Some Reflections on Leaving Beijing

I have always insisted that I am a country person, but I have overlooked the fact that I have lived in Beijing for nearly thirty years. Thirty years is long enough to change many things before one even notices.

Beijing is China's capital, a city highly developed in economy, culture, and medical care. After living in Beijing a long time, the easiest illusion is that all this is ordinary. But in fact, leave Beijing and spend some time at the real grassroots level, and you will find that the social resources Beijingers enjoy are far beyond what ordinary people at the grassroots can access.

Once the secretary-general of a prefecture-level city Party committee told me: "In terms of the medical care you enjoy, people like you living in Beijing are better off than we secretaries of prefecture-level city Party committees." At the time we were discussing the course of his wife's gallbladder cancer; indeed, if she had lived in Beijing, her gallbladder cancer would probably have been screened out at an early stage.

I am an outsider who drifted to Beijing and eventually settled as a "new Beijinger"; my whole family now has Beijing household registration. I have a small home in Beijing; although it cannot be as large as homes in second- and third-tier cities, it is enough for us. We enjoy Beijing's convenient transport and its high-quality medical services. As for me, over the past twenty-plus years I have spent at least half my time in the National Library, also enjoying Beijing's excellent cultural and educational resources.

Since last September I have been studying in a third- or fourth-tier city; in the medical field this kind of study counts as advanced training. Sometimes I joke with my wife that in ancient times this would have amounted to being exiled. For a while at the start I really did find it hard to adjust. For example, in Beijing public toilets all have individual cubicles, while our school's toilets do not. Used to Beijing's public restrooms, I found it hard to adapt at once to these open-style ones.

Likewise, studying in the National Library and studying at our school feel very different. Readers at the National Library are extremely civil; there is no noise and no smoking. But at our school I have suffered a great deal from secondhand smoke: dormitory corridors and restrooms are full of smoking college students.

The young readers I saw at the National Library were basically from the nearby 985 or 211 universities, or from key high schools such as the High School Affiliated to Renmin University, the Capital Normal University High School, and the High School Affiliated to Beijing Institute of Technology. These young people are generally eager to learn and highly self-disciplined. Such an agglomeration of outstanding talent is hard to see anywhere else in China. So going from such a place to a group with very weak self-discipline, I did not fully adjust either.

From high school on I have been a very self-disciplined and hardworking student, and most of the time I was class monitor and a leading student in the school student union and Youth League committee. As a competition-track student in the Huanggang region of Hubei, we were also frequently gathered for intensive competition training. So overall, the environments I came from were really quite good, and most of my classmates were outstanding; today they are all in leading positions in their fields.

People like us may barely count as social elites, but unlike elites born into privilege, we grew up in harsh rural areas and have truly experienced grassroots, ordinary people's life firsthand. We still have countless ties to our rural hometowns, and most of our parents still live in the countryside.

So, as for myself, I have a heartfelt hope that living conditions and health-care standards in China's rural areas can also rise to a satisfactory level, so that our loved ones may live better. To be realistic, rural living standards and medical care have improved greatly compared with the past. It is just that, as government documents often put it, "the people's ever-growing expectations for a better life"—we are always still somewhat dissatisfied with the status quo at the grassroots.

This past semester-plus, studying at our school, I have seen that our school's main mission is training students from the grassroots who will return to the grassroots to work as doctors and nurses. Living with them over time, I have gradually seen a fact: to raise the level of grassroots medical care, what is most lacking is outstanding talent. The highly self-disciplined top students gathered at the National Library basically will never return to the grassroots; those who ultimately serve the grassroots people in grassroots health institutions can only be graduates of schools like ours.

We cannot expect medical students at every level to become morally and professionally elite talents. At first I was deeply pained to see some medical students around me smoking, drinking heavily, and habitually skipping class, but now I am gradually coming to accept all this.

Last week, a major-course teacher of ours—born in the 1970s like me—told me in conversation that the quality of students in recent cohorts at our school had improved considerably, because the admissions cutoff scores had risen; earlier students had been of much lower quality, she said, and she felt gratified. Hearing her remarks, I felt mixed emotions, because a cohort of children whom I found rather lacking was, in the eyes of the school's senior teachers, noticeably better than previous ones. Her words healed my sense of loss and brought me back to reality.

People born in the 1970s carry a generational stamp mocked as a love of "grand narratives." If interpreted charitably, we can say with a straight face that we have a stronger sense of social responsibility. We grew up in material deprivation; most of my peers, when at school, carried grain and pickled vegetables on their backs every week and walked over mountains to class. At school they exchanged grain for meal tickets, bought rice from the canteen, and ate it with pickles brought from home. Some born in the early 1970s could not even get enough to eat at school. An entire generation had a strong desire to change the status quo, so we care about society's overall development—this is what is mocked as the so-called "grand narrative."

Social development has its own laws; high-quality resources always tend to concentrate in developed regions, and the overall living standards of people in backward areas cannot rise overnight. However much an individual may wish to change this, it is like trying to stop a chariot with a mantis arm. We can only hope that as society progresses, this regional imbalance will one day be further improved.