The Dream of Saclay
Because my child wants to major in mathematics, I learned of Paris-Saclay University-the university ranked first in the world for mathematics. (Actually, the one truly ranked first should be the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, but ENS is too small in scale and does not hold an advantage in the rankings.)
Paris is the undisputed world capital of mathematics. France has many great masters of mathematics, most of whom are concentrated in the city of Paris. The mathematics programs at Paris Descartes (Paris V), Paris Diderot (Paris VII), Paris-Sud (Paris XI) and Paris VI are all very strong; moreover, because higher education at French public universities emphasizes balanced and shared resources, professors move frequently among these universities.
I very much hope to send my son to Paris to study mathematics. I consulted the study-abroad center at Beijing Foreign Studies University and learned that, given my son's grades, he could be admitted to Paris-Saclay quite easily. But studying in Paris requires learning French, and my son has no gift for languages; the pressure of learning yet another foreign language is heavy, so up to now he is still not very willing to study in Paris.
Studying abroad in Paris is probably also the cheapest option: the university charges no tuition, and the annual registration fee is only a few hundred euros. Once registered as a student, one receives many concessions-for example, student fares on transport. When a student rents housing in Paris, the French government gives a housing subsidy; the benefits available to local students are also available to international students. Studying in France, the total annual expenses may come to only about 100,000 RMB. Many international students can work and study from their second year onward, so the financial burden on the family is very light. Some international students in Paris earn a good deal from part-time work; during their university years, relying on their own income, they can even travel all over Europe.
Compared with fiercely competitive countries like China and the United States, the pace of life in France is much slower. Studying mathematics in Paris, one can pursue the research one likes more peacefully, undisturbed by worldly society. Paris has as many as 500-some mathematics professors, among them quite a few Fields Medal winners (the Nobel Prize of mathematics)-the most of any city in the world.
Three generations of my family have all had a little aptitude for mathematics, and all have loved it. My father used to be an accountant; my older brother now teaches English-math (a teacher who teaches mathematics entirely in English). In my own high school days, mathematics and physics were my best subjects; I often scored full marks, and in my second year of high school, with no one to guide me, I derived the inclusion-exclusion principle on my own. After my son entered high school, he became so fascinated by mathematics and physics that it bordered on obsession; he entered the strong-foundation class for math and physics and taught himself university-level mathematics and physics. In this respect, we have to believe in the power of genes.
But I know very well that none of us is the brightest kind of person. In my middle-school and university days, I met many people far smarter than I. A classmate of mine at university had an IQ that left me awestruck; when I played Chinese chess with him, even after letting me have several pieces, I still could not beat him. Before I knew him I was a little conceited about my intelligence; after knowing him, I felt deeply discouraged. Among countless classmates, he was also the one who most enjoyed associating with me. Perhaps because we were both rather odd and rebellious, we had some common ground. At that time I shaved my head bald while he wore shoulder-length hair; our shared goal was to work hard to drop out and study on our own. I did drop out and went to study on my own at the National Library; I don't know whether he dropped out after I left.
I have studied the life histories of quite a few mathematicians, and after learning about the IQ and talent of some of them, I also felt discouraged. My classmate, though clever, was not the very smartest person. People like us-not to mention comparison with the mathematical geniuses of Europe and America-even when compared with Chinese-American mathematical geniuses such as Terence Tao, Shing-Tung Yau, Xiao Gang and Xu Chenyang, our IQ lags far behind. As for a prodigy like the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, he is simply beyond our reach-even a giant like Terence Tao, a Fields Medalist, cannot quite understand Mochizuki's papers; it is said that currently fewer than 50 people in the world can understand what he is writing about.
On top of that, mathematics education in our country can only be regarded as third-rate in the world. The first-tier mathematical powers are France, Russia and the United States; the second-tier are countries like Germany and Japan; China can barely enter the third tier. Apart from Hong Kong, which produced the Fields Medalist Shing-Tung Yau, no one in mainland China or Taiwan has yet won a Fields Medal.
So I very much doubt whether my child can become a fine mathematician. Of course, if we relax the standard and also count as mathematicians those who obtain a mathematics doctorate and eventually teach mathematics at a university, then perhaps he might become one.
