Every Generation Gets A Question

In 1966, China’s Cultural Revolution was just underway. Gaokao, the annual university entrance exam, was cancelled on the grounds that meritocratic education reproduced class hierarchy, that educated urban youth needed to be reeducated by peasants and workers. It would be cancelled for 11 years. For a generation of intellectual young adults who aspired to an education, they had to figure out how to live their lives when the institution they trusted was abolished.

What did they do, then?

In 1966, a boy named Bingkang Liu was in eighth grade in Hefei when all classes stopped. He was sent to the countryside in 1968; two years later, he was assigned to work as a carpenter at a construction company back in Hefei. In an interview with Sixth Tone¹, he recounted how he kept learning on his own after his education was interrupted:

I knew I wouldn’t get into college based on the recommendation system because I had a “bad” family background: My father was an intellectual, a professor at Anhui Normal University, and they accused him of working in “reactionary organizations” before the establishment of the new China. But I didn’t give up.

Even before 1977, I secretly studied with my colleagues, who were all educated youth. Publicly, we set up philosophy study groups and read books by Karl Marx and Mao. Privately, we exchanged any books we could find, such as [Leo Tolstoy’s] “Resurrection” and [Charlotte Brontë’s] “Jane Eyre.” Back then, you’d be condemned for lacking revolutionary spirit if you were found reading these books.

I searched for textbooks everywhere. At the time, books were rare, so it wasn’t easy. I bought a series of advanced mathematics textbooks with Mao quotations printed all over them, and worked through half of the series. People mocked me, saying I was “on the path of anti-socialist professionalism,” but I believed that the knowledge you learn is yours. It will not fail you.

In the interview he showed a page from his diary in 1973, seven years after school stopped, four years before anyone would know that the Gaokao would resume. In the fog of uncertainty, without knowing when it would be resumed — or IF it would be resumed — and without knowing what the future of education looked like for him. He tried to cheer himself up:

What is my purpose in going to university? Nothing more than to learn more knowledge, and to escape my current position of being looked down upon. Since heaven hasn’t been kind to me, I can still manage to learn more on my own. I’m going to make this resolution: my study progress must not fall behind that of this year’s newly enrolled architecture students. Must one really sit inside a building with a “university” sign on it to complete a university education? To finish the entire university curriculum on my own, that is equally going to university! This is my university.

Young intellectuals in this generation put up with spartan material condition: shared beds in the dorms, bad cafeteria food, curfews, all for a chance to learn. “The doors of our study building would close at 11 p.m., so some students would stay in the classrooms until the next day. The lights of the dorms would go out at 11 as well, and students would go into the hallway, where there was still light, to read. Girls with long hair found combing their hair time-consuming, so they cut it off,” Liu recounted.

These young students, pursuing an intellectual life no matter the circumstances, so admirable. In Liu’s words, “despite the lack of resources, all the students worked hard, to an extent that students today could neither imagine nor understand.”

I feel two things at once, reading Liu’s account. On the one hand, I find it so admirable how hard they worked despite the circumstances; on the other hand, being Chinese myself, I am familiar with this hard work ethos, this conviction that suffering and study are inseparable. But there is something in me, trained by Western education, Western therapy, and a steady diet of Western self-help books, that flinches at this. When I was struggling in university, I tried to push myself to reach lofty goals like this too. I became depressed and burned out instead.

That said, Bingkang Liu did get to live an intellectual life as he wished. He registered for the Gaokao as soon as it resumed in 1977, and became one of the 5% of test takers that year to receive admission to a university. An online search of his name tells me that he became an expert in seismic engineering, staying at his alma mater as a professor. He spent his career studying how buildings behaved during earthquakes and how to make them stronger.

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Postwar Japan had a social contract: university graduates would get hired in recruitment season to lifetime employment. Employees devoted their lifelong loyalty to their employer in exchange for a predictable life. However, Japan’s economy collapsed in the early 1990s, and the hiring system ground to a halt, freezing out an entire generation of new graduates.

Many never recovered. The hyōgaki sedai — “ice age generation” — are still struggling til this day. A missed hiring window became permanent exclusion, which became isolation, which became shame, which made trying again feel pointless… it’s a vicious spiral.

Amidst all this despair, some people took initiative to create spaces where the isolated could simply be around other people again. A 2020 Bloomberg profile² of Japan’s lost generation described one such effort: Wataru Kubo, a business consultant who had spent his own youth as a shut-in, organizing monthly gatherings at a Shibuya restaurant. The only rule, posted at the entrance: “Nod a lot as you listen. Don’t deny others even if you disagree with them.”

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There are so many more examples like this around the world. South Africa’s “born-free” generation, promised democracy and handed sixty percent youth unemployment. Post-Soviet youth, coming of age as their entire country dissolved overnight. People don’t have a choice in the sociopolitical backdrop they’re born into, if there’s political upheaval or economic collapse or a cold war, they have to build a life in it regardless. Every generation faces the same question: what does a good life look like, given the world you were handed?

I’m a Zillenial, and I now spend my time in Canada and the US. The backdrop my generation exists in is harder to define: in many ways it’s infinitely better than the generation robbed of their education or their only window to stable employment. But we also live at a time that’s unprecedentedly atomized, where the responsibility of living a good life is completely pushed to the individual, where even community is something we have to build for ourselves. While we enjoy the wonders of technological innovation, we have smartphones and social media bringing the whole world’s suffering to the front and centre of our attention.

I can hear some of my friends’ objection: that focusing on individual agency is a way of letting the powerful people who created these circumstances off the hook. That the housing crisis and the attention economy were built by people with power to make decisions on behalf of the mass, and to skip past accountability into “figure out your own good life” is to capitulate. They are not wrong. But even holding Mao accountable would not bring back the lost university years or the lost lives; that generation still had to answer the question for themselves: what’s a good life, for me, given that I exist in this specific place and time?

What’s the answer to that question for my generation, atomized, overstimulated, unmoored? I don’t have an answer; I’m also trying to figure this out. But when I look around I see people doing things that are constructive to the lives of those around them: organize events, moderate discords, check in on their friends, throw parties, volunteer at church… They have my deepest gratitude.

1. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1000306

2. https://archive.ph/c9RBC