The original text was published on January 1, 2021
It snowed, heavy snow mixed with strong winds, leaving only a blanket of white between heaven and earth.
On this day, I attended the Introduction to Computational Thinking course with my friend Zuo Zuo. Introduction to Computational Thinking is our major course, and the other students are studying diligently; a student in front is furiously writing in her notebook, trying to jot down every word from the PPT. However, this class is a breeze for my friend and me—I've learned most of this stuff nearly ten years ago and don’t need to listen, while my friend is nonchalant about any class, including this one.
While scrolling through our phones, we quickly got bored. So, we opened Bilibili, followed each other, and scrolled through each other's updates. At that moment, he came across a photo: a group picture of me and the Bilibili UP "True·Phoenix Dance in the Sky."
He exclaimed, "You actually met Meng Feng (note: the nickname for 'True·Phoenix Dance in the Sky')?"
I was also surprised, "You also do chemistry?"
He then said he used to compete in chemistry competitions and persuaded several classmates to join the chemistry major, excitedly describing how they endured the iron fist of competition. If he isn’t boasting, then he has at least created three fellow competitors.
"You really are a bad influence; I wish you to go to hell in hydrofluoric acid after you die, with every cell in your body protonated by hydrofluoric acid, and after being protonated, resurrected into a second barrel of hydrofluoric acid, continuously, suffering endlessly," I joked.
"But they all volunteered; I just gave them a little push. The decision to choose a major was still made by their free will. Freedom, you know, is freedom," my friend joked back.
"Tsk, such a libertarian." While joking, my thoughts had already taken me elsewhere. Perhaps this is a story that began decades ago.
My grandmother was always excellent in chemistry, but during high school, due to national events, she dropped out and became a primary school teacher. She always regretted not being able to continue her chemistry studies due to the tides of the times, until she discovered her color vision deficiency, which somewhat relieved her: after all, she couldn't study it anyway.
Here, we need to understand a piece of knowledge that high school students memorize for exams: the genes determining color blindness and color weakness are located on the X chromosome. Thus, my grandmother's two sons (my two uncles) are also color weak, and unfortunately, they are particularly strong in chemistry.
The elder uncle won a national first prize in a chemistry competition but was rejected by the university due to his color weakness during the recommendation process. After repeating a year, he applied for the chemistry major again, and this time the result was a bit better: he had to choose between being adjusted or rejected. The elder uncle chose the former.
The younger uncle won a provincial first prize in a chemistry competition, and due to the previous experience, he did not choose to continue competing nor did he choose the chemistry major.
For those who understand high school genetics, it’s not hard to calculate: since my grandfather is not color weak, my mother is also not color weak, but one of her two X chromosomes comes from my grandmother, so as a boy, I have a 1/2 chance of being color weak. Unfortunately, I am color weak, and my chemistry is still quite good. In fifth grade, I began participating in the "Little Scientist" competition in the chemistry group, winning a provincial first prize. In sixth grade, after finishing the entrance exam for junior high school in the morning, I went to this competition again in the afternoon and won another provincial first prize.
To participate in this competition, I previewed the junior high school chemistry book. Therefore, four years later, I could finish previewing the high school chemistry book in the third year of junior high and help the chemistry department create exam questions. I remember our chemistry teacher offered a reward, saying he would perform an experiment according to the question setter's request. I then created a major question based on the Solvay process, and my bid was successful. The teacher promised to let me do the thermite reaction experiment, but coincidentally, the school laboratory was under renovation, so it had to be canceled. By the time the laboratory was finished, we had already graduated for half a year.
After graduating from junior high, I left with a wide range of interests from computer science and natural sciences to humanities and social sciences, along with a passion for my new journey at Foshan No. 1 High School. At that time, I thought my various skills could be fully utilized here, paving the way for a bright future.
However, on the first day of school, I found the atmosphere in my regular class quite dull. It was supposed to be the best time to meet new friends, but everyone in my class was sitting in their seats reading their books, while the competition class just a wall away was filled with laughter and joy. There are always differences between people, and it was this difference that drove me to strive to get into my junior high school instead of attending the nearby public junior high. Yet now, I found myself back in this atmosphere that I despised.
