Back in the U.S., I was a dorky geek. Almost no social life, few friends, but perfect grades. Gifted and Talented classes. SATs four years early. I was well on my way to becoming an introverted scholar-guy receiving an above-average salary for some technical job most people would find boring. I could justify my lack of social grace with “intelligence.”
Then I moved to China for school, and everyone had the exact same personality as me.
The Slap
At Yan An Middle School, one of the top schools in Shanghai, I was surrounded by people who were better at the thing I had built my entire identity around. The distinguishing trait that had made me special in the U.S. was the baseline in China. My self-esteem and my sense of self took the same hit simultaneously — because they were the same thing.
I tried to reclaim some “former glory,” to be who I “was.” Eventually I got tired of it. What I saw around me was a mass of people all optimizing for the same exam, and most of them were better at it than me. The choice was to keep competing on a track where I was average, or to start asking who I could be rather than who I had been.
What Got Stripped Away
It is here that everything I based my sense of self on was taken away. Left with nothing, I was forced to rediscover who I really am.
The realizations came in layers:
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Grades are shallow. I had never seen this clearly when grades were the currency I was rich in. Social dynamics mattered far more than I had admitted, and the education system’s single-minded focus on the Gao Kao was producing a kind of sophisticated emptiness.
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My interests were extrinsic. Despite my prior success in science and mathematics, I had never been intrinsically interested in these subjects. I had succeeded for the status that success in these fields brought me. The motivation was neediness wearing the costume of intellectual passion.
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Being stereotyped builds empathy. As a foreigner in China, I was considered second-class — privy to higher fees, lower status, and seemingly random rules. Walking into a group and instantly feeling left out, being seen as a dumb clown who paid his way in, hurts in a way that tints everything. But it also made me understand what it feels like from the other side.
Plato’s Cave
I was forcibly taken from the cave and thrust into the light. Eyes burning, stinging, seeing a reality I did not want. Yet this truth is liberating.
The comfortable identity — smart kid, good grades, heading for a respectable career — was a locally-optimal strategy. It worked in the environment that shaped it. Transplanting it into a different culture revealed that the strategy was environment-dependent, not identity-deep. The “intelligence” that felt like core identity was actually a reference-point artifact — I was special only relative to the sample I happened to grow up in.
University at Fudan did not fix this. Youth is quickly deceived only because it is quick to hope. The problems of the education system continued, the foreigners remained second-class, and the temple of knowledge I had imagined turned out to be more of the same single-mindedness, just pointed in a different direction.
What Remains
Sometimes I wonder where I would be if I had stayed in the U.S. But my time in China has become an inseparable part of who I am now. It is here that I realized how fragile an identity built on external metrics really is. It is here that the question shifted from “what am I good at?” to “who am I when I am not good at anything?”
That question has no comfortable answer. But it feels more right than the old one. Travel can be genuine exposure therapy for this kind of identity wound — forcing the nervous system to learn through direct experience that you are capable without the markers you lost. But it can also become avoidance if you never bring the learning home.
References:
- David Jiang: China’s Education System Made Me an Individual — ChinaSmack Diaspora