In the summer of 2022, I was about to begin my final year of high school. Because my grades the year before had been fairly good, Nanyang No. 1 High School gave me a place at the Tsinghua University summer camp1.
By custom, the camp would have been held on the Tsinghua campus, but because of the pandemic, that year it took place at Zhengzhou No. 4 High School instead. At the end of July, my parents drove me there.
Everything about the camp was wonderful: plenty of activities, good food, and lots of brilliant people. My only regrets were that I didn’t prepare properly for the tests, and that I didn’t take the chance to get to know more of the other students.
At the closing gala, my roommate and I sang Mao Buyi’s “Herding Horses in the City” together; I loved his songs back then. It was also at that gala that I fell for “Kill That Shijiazhuang Man”, which I still play on repeat to this day. And at the very end, with everyone waving their phone flashlights, the camp closed with “Love You” and “Sun Will Never Set”.
It all felt like a dream, and when I woke up, my final year of high school had begun.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hated my final year, but I certainly didn’t like it2. The first blow was the change of teachers. When term began I was full of pride and found it especially hard to adjust. I badly wanted my teachers to see how capable I was, yet for a long stretch I couldn’t do well in a single exam, and I kept feeling that they didn’t care much about me (in truth, every one of them was kind and taught very well). Perhaps because of this, little by little, with each setback, my drive slipped away without my noticing.
Back then I desperately wanted to study physics: to go to the School of Physics at Peking University, or to study physics at Tsinghua, and to work on controlled nuclear fusion. Sadly, apart from a handful of good results, I was fairly mediocre for the whole of that year, right up to the very end…
Later, as I had feared, the college entrance exam fell short of what I’d hoped, so I applied through Tsinghua’s Strengthening Basic Disciplines Program instead. A lot happened along the way (but that’s another story). Fortunately, I did quite well on the written test, and together with my evaluation from the summer camp, I made it, after a few scares, to the interview in Beijing.
During the days of the Tsinghua interview, I was sulking at my family. My father took me all around the city, and only when I looked at the photos afterwards did I realize how obvious it had been: I had a long face the whole time. Looking back now, I feel really bad about it.
What I remember most vividly is that, the night before the interview, I started hiccupping and couldn’t stop. They only stopped the next morning, a dozen or so minutes before the interview, so I didn’t sleep at all that night. Still, it doesn’t seem to have affected the result in the end, haha.
The results came out about a week later. My overall score had only just scraped past the cutoff, but I couldn’t be admitted to the program I had applied for (Xingjian College), and I had declined to be reassigned (I might have ended up at Tanwei College), so in the end I missed out in style.
…
In the blink of an eye, all this happened three or four years ago, and even my days at the School of Statistics at Renmin University of China are nearly over. Lately I keep daydreaming about my quant internship next term, and about the PhD I might one day pursue, yet somehow the old memories have resurfaced too.
Do I regret how it all turned out? I don’t know. Even now I clearly remember the melody of the school song, “The Western Hills stand green, the Eastern Sea stretches wide; our school stands solemn and tall at the center.” But perhaps what I feel is mostly nostalgia: nostalgia for those innocent, beautiful days that, for all their pressure, were at least full of love, hope, and dreams.