Seeing a few classmates in the competition class reminded me that I could have entered the competition class. After the high school entrance exam, the selection for the high school competition class began, with the following rules:
Other regular students admitted to Foshan No. 1 High School (referring to students admitted in the first tier of the early batch) are eligible to participate in the selection test for the Advanced Mathematics University Preparatory Course (competition class), but they need to register online and take the test on July 9, 2017. The specific process is as follows...
This document can be found here: https://www.fsyz.com.cn/zszp/201707/t20170703_7092245.html
I was not a regular student but a "quota transferred to regular" student. Although I was ten points lower than regular students, I still accounted for over 30% of the student body. When I saw this notice, I did not apply for the competition class. However, I found that several classmates in the competition class were also quota transferred to regular students. When I asked them, they told me: in practice, they didn’t care about the source composition at all. Later, I discovered that even those who were not admitted to my high school (though they were admitted to better high schools) could also participate in this exam and then attend my high school.
Lady Luck always seems to favor me. I thought. Amid the laughter coming from next door, I returned to my seat in the dead class and flipped through the Chemistry Elective Three, which was the high school textbook I bought in my third year of junior high, never tiring of it.
Indeed, Lady Luck favored me; the head teacher of the competition class (let's call him "Wu Zhenying" here) saw me flipping through this book and invited me to join the chemistry competition training. Wu Zhenying (the teacher)1 also said that after the midterm exam in the first semester of the first year of high school, there might be a reallocation of the key classes. Because of my color weakness, I initially had no hope of "winning awards in competitions to participate in independent admissions," but Wu Zhenying (the teacher) still encouraged me to participate after hearing about it. So, I entered the competition training class and began to work hard, partly to enter the key class and partly out of my interest, wanting to learn more chemistry knowledge, as this was almost my only opportunity to learn university-level chemistry.
When the first semester of high school began, the more than eighty students sitting in the classroom did not deter me. Perhaps to test the new students, in the first class, Wu Zhenying (the teacher) taught at a very fast pace, covering a lot of material. I remember that in this class, I was the student who interacted the most with Wu Zhenying (the teacher). At the end of the class, Wu Zhenying (the teacher) announced that there would be a test in the next class, and that students' retention would depend on their test scores. I asked him for the course materials, organized the PPT into a Word document of over ten thousand words, shared it with my classmates in the group, and spent three days mastering the content, still remembering that the most difficult part was the empirical formula for ionization energy of electrons in different orbits.
In the first exam of the competition class, I ranked seventh, six points behind the first place. I decided to keep pushing myself. In the first segment exam, I ranked 11th in chemistry, and during the midterm exam, I ranked second.
However, the competition class was not reallocated. The school policy was so capricious. I pinned my hopes for entering the competition class on the reallocation in the second year of high school. According to past policies, half of the spots in the two science key classes in the second year were allocated to us competition students.
However, another opportunity arose: I was selected as the only candidate from my school's chemistry department to participate in the 2018 "Talent Plan" for middle school students through school screening, first taking an online written test and then going to Sun Yat-sen University for an interview. On the day of the interview, I looked at myself in the mirror, preparing my personal image for the first time without any interview experience.
I was the last to be interviewed, alongside a student from Guangdong Experimental High School. I still remember a particularly impressive moment during the interview:
The interviewer asked, "Do you have any research or exploration in chemistry?"
The student from the provincial school replied, "Our school invited Academician xxx to guide us on a project; we studied the composition of the scale in water dispensers and found..."
I answered, "In the experiment of 'the reaction between aluminum and acid or strong base,' I found that adding litmus reagent to the reaction solution causes it to lose color. Therefore, I proposed three hypotheses and designed two experiments, which are... These are also recorded in my report. As stated in my report, it was verified that Hypothesis 2 is correct."
