My Two Attempts at Graduate School

Deciding to take the graduate-school entrance exam was my first real awakening.

Almost ten years have passed.

It is exam season again. Looking back on that feeling, I think it was a little like Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence, the middle-aged stockbroker who leaves his family to learn painting and disappears into another life. I imagine he had the same question I did:

What do I want to do?

Before I decided to take the exam, I had spent twenty-two youthful years without ever asking that question. I did not even have the awareness that I should ask it. My life ran along a closed track like a puppet following a set program: attend a key high school, study in an advanced class for three years, choose a university major by scores, drift through four years of college, skip classes, date very little, and suddenly arrive at graduation.

I remember the moment clearly. It was the last winter holiday, in my childhood bed on a damp southern morning: no heating, an electric blanket, thermal underwear, and cold that still reached the bone. I asked myself my first serious question:

What the hell am I going to do next?

I was the only person in my class attempting what Chinese students call the “three crossings”: a different city, a different university, and a different discipline. My undergraduate major was Electronic Information Science and Technology—circuit boards, essentially. But I applied for Broadcast and Television Journalism at the Communication University of China. The reason was simple and ridiculous: I had fallen in love with radio, especially midnight call-in shows. In a rush of enthusiasm, I thought graduate school would let me make a leap. One day I would sit on the other side of the microphone, with my own magnetic voice…

Yes, friends who know me will probably laugh. Beyond unlikely, it was absurd, given my Mandarin.

Still, I prepared for more than half a year and passed the written exam. With an English level that had never passed CET-6, and a mountain of literature, history, and journalism materials to cover, I am still impressed with myself. My mother never worried about my exams.

I went to Beijing for the interview round, sharing a partitioned room near campus with another applicant. Ten years ago, I had already seen the crowds and bustle of the Batong and Line 1 subway in the early morning.

But there was no fairytale ending. The story turned sharply.

The interview went well, but my written score was too low. I missed admission by one place in the final ranking. That is another scene I will never forget. In June 2008, at a shabby internet café across the street from school because its connection was faster, I clicked to check the result. Red Microsoft YaHei text appeared on the screen. My previously unbroken run of exam success ended there.

After working for a year, I could not let it go. I went to Beijing again to prepare full-time. Even then there was no happy ending.

This time was worse: I did not even pass the written exam.

…

Those were my two attempts at graduate school.

Yes, my first awakening went out like that.

I value the experience enough that I have told the story to many friends. Setbacks make us grow, and they make life more meaningful. What we should fear is a whole life without ever having such an awakening.

Li Xiaolai says a person changes every seven years.

So what will we do next?