to sit that exam one must study TCM or integrated Chinese-Western clinical medicine. A TCM junior-college graduate who passes the assistant-physician exam and works two years may apply for the integrated Chinese-Western licensed physician exam; an integrated Chinese-Western clinical bachelor's graduate may take it after one year of work. So a TCM junior-college degree or an integrated Chinese-Western clinical bachelor's is my target; the most realistic and easiest route is the TCM junior college, then minoring in clinical medicine once on campus. I have a clear plan for the next few years.
Some long-time readers worried about my income once I study full-time. I have to say, these are true fans who have my best interests at heart. Thank you very much! Income is not a problem for me. This public account I run earns a bit of advertising revenue from Tencent every month—ads are automatically placed at the end of my articles—and many readers tip my writing, so I earn five or six thousand yuan a month, and the account's income is still growing steadily each year.
This year I have also begun allowing some journals and magazines to publish my articles, for which they pay a small honorarium. These sums are not large, but together they already approach the income of an ordinary doctor at a county hospital. So if I study full-time and keep writing, there will be no income problem. I am one of the rare medical learners who can survive without clinical practice; this is the payoff for years of writing. As the saying goes, heaven rewards the diligent, and no effort is wasted; someone as hardworking as me will not go hungry. Few medical learners in China write every day as I do, so it is no surprise that I can make a living through medical science communication. I would even love to do only science communication and no clinical work for the rest of my life, because clinical work is truly grueling.
Our family's expenses are modest. My wife teaches at a school with a stable income; we have no family debt, so my contribution is enough to fulfill my family responsibilities. I went into business early and did reasonably well; before thirty I had solved the housing problem in Beijing (thank goodness Beijing prices had not yet risen to today's absurd levels). Once housing is solved in Beijing, living costs are actually not high—even cheaper than in some eighteenth-tier cities. So I have no economic worries and can study at school in peace; my friends need not worry about me.
Darwin, who proposed evolution, and his cousin Galton, who founded eugenics, both inherited fortunes that let them live as gentleman scientists pursuing their interests. I am not as lucky as they were, but through my own efforts I have solved the problem of survival and can spend my life as a freelancer doing cancer research. That is also my pursuit for the rest of my life; I have no retirement plan. Telling me to stop my research would be worse than killing me. My remaining years may well stretch beyond forty, so I no longer rush at anything.
Reviewing middle- and high-school math, physics, chemistry, and biology lately has brought back a long-missed joy. I spent just over three days reviewing junior-high biology; junior-high math, physics, and chemistry can be done in a week to ten days, and I can basically solve the problems. This is not because I am especially gifted; it is because junior-high material is so simple for adults that picking it up is not hard.
My learning ability has always been strong, and I am good at finding the best learning resources. Junior-high math, physics, chemistry, and biology contain foundational material that bridges into high school; those of us who left school twenty-plus years ago must realistically start with junior-high material. Once we clear away the conceptual obstacles, high-school material becomes easier. I estimate I can reconnect the knowledge chains of the six subjects—Chinese, math, English, physics, chemistry, biology—in about half a year.
My method is: watch videos + review knowledge checklists + read textbooks + drill problems. My review logic is clear. For biology—a subject my generation barely took seriously—I watch teaching videos. There are many excellent ones on Bilibili; I watched a 32-lesson junior-high biology course by a teacher named Lin Xu, which basically reconnected my junior-high biology chain. Junior-high math, physics, and chemistry are relatively easy, so I skipped videos as too time-consuming and just used workbooks like Illustrated Quick-Memorization of Junior-High Math, Physics, and Chemistry—"mind map + knowledge checklist" style—to reconnect the chains. Chinese and English are the easiest for me; I need only a light review.
For high-school content, I first read through the knowledge checklist, not spending too much energy on points I already know well, and for points I have grown rusty on, I read textbooks and videos and drill related problems. This reconnects the high-school chains fastest; once the chains are in place, I repeatedly drill past gaokao papers. Every wrong question signals a problem with the relevant concept, and I go back and review that concept. This approach is clear in logic, focused, actionable, and efficient.
Because the score I need is not high, nailing the basic points gets me into the school I want. This review method saves the most time, so over the coming year and a half I can balance work, gardening, and preparation. The impact on my work and life is basically negligible.
Through this process I have also realized I should long ago have settled down to relearn the basics of biology and chemistry. Over the past few years, reading foreign medical literature, I have struggled with half-understood biochemical terms; in fact, many of these terms come straight out of junior- and senior-high textbooks. This is not just my problem: before I reviewed junior-high biology, I did not understand the term "plant meristematic zone"; I asked a biology postdoc, and he had forgotten too. After reviewing junior-high biology, I learned that the meristematic zone refers to the root tips and shoot tips of plants. As Confucius said, reviewing the old to know the new—he was not deceiving me.
I do need to concentrate time and energy on review now, but I have no more hesitation about this decision. A person without foresight must have near-term worries. A few years of hardship now makes the road ahead much easier and lets me help patients more. Those who set long-term goals must not rush for quick success, nor take shortcuts; every shortcut plants hidden trouble for the future. Some people cause huge social controversy over minor flaws in a paper, let alone anything else.
To make an academic life more meaningful, steady, diligent study is the best way. Past effort is not wasted when setbacks come; the rewards I receive today are proof. Today's effort will not be wasted either. I believe I will one day be very grateful to the relatives and friends who led me to this decision, and grateful to myself for not idling away these anxious, impatient times. One should not waste even a second on irrecoverable losses; standing up and walking on decisively is the best respect for time.