The resource disparity between Guangzhou schools and Foshan schools intimidated me. Nevertheless, I successfully made the selection, and I did not see this student's name on the list. Perhaps my ability to design experiments independently was recognized. At the end of the first semester of my first year, as one of the only three selected students from Foshan's chemistry department (the other two were from another school), I attended the opening ceremony of the "Talent Plan" at Sun Yat-sen University, where I witnessed the greater disparity between Foshan and Guangzhou, which I could only fill with my own efforts.
Every Saturday afternoon in 2018, I spent my time in the laboratories and libraries of Sun Yat-sen University. By grinding through the material, I managed to elevate my chemistry knowledge to a level where I could converse easily with students from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Meanwhile, I tied for first place with another student who had consistently ranked first in the second exam of the competition class.
However, looking back, I realized I had lost too much. Due to the time conflicts with competition training, I gave up various clubs and thus many of my hobbies. I once loved debating, but I could not join the debate team due to scheduling conflicts; I once loved computer science, but I could not join the informatics competition class because of the chemistry competition. I also found that fewer than one-fifth of the truly capable students in the chemistry competition class existed. To accommodate these classmates who knew nothing about high school chemistry, Wu Zhenying (the teacher) greatly reduced the university-level content and even the teaching of competition exam points, focusing instead on high school chemistry, only expanding on the high-frequency exam points for competitions. Meanwhile, another school in the city had already hired a gold medal coach to train their competition class. I felt disappointed and confused. The disappointment stemmed from not being able to learn new knowledge, while the confusion arose from the fact that even for the competition itself, what Wu Zhenying (the teacher) taught was far from enough.
As mentioned earlier, I had two purposes for joining the competition class: to develop my interest (learn knowledge) and to enter the key class. In fact, entering the key class was also to learn more knowledge and broaden my horizons. Now, the former had already proven impossible to achieve through the competition class. The only remaining goal was to enter the key class, and for this purpose, I needed to do a lot of practice rather than learning; I had to do a lot of exam-oriented work. I did not like or excel at exam-oriented work. Nevertheless, I could only strive to do it. In the Guangdong provincial chemistry competition at the end of the first semester of my first year, I received a third prize. There was only one first prize in the entire grade, one second prize, and three third prizes. I still remember when I entered Foshan No. 1 High School in the first semester of my first year, looking at the bulletin board where several lists were posted, showing some students' exam scores in the competition class and whether they were selected for the key class. The top ten in mathematics could enter the key class, while only the top five in physics, chemistry, and biology could, and there were no qualifications for computer science and English. According to this standard, I could have entered the key class in the second year.
The heavy exam-oriented work had already harmed my interest in chemistry itself. The once brave enthusiasm for exploration was now gone; the once flowing inspiration was no longer there. I could only keep telling myself: chemistry and competitions are not the same, and the competition class is even less related; there is no need to hate everything associated with it. But is this useful?
During the summer vacation, students from the advanced chemistry class voluntarily signed up for training in Hangzhou in early August. At that time, there were 37 students left in the competition class, but only 7 signed up. In Hangzhou, Wu Zhenying (the teacher) told us that he wanted to keep the truly capable and willing students, and we seemed to fit that description. This undoubtedly increased my confidence in entering the key class.
Looking around, I found that in the "basic class" where I was with the other five, more than half were prospective first-year high school students, even some prospective third-year junior high students. They were one or two grades younger than us, yet their level was comparable to ours. According to the perennial first student in the advanced chemistry class, in her "enhanced class," the instructor finished teaching "Basic Organic Chemistry" in one day and then began discussing deeper topics.
I was disappointed again to discover the gap. This was the disparity between Guangdong and other provinces. The gap between me and a prospective third-year junior high student from Jiangsu (my deskmate) was even greater than the gap between me and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology students.
With the national preliminary competition on September 2 approaching, I could only rely on myself again. However, I had no time to prepare for the exam in the second half of August because I still had to work on a project at Sun Yat-sen University. Another reason was that this competition was unrelated to the allocation of key classes: the results of the allocation would be announced before August 30. The Talent Plan lasted for a year, and I had to produce results before January 2019. In the second half of August, I collected water samples from the river next to the school, using solid-phase microextraction technology to analyze the content of dimethylformamide and dimethylacetamide. For this, I stayed at a relative's house, commuting daily by subway to Sun Yat-sen University, living a "8 to 6" life for nine days between Huanshi East Road and Sun Yat-sen University. One day during this half-month, "True·Phoenix Dance in the Sky" came to Guangzhou to shoot a program, and in the evening, there was a fan meeting at a restaurant. Naturally, I attended, which led to the group photo at the beginning of this article.