But at over forty, I have no strong desire to achieve fame and success. If God grants us a certain talent and we love to delve into it, we may indeed become a master in some field; if we lack both of these, forcing it on ourselves is not only unhelpful but will even make a laughingstock of us. Yet even if we cannot become masters, we still have the right to love a discipline, even to love it for a lifetime, and immerse ourselves in the joy of studying it. I believe that the rarest thing in a person's whole life is to live this kind of immersive life out of love.
So if I were only eighteen now, and my parents could support me to study in Paris, perhaps I really would go to study there. There, reading books, studying and thinking, finding a place to sit or lie down under the shade of the avenues or on the lawn and thinking deeply for half a day or a whole day-that must be an immensely enjoyable thing.
In my high school days I loved most those problems and books that could inspire deep thinking. The math teachers at our school had limited ability; there were many problems they themselves could not solve, so whenever I encountered an especially difficult problem, I would immerse myself in it and spend days, forgetting to eat and sleep, thinking about how to solve it. In high school I also liked reading philosophy books; if a certain book caught my interest, I would spend several days carefully reading and thinking, refusing to stop until I had read it through. Thinking back now, how happy the life I led then was. I must thank my teachers; they gave me a great deal of freedom, allowing me to skip classes and problem drills and arrange my own study.
I must also thank myself: at that age I could already defy exam-oriented education, take neither advancement nor employment seriously, and follow my own way. To live in this world without enough boldness, one cannot withstand vulgar convention and quietly persist in the cause one loves. Throughout his high-school years, my child was much like I was back then-following his own way, not caring about exam-oriented education, and only willing to immerse himself in deep learning. I did not interfere with him much, because what he was doing was exactly what I myself had done back then; since I had experienced incomparable joy through deep learning, I could of course understand what he was doing.
Only today he is more drawn to American education-or rather, he is daunted by learning languages. After all, a genius like the mathematician Xiao Gang is rare: he learned English and nearly memorized an entire English dictionary, and after studying French for only two weeks he could already converse with people. Such geniuses are rarely encountered; all we can do is admire them to the ground. Most great mathematicians are such geniuses, because mathematics is the product of the human intellect at its peak.
Mathematicians are perhaps the purest people in this world. Immersed in scholarly research, indifferent to fame and gain, many have sat on the cold bench for a lifetime; their personalities seem eccentric to outsiders. Take a mathematician like Alexander Grothendieck: he even refused to go and accept the Fields Medal awarded to him, and he also furiously berated the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when it awarded him the Crafoord Prize. After the age of 42, he suddenly withdrew from the world and moved to a remote little village to live the life of a hermit.
It is precisely because of these oddballs in the mathematical world that I am especially fond of mathematicians. They are clever and pure, truly leaping beyond the three realms, no longer living the squalid scramble of ordinary mortals in the dusty world. Their rich inner world enables them to withstand any vulgar convention-as everyone knows, vulgar convention breeds too many worries. In Paris, France, there is a group of just such people; discussing mathematics with these interesting people is truly a fascinating life experience.
If I had not devoted myself to medicine, I think my two most likely paths would have been: first, to become one of these mathematicians, immersed in thought all day long; second, to become a monk and immerse myself in another kind of thinking. But it is also fine that I have studied medicine. After studying medicine, I can not only help a few lucky patients relieve their suffering (the suffering of most patients I cannot relieve, because my intelligence and professional level are insufficient), but also, in my spare time, ponder difficult medical problems and be a happy amateur scientist.
I envy my son for having the chance to study mathematics and pursue such a pure calling. He was born into a middle-class family; if he lives frugally all his life, he can entirely rely on inheriting his parents' estate and live as a gentleman scientist, just like Darwin. (Darwin, too, in his middle age, like the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, moved to a remote village and immersed himself in the study of climbing plants.)
If my son is willing to spend his whole life doing pure mathematics research, I do not mind him being a NEET who lives off his parents. I would not even mind my child wandering for a lifetime in a mathematical capital like Paris, living a life either poor or not-so-poor. A human life is both short and long; to find a calling into which one is willing to immerse oneself-whether or not one ultimately achieves anything-will be a very happy thing. Too many people bustle about for a lifetime yet never experience this kind of extreme and lasting joy.
Unlike most parents, who worry about their children's future employment, what I worry about is that one day my child will lose interest and lose the thirst for knowledge. Because I know that once a person loses these, this life is extremely likely to sink into worldliness, unable to extricate himself. Worldliness is not necessarily bad, but a life consisting only of eating, drinking, voiding and sleeping is obviously not enough.