Flunked In

The year: 1987. 

The setting: Chengdu, China. 

The event: my grandpa forces my mom to give up her dreams of being a writer to pursue math and science, which leads her to flunk her university entrance exams and flunk out of going into her dream field and school.

For that, our family will always be grateful. 

It’s here that you’re probably like, “What the fuck?” but hear me out. Let’s start at the beginning.

It’s not that my mom was stupid or dumb or did terribly in the sciences; in fact, it was the opposite. My mom is one of the sharpest people I know and if the high school report cards my grandma showed me were any indication, she is one the smartest people anyone knows. When she was in her first year of high school, she got sick and had to take a month off of school. When she went back, now one month behind and still woozy, she managed to score full marks on her math exam. She was the only person to achieve that in her entire class and her teacher gave the rest of her classmates a good scolding for that. Something along the lines of, "You morons can't even compete with someone who spent four weeks lying in bed."

My mom isn’t just book smart; she has a marvelous way with people too. She can read most of them like a book and know exactly what to say in any situation. She can meet someone on the subway and within ten minutes, have their entire life story. She loves job interviews because they always tangent off into lighthearted chit-chat; one time, she came home with a job offer and the number of her interviewer’s son because somehow, her job interview turned into a matchmaking session for me. How she managed to do that, I’ll never know. (Not that anyone asked, but nothing wound up happening between me and the son).

The point is, my mom is all kinds of smart. Always has been.

Now, for anyone who doesn’t know, the Gaokao or The Nationwide Unified Examination for Admissions to General Universities and Colleges in China is easily the number one most important and stressful exam a student will take in their life. It’s like the SATs on steroids multiplied by a million.

First of all, cheating on the Gaokao is an entirely different game. It's hard as fuck to cheat. Signals are jammed, the exam makers and print units are guarded by literally policing units and fully cut off from the outside world until the Gaokao begins, multiple sets and versions are prepared as backup, and students are given different exams, so peeking is pretty much useless. These aren’t even all the preventative measures there are, so you’d definitely have to be some kind of high-functioning sociopath to cheat and cheat successfully.

Second of all, even if you do manage to somehow cheat, it can fuck up your academic and career prospects for the rest of your life if you’re caught. You could be barred from retaking the exam, which can throw your life plan off entirely, since without the Gaokao, you can’t go to university, and without university, you’re extremely unlikely to land any sort of job. Some offenders even serve time in some type of youth detention centre, which stays on their records forever and sabotages most attempts to apply for jobs. It’s effectively an academic, career, and social death sentence; no one wants to hire, refer, be friends with, or date someone who cheats on the Gaokao (or at least that's my understanding of it). 

Students spend their entire lives preparing themselves for this grueling three-day nine-hour exam of multiple subjects that determines which universities they can get into. It’s regular school, cram school, weekend tutoring, and hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into making sure your kid has the best chance to ace this exam. Unlike a lot of admissions policies in Canada, extracurriculars and brilliantly written application letters (not even sure if they write these, to be honest) mean pretty much jack shit; whether or not you get into your dream school hinges almost entirely on your Gaokao score. I cannot stress the importance of this exam. Parents will literally take time off work to wait at the school entrance for their kids to finish.

Now, you might ask how, given its importance, could my sharp-as-a-tack and studious mother ever flunk the Gaokao. Well, it’s not an entirely unfamiliar reason. In China, when students reach their second year in high school, they have to choose whether to pursue humanities or STEM; this would determine what classes they took and what subjects they were tested on in the Gaokao. So for example, my dad, who was a STEM major through and through, wouldn’t have had to take the literature exam in his Gaokao, which would have likely brought his score down. 

Opposite to my dad, my mom was born a gifted writer and artist, so it should’ve been the easiest choice in the world that she choose the humanities. However, it's a tale as old as time. The humanities were seen as inferior and difficult to pursue as a career, so my grandfather forced her to study math and science. Now, my mom is a pretty well-rounded person, so it’s not like she couldn’t study STEM; she just absolutely hated it and she knew it wasn't what she could do best.

Imagine there’s something you want to do and you know you could do it well. It’s something you could spend the rest of your life doing and you would never get sick of it. Playing the trumpet, becoming a psychologist, or stacking cups at the professional level. It could be anything and if you’re lucky, maybe you’re already doing what you want and excel at.

Now, imagine you can’t do it. Maybe you physically can’t or you’re not allowed to. Maybe you’re the best rugby player the world has ever seen, but then you blow out your shoulder and have to become a data analyst or something. Wouldn’t that suck?

That’s what happened to my mom. Despite being a lifelong student of the written word and the arts, she had to take all her exams in the subjects she hated most, get into a school to pursue a field she knew she would be miserable in, and spend the rest of her life doing it. Maybe her heart just wasn’t in it, or maybe she was just burnt out. Maybe it was even just the smallest bit of teenage rebellion, but whatever it was, she wound up flunking.

It's here that I should mention (because I think I forgot) that "flunk" doesn't mean "fail". She probably got like the equivalent of a 70% or something, but a lot of the top universities in China are located out of province and since she didn't score high enough, she attended a local, lower-ranked university for computer science.

So now, we come to why our family would look back on this and be grateful that my mom didn’t get to pursue her dream field and flunked this colossally important exam. (I promise it’s less selfish than it sounds. Or maybe not. You be the judge). You might even be reading this and feeling bad for my mom because she never got to pursue the career of her dreams, but two things I've learned: one, life is not always linear, nor should it follow one prescribed path, and two, it is made up of all kinds of dreams, not just one. If one dream fails, there’s always another one waiting for you, and there’s no telling which one would have made you happier. 