I gained a deeper experience of Guangzhou and a better understanding of the gap between Foshan and Guangzhou: the gap in one subject might be bridged by effort, but what about several subjects? What about the number of opportunities? What about life? How could I compete with the locals of Guangzhou? If a person from a second-tier city like me could be crushed to this extent, what about those small-town exam-takers? They might have won the college entrance examination, but in the face of the all-around pressure from the big city locals, could they win their lives?
Despite this, I still looked forward to life in the key class: at least I had finally crossed the chasm between the regular class and the key class. After finishing experiments and returning to my relative's house, I often fantasized while standing in the subway: how good could my teachers be? How many excellent classmates could I meet? How many wonderful opportunities could I have? Yes, the miserable life in the regular class had become a thing of the past; I would begin a new life in the key class as I had wished, and all the sacrifices made for this were worth it. At that time, I felt I had something called determination within me. While writing this article, I realized that this was the most determined period of my life so far.
This summer vacation was very fulfilling for me. During a month and a half of vacation, I spent only four days at home. Besides traveling in Germany in the second half of July, I dedicated the entire August to chemistry, half of which was for competitions. At the same time, this was also my first prolonged separation from my mother. After this, our relationship matured, became healthier, and normalized. My mother partially regained her sense of self instead of centering everything around me.
However, the dream shattered.
On the night of August 30, the results of the second-year class allocation were released. I was not placed in the key class, nor was the perennial first student in the advanced chemistry class. The allocation for our year was completely opaque, lacking the ranking of exam scores from the previous year’s competition class, and there was no posted admission list. To this day, I still do not understand the criteria. Aside from a few words from Wu Zhenying (the teacher) and my political teacher, I received no information regarding the standards.
Wu Zhenying (the teacher) said before we graduated from the first year: "My words carry some weight, but you also need to raise your overall scores... Do you understand what I mean?" I listened, gripped by fear, but I shook my head vigorously to dismiss it. In fact, at that time, only two weeks remained until the summer vacation, and it was already too late for me to withdraw.
My political teacher (she is the wife of the grade administrator) said: "…It seems like you need to rank in the top 150 in the grade or something… I’m not too clear on the specifics…" But there were some students from the math and biology competitions who did not meet this standard.
In any case, the key class vanished before my eyes, like a carp jumping over the dragon gate, only to find that the dragon gate was merely an illusory rainbow. Yet on the night of August 30, I was surprisingly calm! I simply said "oh" and went to sleep, as if I had already known the result.
Actually, it was not the case. When faced with a huge emotional shock, a person may not be able to react quickly. That night, I slept soundly and vaguely remembered having a beautiful dream. But when I woke up, I could only feel the despair surging from all directions, the malice of the entire world penetrating my bones. A voice began to whisper like a shadow in my ear: "You can't enter the key class. You can't enter the key class..." It forced me to accept this unwilling reality. In preparation for psychological counseling, I developed the habit of recording my dreams after waking up. In my records, I found that this dream was the last beautiful dream I had.
On the night of August 31, I finally cried.
On the evening of September 1, I was to return to school a day earlier than my classmates because the next day we would depart from school to participate in the national preliminary competition. That night, I lifted my heavy luggage and moved into the dormitory. At that time, the dormitory building was empty, with only a couple of dormitory supervisors left aside from the chemistry competition students. At that moment, a children's song rang out from the village next to the dormitory:
Little mouse, up on the lampstand.
Can go up2, but can't come down.
Meow, meow, meow, the cat is coming.
Roll down with a clatter.
I then cried out loud in my bed.
