The classroom door flew open. Ten men in bulletproof vests stormed in, assault rifles pointed at us.
“Police! Hands on your heads!”
I did as I was told, but my first instinct was to dive under my desk. Judging by their wide-eyed terror, my classmates felt the same way. The final exam, which had seemed so pivotal just minutes before, was forgotten. Pencils rolled onto the floor and exam papers fluttered in the air.
You know how when there’s bad turbulence, everyone turns to look at the flight attendant? Well, our teacher looked even paler than the walls of the classroom. That’s how I knew this wasn’t a drill. A kid at my high school had been spotted with a gun. It was June 2000, just one year after the Columbine shootings, so the police—understandably—took it seriously. It took thirty minutes, which felt like forever, to search everyone, classroom by classroom, until our principal announced over the intercom that the SWAT team had cleared the building. With shaky legs, we filed out and assembled at a designated area on the football field.
I called my dad to tell him what had happened and ask for a ride home. He said: “If the exam is still on, don’t leave.”
Even though neither the suspect nor the gun had been located yet.
At the time, I was just a teeny tiny bit peeved about being abandoned in an active-shooter scenario. As I walked home after the test was canceled, I wracked my brain trying to remember the number for child services. It wasn’t until many years later, when I asked Dad about how he came to this country, that I began to understand where he was coming from. To me, it seemed as if school were more important to him than my life. To him, school was more important than his life.
When my dad was seventeen, he was forcibly removed from high school and sent to the countryside as part of his “reeducation.” This happened during the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of class warfare exploited by Chairman Mao to take back control over the Communist Party. After his Great Leap Forward—which aimed to convert China from an agrarian society to an industrial one—face-planted, causing three years of famine and killing millions, he realized he had to do something drastic to consolidate power and prevent a coup.
Anyone who was considered “bourgeois” (teachers, doctors, landowners, people who worked for the opposition party) was branded an “anti-revolutionary.” My grandfather, having worked as a medic for the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, which opposed the Communists during the civil war, fell into that category, along with my grandmother, my dad, and his four siblings. They were all guilty by association.
My dad spent the better part of his youth—ten years—doing backbreaking labor in the countryside. Using primitive tools, his job was to haul massive boulders to and from a quarry, under a blazing-hot sun, surviving on meager rations. Once, while hauling a two-hundred-pound rock with a friend, he slipped in the wet mud, rolled down a hill, and almost got crushed to death. He lost hope of having a future or any chance of improving his situation. Every day was as grueling and hopeless as the last.
In 1977, after Chairman Mao died, the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, decided to overhaul the system and reopen the schools. The National College Entrance Exam (NCEE), or Gaokao, which dates back to 1952 and can be taken by anyone, regardless of political or socioeconomic status, was reinstated. It dawned on my dad—a factory worker at this point—that this was his shot.
The three-day exam tested comprehension in every high school subject, despite the fact that during the Cultural Revolution most students had been kicked out of school and never graduated. Dad describes December 10, 1977, as the most unforgettable day in his life. His father woke him up at four thirty a.m. to cook him breakfast, and his parents watched him eat in silent devotion. As he boarded the bus, he looked back at my frail and coughing grandfather, who had been ill for years following the denouncements and hard labor of the Cultural Revolution. Not only did his future rest on the results of this exam, but his entire family’s future, including his four siblings’, did as well.
So, you can imagine the pressure he was under. Millions of people were competing for a coveted university spot; the NCEE was referred to as “a thousand soldiers and their horses trying to cross a log.”
The odds were not in my dad’s favor. But as you may suspect by now, he got in. In fact, he got 60 points more than the required score and was admitted to a top university. (He found out later that 5.7 million people had taken the exam that year—and only 4.8 percent passed.1) The news quickly spread in his small town. Even the people who had previously ostracized my grandparents started treating them with respect.
Education was how my dad got out from under the thumb of a totalitarian government. So, he wasn’t overly sympathetic whenever I complained that a subject was too hard or I was too tired to go to school—or the school was closed because a gunman was on the loose. You tough it out. Because your entire family is depending on you. (I still think he should have come and picked me up, though.)
The Gaokao is still the most important exam in a Chinese student’s life. I’ve heard similar stories from Vietnamese friends; for their parents, getting an education was also a matter of life and death. During the Vietnam War, students with the highest marks were kept behind to fill political roles, while their peers were conscripted into the army, which meant that the kids with better grades were the ones who survived. We’ve all heard of amazing kids like Malala Yousafzai, who faced death threats for going to school, and Ugandan immigrant Twesigye Jackson Kaguri, whose family scrimped and saved to get him a no. 2 pencil, the price of admission to his local school.2 These are extreme cases, I know, but around the world, education often remains the only way out of poverty. Even in the United States, getting an undergraduate degree increases your average salary by 70 percent. No matter where you are, education has the power to change your life by improving your earning power.
Not only that, one longitudinal study demonstrated that a lack of education can be as harmful to your health as smoking. Education improves your ability to process and understand information. Education also helps you become more curious and self-sufficient and teaches you how to trade short-term pain for long-term gain. People who drop out of high school die, on average, a decade earlier than their peers who have a bachelor’s degree. But more than 10 percent of Americans ages twenty-four to thirty-five (over eight million people) don’t have a high school degree.
Maybe you’re with me. Or maybe you’re rolling your eyes, wanting to throw names like Richard Branson and Katy Perry in my face, to prove that it’s possible to drop out and still make it big. But (as I’m sure you secretly know) these lucky people are the exception, not the rule. If you want to extend your salary and your life, education is pretty much the best bet.
After all, if it weren’t for that exam, I wouldn’t be here. Even though I grew up in poverty, too, my father laid the groundwork for my success, and he never let me forget it. It wasn’t until he got his PhD after years in Canada that he finally found a job as a research scientist for the government, and that’s when things started to turn around. Dad has always played the long game.
And he was right; all the blood, sweat, and tears to get my degree were worth it in the end. But as you’ll see in the next chapter, not all college degrees are created equal.