If my mom had taken the subjects she wanted and aced the Gaokao, our family would have never immigrated to Canada. There’s nothing really wrong with Chengdu or China, but it was my parents’ dream to move to Canada and it was because my mom worked with computers that her immigration application was approved. My dad aced his Gaokao, got into his dream school, and worked in his dream field, but it wasn’t a field that would’ve been approved for immigration at the time. Had my mom never studied STEM and computers, her dream of moving to Canada may not have been realized. It’s also here that my mom discovered her new dream: pet grooming. Combining her lifelong love for animals and skill of being good with her hands, she now goes to work every day with a smile on her face and comes home every night with pictures and stories from her days at the salon.

As we continue on the subject of dreams and jobs, remember when I said that life is not linear and that if one dream fails, there’s usually another one waiting? Well, if you’re really lucky, sometimes old dreams come back on top of new dreams. Beyond working with animals, my mom’s also re-pursued her love of literature and writing, where she’s active in a blog community and often writes short stories and poetry.

Beyond fulfilling her dream life and job in Canada, albeit on a slightly detoured path, my mom not pursuing humanities and flunking her Gaokao also led to her meeting the love of her life — my dad. Had my mom gone to her dream school several provinces away from her hometown, they wouldn’t have met, fallen in love, gotten married, or had me. Our family wouldn’t be our family.  

Now, you might say, “Well, you can’t miss a life and family you never had. Maybe they and you would have led equally good or even better lives. You never know” and you would be right. Maybe my mom still could’ve had both if she aced the Gaokao: the job of her dreams and the love of her life. It might've been with someone else, but she still could've been happy. Maybe she would’ve had a different kid, a different house, a different family, and been just as content. There's also a possibility of another future seeing her become a successful writer who didn’t feel the need for a family, which is perfectly fine as well (that being said, I can tell you right now, my mom is a lifelong romantic who dreamt of getting married and having kids, so that’s very unlikely. For any Friends fans reading this, my mom’s basically Monica when it comes to marriage and kids).

The same goes for my dad and I. He might have married another woman and led a different life and I might’ve been born someone else entirely. We might have all been fine with it. There’s no way of knowing what kind of cards you’ll be dealt and what kind of future your decisions lead to. As likely as it is that my parents and I could have led better lives, there’s also the chance we could have led worse ones. In any one of the decisions I've made in my life, I could've wound up putting myself in a time or place where I get hit in the head with a piece of farming equipment or pooped on by a giant bird. In fact, it's a real possibility that either of those things or more can still happen to me because of things that happened in the past or things that have yet to happen. When decisions combine with dumb arbitrary luck, there’s just no way of knowing anything, but I've never really been one to dwell on the maybes and the what ifs. It's just not a sustainable mindset. Sure, there are countless possibilities, but when you're given something amazing, wouldn't it be better to dwell on that instead? Or at least that's what my mom always says.

For example, meeting someone, falling in love, having them feel the exact same way about you, and building a life that you both want, and living happily ever after. It's not something everyone is lucky enough to experience. It’s a ton of luck, work, and patience, and if every relationship worked out perfectly, there would be an entire genre of music, books, and movies gone, just like that. If you think about it, any one thing could have caused you not to meet the people you care about most in the world. I can think of at least fifteen factors that could've prevented me meeting my friends or my boyfriend, and that's just off the top of my head. Even if you're lucky enough to meet someone, there's so many factors that can contribute to a relationship ending. Maybe that’s why it’s such a celebrated thing to be happily married to someone for decades (emphasis on the “happily”) or maintaining a lifelong friendship. Maybe it just doesn’t happen enough because relationships end in such unsatisfying ways all the time. Your partner might not always want the same things you do and if they do, external factors can still make being together impossible: a disapproving parent, a senseless tragedy, or just anything. It’s not an everyday occurrence that you get to marry the person that you want to be buried next to and actually have that happen, or have the kind of love that you would traverse several lifetimes to find, but my parents managed to do that. They’ve been married for 30 years and quite frankly, as their daughter, it’s sometimes almost gross how mushy they are, but it’s also kind of wonderful. They kiss each other hello and goodbye every day before work, cook together, go on dates, joke around like teenagers, hold hands everywhere they go, communicate through every fight, and every night, they go for a walk after dinner and just talk about anything and everything, and all because my mom flunked the Gaokao, creating the conditions for my parents to find each other in this life and experience the kind of love musicians have sung about for centuries. 

As for myself, I’m not unaware of how blessed I am to have my parents be who they are. They are incredibly loving and unconditionally supportive, and yes, we fight (any one of my friends will tell you that I’ve called crying after particularly vicious arguments), but so does any family. We always find our way back to the way things were after a while. We always sit down to dinner together every night when we can and share our days with each other. They took time to go to each and every one of my piano recitals, table tennis games, parent-teacher nights, and supported me through the ups and downs of school and relationships. They still do. My dad patiently tutored me in every subject I struggled with (eg. anything related to math and science. Guess who inherited 100% of her mom's love for literature and exactly 0% of her dad's affinity for the sciences) and my mom taught me the importance of healthy living, self-love, confidence, and care, and how to take care of and keep myself safe should they not be around. They make sure I know that there's nothing I can't bring to them and nothing I can say or do that'll ever change the fact that I'm their daughter and they love me. It’s the kind of family where I look forward to going back home for the holidays, which is not something everyone is lucky enough to have. So, yes, maybe there are an infinite number of families, situations, and possibilities that we will never get to experience, but our family is grateful for the ones we do have together right now and to my mom: thank you for flunking IN to this life that we wouldn't trade for any other one in the world.