What to Expect When Your Child Goes to University in China: A Parent’s Real Experience
I was folding clean bath towels after dinner last October when my phone buzzed with a WeChat voice note from my daughter Lina, who’d started her first semester at Fudan University two months earlier. Her voice was wobbly, half-muffled by what sounded like a bathroom stall door. “I got a 58 on my first math quiz,” she said. “And all three of my roommates already have their Kaoyan review books. Why didn’t you tell me the race doesn’t end after Gaokao?”
I sat down hard on the wicker laundry basket by the washing machine. Lina had been a top 5% student in her high school in Guangzhou, studied 12 hours a day for a year to get into her dream journalism program, and we’d all celebrated for a week when her Gaokao scores came in. I’d assumed university would be her reward: late nights with friends, exploring Shanghai, joining clubs, figuring out what she cared about. I’d had no idea the pressure would hit this hard this fast.
I called her back immediately, and she came out of the stall to talk, leaning against a ginkgo tree near the dorm. She told me she’d gone to the student club fair the week before, and when she said she was thinking of joining the campus newspaper, one of her roommates had laughed and said, “That’s fine, but don’t let it take time away from Kaoyan prep. If you don’t get into a top master’s program, that journalism degree won’t get you a job that pays the rent in Shanghai.” She’d brushed it off at the time, but the bad math score sent her into a spiral. Suddenly every spare minute her roommates spent quizzing each other on politics terms felt like a reminder she was falling behind.
This is the thing no one tells you about university education in China, if you haven’t had a kid go through it recently. The old narrative says Gaokao is the big hurdle, and once you get into a good university, you can relax. That hasn’t been true for a long time. When I went to university 30 years ago, most of us spent our junior and senior years looking for jobs, and only a small fraction applied for postgraduate programs. Now, more than half of all undergrads start preparing for Kaoyan, the national postgraduate entrance exam, within their first or second year. When I visited Lina back in March, I walked past the campus library at 9pm on a Friday, and every seat was full. Nearly half the people there were poring over Kaoyan review books, not just doing class assignments.
I didn’t tell her “don’t worry” or “you should study harder” or even “just ignore your roommates.” Those are useless things to say when your kid is already panicking. First, I told her to sign up for her professor’s weekly office hour the next day, bring her marked quiz, and ask him to walk through every problem she got wrong and write down three specific topics to focus on before the midterm. That gave her one small, actionable thing to do instead of spiraling. Then I told her to block 2pm to 6pm every Saturday on her phone calendar, and mark it “do not disturb for school.” No Kaoyan books, no talking about exam scores or grad school with anyone that afternoon. If she wanted to write for the paper, go get soup dumplings with friends, or even just nap and watch cat videos, that’s all that mattered. It wasn’t that she shouldn’t prepare for the future, just that she needed one guaranteed chunk of time a week that wasn’t for anyone else’s timeline.
A month later, she texted me a photo of her makeup quiz score: 78. She’d finished her first article for the campus paper, a profile of the old man who sells fried chestnuts by the school gate, and it got 12,000 views on their public WeChat account. She still studies two to three hours a day for Kaoyan after her regular classes, and she still worries that her GPA isn’t high enough to get into the master’s program she’s looking at. But she’s already lined up a summer internship at a small independent magazine in Shanghai, something she would have skipped if she’d listened to her roommates’ advice back in October.
I’ve talked to a dozen other parents of undergrads in China over the last six months, and almost every one of us has had a similar late-night call from a panicking kid. The biggest mistake I see parents make, myself included at first, is adding more pressure to match the peer pressure. Or the opposite, telling them to just ignore everyone else and do what they want, which feels impossible when everyone around you is sprinting. One small thing that works for our family, that I’ve told other parents to try, is to stop opening every chat with “how are your grades?” Instead, open with “what’s one thing you did this week that had nothing to do with school or your future plans?” It’s a tiny shift in the question, but it reminds your kid that their worth isn’t just in their exam scores, and gives you a window into what they actually care about. Another thing I had Lina do early on was write two quick lists on a piece of paper during a video call: one list of everything other people say she should do in the next four years, and another of everything she actually wants to do. It took 15 minutes, and after she finished she said she could suddenly see the difference between what was her panic and what was everyone else’s.
Last week, Lina called me after dinner, and she was back to worrying. One of her roommates just switched her major from Chinese literature to big data, because she says big data grads get three times the starting salary. Lina wondered out loud if she’s being stupid sticking with journalism, when it’s so hard to find a stable job. I didn’t give her a big speech about following your dreams. I just reminded her that her next Saturday afternoon is still hers, and asked when the article she’s writing about the stray cat that lives outside the library is going to be published. She laughed and said it’s almost done, and she’ll send me the link as soon as it goes up.
She still has bad weeks where she stays up too late panicking about her future. She still hasn’t decided for sure if she’ll actually go through with taking the Kaoyan. But that’s okay. University in China isn’t the reward for 12 years of school anymore. It’s just another race, and it’s up to each kid to decide how fast they want to run, and when to stop for a snack along the way.
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