The competition on September 2 was held at Sun Yat-sen University, although it was not in the same campus as during my summer vacation. My exam room had a great view; outside the window, I could see the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou (the location of Tianhe-2), but I had no mood to appreciate it, nor did I have the heart to solve problems. I only completed the last question, which was the organic finale question, and then submitted my paper and left the venue.
Returning to Foshan No. 1 High School, I entered a new class. My classroom was on the seventh floor, the farthest from the corridor, one of the three most remote classrooms in the entire teaching building, perfectly suited as my place of exile. Looking around, the students in the class were once again the same dull-eyed students I had seen in the first year, and the teacher at the podium was just a tape recorder reading the textbook. After a whole year of hard study, I was now exiled to this class, which had never left the bottom three in the grade's average score. My heart, which had turned to ashes, was once again doused with a bucket of water, becoming a bitter and astringent solution of ashes. That day, I filled an entire page of draft paper with fine pen strokes, leaving no white space. My future had also become a void. Without the support of the dream god, I could only circle the tree like a southward-flying magpie, with no branches to rely on.
On the afternoon of September 3, I informed Wu Zhenying (the teacher): I would withdraw from the competition class. Perhaps knowing my situation, he agreed without asking much but did not say much more. On the 4th, I went to the advanced chemistry class to retrieve my textbooks and materials, severing ties with the competition completely. Back in class, facing the dull-eyed classmates, I was surprised to find that I had almost become one of them. A year after the competition, everything about me was in ruins, waiting to be rebuilt: my total score in six subjects dropped from the previous hundred to over three hundred, mathematics was even in the bottom hundred, and all my personal hobbies had withered. I found it hard to produce anything to prove that I did not belong to the same category as these people; even my gaze had become duller than a year ago. How I wished to balance chemistry with other interests! But the reality was so cruel: a person's energy is limited; what diminishes here does not necessarily grow there, but what grows there will inevitably diminish here.
In the first year of high school, some of my subject teachers were from the key class, but in the second year, I had none. I wanted to regain my hobbies, I wanted to improve my grades, but once again, I could only rely on myself. I looked around; there was nothing to lean on. Thus, I began my life in the post-competition era.
In the following two years, I remained in this class. The classroom floor has accumulated more dust than it did then. There are fewer books on advanced chemistry on the desk, and there are more small awards that are not related to advanced chemistry in the box. My dormitory classmates often fantasize and discuss a few pretty girls until eleven-thirty, and the bed next door talks in its sleep every night, sometimes snoring all night. I miss my dormitory from middle school. Back then, the top two students in the grade often shared their views on the world, discussed history, talked about life, and contemplated the future with me. The stagnant class and dirty dormitory repeatedly tossed my heart into the pot to be stewed. I regret, I hate. I cannot forgive the advanced chemistry class and the school. I gave everything, yet I received no consolation.
I wanted to reclaim some of my hobbies. I went to debate and found that my eloquence was no longer as sharp as it was when I graduated from junior high, and I could no longer convince the entire audience. I went to give speeches and found that I began to experience unprecedented stage fright, unable to speak fluently. I went to study computer science, but I found I could no longer invest my energy anywhere.
I became the "competition dropout" in my classmates' eyes, constantly repeating "withdraw to stay safe" offline, and posting two withdrawal posts in the school forum. I did not want to see others waste their youth in the competition class at Foshan No. 1 High School, but more and more failures continued to emerge.
I quickly attracted the dissatisfaction of the competition students. A few said I did not truly love chemistry, and the perennial first student in advanced chemistry scolded me as a coward who withdrew from the competition because I couldn't enter the key class. Although my level had seriously declined, I still logically refuted these statements one by one; this was during the first semester of my third year.
Not long after, Wu Zhenying (the teacher) found me. He said that my withdrawal article had spread, and the criticisms of the competition class and the teachers had hurt him.
I forced myself to remain calm and replied, "Who hurt whom first?"
Wu Zhenying (the teacher) said, "Some things are not as simple as you think... For example, our competition class was originally aimed at cultivating interest; you say we could do it like Shimen (the school mentioned earlier that hired a gold medal coach), but funding has to be approved from above. Also, regarding the allocation of competition classes, various policies are involved. The people above think that you Foshan No. 1 High School should focus on the college entrance examination and not engage in so many side paths... In short, I am also quite helpless... Let's not talk about anything else for now; from my personal perspective, you specifically named me in your withdrawal article and said how I..."
