In just a few hours, the 2009 gaokao will begin.
It suddenly feels a little distant from me now. Junior year is almost over, and in less than a year we will be leaving school and stepping into the workplace. Still, we all came through the gaokao once, too.
A classmate’s younger sister called just now. She said she wanted to listen to a song, probably because the pressure was getting to her and she needed to relax a bit. The song she wanted was Jay Chou’s “End of the World.” The end of the world—does it really have to sound that dramatic? Or maybe it is supposed to mean surviving a disaster and starting over afterward.
Either way, I hope she can perform well in the exams that begin in a few hours.
I remember once thinking that I would never forget what the gaokao felt like. But now, none of us can really remember the order of the subjects anymore. We cannot remember how long each exam lasted. The things we once believed would be carved into memory seem to have faded after all.
Maybe for people who did not succeed in the expected way, the gaokao becomes a painful memory. For me, it was not exactly painful. I have always seen it more as a bridge to university. It may have been a narrow bridge that pushed many people off along the way, but at least I was somewhere near the edge and managed to get across.
So what can the gaokao really represent?
Not much, perhaps.
At university, there is another kind of pressure. It comes from all directions, and sometimes it is even heavier than the single, concentrated pressure of the gaokao. So the effort still has to continue, only now everything depends more on yourself.
That means there is still no reason to give up.
Another gaokao season has arrived. For some people, the pressure will soon be over, at least for the moment. As for me, I am still working hard, still fighting for my own goals.
Keep going.