This Day Last Year, I Walked Disheveled into the Gaokao Exam Hall

June 6, 2025 was the last day before that year's gaokao. After breakfast that day, my father and I went to my mother's grave to pay our respects, telling her that the next day her 46-year-old son would once again walk into the exam hall to take the national college entrance examination.

The week before (May 30), the Beijing High People's Court sent me a "Civil Judgment" ruling that I had won a traffic-accident civil dispute lawsuit. This case was heard three times—by the Beijing Haidian Court, the Beijing Financial Court, and the Beijing High People's Court—and I won every time.

When I brought this lawsuit, I was more or less driven by righteous indignation. Under Beijing's previous adjudicative rules, I would have been ruled to lose it. The Beijing lawyers, police officers, and judge friends I consulted in those days all told me I was bound to lose; law firms even refused to take my case.

But I wanted to change this unfair adjudicative rule, so I spent nearly a month self-studying the relevant law and wrote a defense brief of 42 pages. Perhaps because the brief's logic was too rigorous, I won handily at first instance. The insurance company that had sued me was not satisfied and appealed twice to higher courts; still I won.

Under China's system of like-cases-like-judgments, a case decided by the Beijing High People's Court becomes guiding precedent in the Beijing area. So this lawsuit thoroughly rewrote Beijing's previous adjudicative rule. This was not just my personal victory: from now on, in traffic-accident disputes in Beijing, the rights of the disadvantaged party will be protected by law.

Several of my friends who studied law were quite surprised, because the case they thought I was bound to lose had been won by a legal novice who refused to be cowed. But after reading the defense briefs I wrote in the first, second, and retrial proceedings, they were convinced. Two judge friends joked with me that if one day I tired of medicine and switched to law, I would become a very successful lawyer.

At the time I was rather smug, so when I went home to sit the gaokao I mentioned this to my father at my mother's grave. Unexpectedly, instead of agreeing with me, he lectured me not to bully others on the strength of my cleverness.

My father in his youth was half a judge in our village; our home was the village dispute-resolution center, and quarreling villagers often came to our house for him to judge fairly. So he has always maintained an attitude of fairness and justice in everything. He believed that since the previous adjudicative rules had existed for so many years, they must have their reasons, and he reminded me to put myself in the other side's shoes.

That talk calmed me down. In that moment I genuinely admired my father's family upbringing. Even though the Beijing courts had ruled his own son the winner, he still reminded him to consider things from the other side's perspective. By this token, though my father is old and even showed some early symptoms of Alzheimer's two years ago, his thinking and judgment remain sound.

Because of that conversation, in the subsequent medical-cost claim lawsuit with this insurance company, I conceded a step, and the two sides finally settled.

But unfortunately, less than an hour after that conversation ended, my father fell and suffered a comminuted fracture requiring surgery. With the gaokao the next day, I learned what it means for joy to turn to sorrow. I carried my father to the hospital and found my junior fellow apprentice, an orthopedic surgeon at my hometown hospital, to operate on him.

The weather in Hubei that day was stiflingly close. Carrying my father up and down the hospital corridors, I was not only drenched in sweat but aching all over. My father groaned uncontrollably with pain, and I stayed up all night with him.

The next morning I downed two cups of coffee to wake myself and walked to the exam hall, leaving my father in the care of my junior fellow apprentice and my sister. After finishing the day's exam I returned to the hospital to sign the operative consent form. For those three days, straight after each exam I went to the hospital to care for him.

My life in those few days was a microcosm of middle age. As the mainstay of family and society, we middle-aged people must shoulder all kinds of burdens and press on under their weight. Middle-aged life has its gains and losses; you must manage your emotions well. Only amid all the shocks of life, keeping joy and sorrow in measure and unmoved by favor or disgrace, can one continue down the road of one's ideals amid a life strewn with chaos. If these wretched trivialities of daily life can trip us up, we are not strong enough to hold to our idealism, and will be drowned in the realities of life.

Once the gaokao ended, I had to prepare for the upcoming full-time study. Fortunately my father recovered quickly, removing some of my worries. In July and August of last year I attended some exchange events on international trade and AI technology, learned some new techniques, set my work direction and working model for the next few years, and after a few more days of summer travel with my family, I reported to school in September.

Returning to campus approaching fifty seemed incredible not only to many around me but, at the very beginning, to myself. Many friends suspected I would be out of school within two months; when the first semester ended, some teachers and classmates also asked me: will you be back next semester?

But imperceptibly, my first academic year at school is about to end. As I study, I have grown fonder of this way of life. This past year, family life, work, study, and even hobbies—not a single one was neglected. My years-long daily writing routine also continued without interruption.

Since returning to campus I have not lost anything but gained a great deal. This academic year I have solidly learned a great deal: I finished important foundational preclinical courses such as anatomy, physiology, histology and embryology, pathogenic microbiology, medical immunology, biochemistry, pathology, and medical biology; I did many experiments at school, and am even trying my hand at research. My horizons have broadened considerably, and some of the new knowledge I have acquired has even spawned valuable business ideas.

I think that after I graduate I will go further than I am now, whether in business or in medicine. I have long admired some of the West's "gentleman scientists," who are financially independent and pursue research purely out of interest. Charles Darwin, the author of the theory of evolution, was one such gentleman scientist.

This semester, studying biochemistry, we learned the story of the British biochemist Peter Mitchell. This fellow, too, began independent cross-disciplinary research in middle age. He had been studying bacterial metabolism; at 41, after a gastrectomy for a duodenal ulcer, he had to resign his teaching post and retire to the countryside to recuperate. He did not give up scientific work; his interests simply turned to a new field.

At a country estate in Bodmin, Cornwall—the Glynn Research Laboratories—together with an assistant he opened a brand-new chapter of independent research. He later published a paper in Nature titled "The role of osmotic coupling in oxidative and photosynthetic phosphorylation," formally proposing the chemiosmotic theory, and went on to win the Nobel Prize for it.

I like this strongly individualistic fellow and envy him for having an independent lab in the countryside; perhaps one day I too will rig up such a lab. When he first proposed his new theory he was ridiculed by many in the field, who mocked him as a "proton mystic." Only later, as more and more studies confirmed his theory, did the scientific community recognize his value.

Peter Mitchell's ordeal closely resembles that of Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics. When Mendel proposed his laws of inheritance, no one paid him any attention; he was even dismissed as a laughingstock by some of the most authoritative scientists of Switzerland at the time. This is understandable: after all, most people in society are conservative, and innovative findings look freaks when they first appear; humankind needs time to understand these freaks.

In my youth I was forced to give up the medical research I loved and go into business to support my family; for a while I felt it shameful that I had gone into trade. But now I can gradually look at this more calmly: precisely because of this ordeal, today I enjoy more freedom of choice than the average person—and conducting medical research also requires a material base.

I have always been an energetic fellow, and to this day I retain the courage to question and a curious mind. These two make it impossible for me to stop exploring; the restrained lifestyle I have cultivated over the years has also saved me much trouble and shielded me from many outside distractions. I think I can spend the second half of my life doing things my own way.

This semester, one of my teachers in our class was born the same year as me; she often laments that she is old. Each time I hear that I want to talk heart-to-heart and urge her to be positive and optimistic. We are not old yet. Some senior physicians I know are still seeing patients in their nineties; by that measure, we can still work for more than fifty years. In those fifty-plus years I can still write many articles and do quite a bit of research.

Life always has its gains and losses, its sorrows and joys, its wretched moments and its easy stretches. As long as one can keep confidence and vitality, any difficulty can be overcome, and no age is too late.