"Among classmates, I am used to calling teachers by their names. Other classmates do the same."
"But to me, you did not respect me and hurt me. It's already the third year; I think we can set these things aside for now and focus on the exams. There shouldn't be any major issues with your grades, right?"
"As long as you are willing to lay flat, there shouldn't be any problems."
"Let's not discuss anything else; I think you should delete your post."
"I'll delete it when I get back."
"Good. It seems you still have a lot to say; do you want to?"
"No, that's enough."
I then continued my studies. In the remaining months of 2019, nothing much happened at Foshan No. 1 High School except for the addition of a few foreign influences. I continued to privately repeat "withdraw from the competition to stay safe," while the students in the competition class continued their journey in competitions, preparing for independent admissions to universities.
What happened later is well-known. The independent admissions for university competitions were canceled, replaced by the Strong Foundation Plan. The requirements for college entrance examination scores in the Strong Foundation Plan caused competition students to fail one after another.
From the me who gave up competitions to the students who persisted in competitions, none of them had a good ending. They were worse off than I was, which gave me a sense of guilty pleasure. However, thinking about the nationwide situation, I could no longer take pleasure in their misfortune.
What made me unhappy was the discussions on this topic online; the discussants often focused on the point of "not allowing major changes," which differed from my focus. I always felt they were too utilitarian, but after a moment, I understood them. Perhaps they were people who had similar experiences to mine? Perhaps they had once poured their passion into a field, only to be denied by a system that did not suit them? Perhaps this entire structure indeed did not provide a way out for people like us?
Later, I continued my life in high school, though occasionally feeling a bit of a resurgence, it could not cover up my overall self-destructive behavior. The painful failure in chemistry left me completely devoid of the ability to "defer payment," plunging me into a life of living for the moment. Naturally, I ended up at the school I am currently attending. I had planned to use this school as a safety net, thinking, "If I can't get into this, I'll repeat." Looking back now, even if I had repeated, I wouldn't have had a good outcome. In my new university, I continued my aimless life. As for that top student in the chemistry competition class, I dared not ask about her situation; I only remembered that chemistry was her everything, and she had no other specialties or hobbies outside of chemistry, and her daily grades were not better than mine. Perhaps she did better than me in the college entrance examination, or perhaps the opposite, but those were things I did not dare to know.
In short, there is a group of people who once loved chemistry, and later they all ended up failing. This is the story of this group of people who once loved chemistry.
The sound of a classmate's book falling to the ground pulled me back from my thoughts.
"So why didn't you study chemistry afterward and come to our Atmospheric Sciences?" I continued the previous topic with my friend.
"Isn't it because I didn't score enough? But if I had enough, I should have been in a physics or mathematics major. As for why I didn't go into chemistry? That's a sad story. What about you?"
"Me too; it's a long story."
The heavy snow fell for a day and a night. The next morning, we got up, and there were snowmen of various sizes piled up in the snow, some with oranges and carrots stuck in them. The road was all white like snow, with some white areas that would make people slip when stepped on, which was the white of snow. There were also some white areas that wouldn't cause slipping when stepped on, which were the traces left by the melting agent after the water evaporated.
In a previously evaporated water puddle, I discovered a few small cubes. After examining them closely, I said to my friend, "These are calcium chloride crystals, a not-so-useful byproduct of the Solvay process; it was mentioned in the 'blue book'3. Back in the day, I even used it to create exam questions."
After saying that, I casually tossed it into a still un-evaporated puddle. The chloride ions and calcium ions, under the pull of water molecules and hydration, broke free from the Coulomb force of attraction and diffused into the water. We saw that the crystal quickly vanished without a trace.
This day was January 1, 2021.
Little mouse, up on the lampstand.
Can go up2, but can't come down.
Meow, meow, meow, the cat is coming.
Roll down with a clatter.
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