by Xiling Wang
My uncle is a man who deserves respect. He was once a boy from a poor rural village in the suburbs of Shanghai. Due to the poverty of his family, the most luxurious and favorite food he had in childhood was just rice mixed with soy sauce and lard. It was precisely this boy who grew up in a poor environment, who, through studying day and night, stood out in the extremely competitive Gaokao, the only college entrance exam for Chinese high school students, and was admitted to the highly ranked Fudan University in China, entering a popular major at the time—computer engineering (Gan, US News). He was not satisfied with this and continued to pursue a master’s degree and successfully entered a large American tech company. In Chinese society thirty years ago, such a life path was almost unimaginable for an ordinary rural youth. Since then, his life and social status underwent a fundamental transformation.
When my uncle recalled this glorious experience, his tone was filled with a kind of firmness, pride, and taken-for-granted sense of honor. He firmly believed that all his achievements stem from that Gaokao which led him away from that poor region. Based on his personal experience, he always advised me and my peers: “As long as you study hard now, everything is possible.”
I have heard this story countless times since I was little. It almost became the most common and mainstream success narrative in my upbringing. However, when I carefully listened to my uncle tell his story in person, I gradually realized that part of the story had been deliberately erased. He spoke at length about his childhood and later academic and professional successes, but, as I remember, he never mentioned the hardships he faced during Gaokao preparation, only that he studied extensively. Maybe for him and for many students in local schools, that level of pressure was so normalized that it didn’t even seem worth mentioning—it was expected, not exceptional. His story seemed to skip over his high school years entirely—there was no exhaustion, no anxiety, no torment swallowed up by huge expectations and uncertainty. In his description, the Gaokao seemed to be just a bridge he successfully crossed, not a grueling psychological battle.
But I know very well that the truth is not like that. I also once studied at a local middle school in China, and I personally experienced the tremendous psychological pressure brought by just a single district-level mock exam. Take my middle school as an example: our schedule began with a morning run at 6:30 a.m., followed by classes at 7:30 a.m., and ended only after self-study at 10 p.m., with little time for meals. By ninth grade, our homework often kept us up until 3 a.m. On countless nights, anxiety, insomnia, and self-doubt tormented me and my classmates. Over time, this intense routine didn’t make us any less anxious; it only taught us how to function while suppressing the stress. We became numb—not because the pressure disappeared, but because feeling it came with a cost. No one had the time or energy to deal with anxiety—we couldn’t afford to lose even a minute of rest. Complaining to teachers or parents felt pointless, because every worksheet completed meant a better chance on a future exam. Over time, we learned to remain silent about these feelings and gradually regard them as a part of growing up. Though our middle school life was already intense, we all knew the real pressure would begin in high school.
The Gaokao amplifies all the anxiety, pressure, and emotional suppression on a much larger scale. Each year, with the exception of a handful of early-admitted geniuses, the only path for more than ten million senior students to be accepted into their desired universities is to achieve a top Gaokao (Gan). Thus, in high school, to ensure students are fully prepared for that exam, everyone treated every test as a rehearsal for the Gaokao; each score carried emotional weight for the entire family. Everyone’s focus became centered entirely on the Gaokao. During the Gaokao period, it’s not uncommon to even see teachers and parents wearing red Qipaos—a symbol of auspicious beginnings and success (Zuo), while construction is halted to minimize noise, and government transportation providing free services for test-taking students (Wang and Chen). The Gaokao receives so much attention because it determines whether we were qualified to get into the university that meets our expectations, whether our chosen college could give us the confidence to face society and apply for good jobs, bring our parents pride in front of relatives and friends, and repay all the teachers who had once invested their energy and hopes in us. Under the coexistence of intense public attention, high expectations from families, and overwhelming pressure from the exam itself, for the majority of students preparing to take it, the Gaokao is widely regarded as a life-defining checkpoint—one where success is seen as the only acceptable outcome, and failure feels nearly unimaginable.
Given this powerful cultural narrative and societal expectation, I gradually realized what the Gaokao shapes is not merely a competition mechanism but also a powerful emotional discipline system. What that system teaches us is not how to effectively express and deal with these negative emotions but how to more skillfully hide, suppress, and eventually forget them. From what I’ve observed in this system, pain and struggle are rarely acknowledged. Emotional expression is often seen as meaningless or even harmful, and students learn that the safest response is to remain silent. Over time, this silence gradually becomes an internalized virtue that is worthy of praise.
This internalization of silence is not merely theoretical. In their study “Chinese school adolescents’ stress experience and coping strategies: a qualitative study,” Xiaoyun Zhou et al. interviewed Chinese high school students and their teachers to understand how these students deal with stress caused by educational structures and social expectations. They found that “students demonstrated various coping strategies, with the most common being avoidant coping,” which they define as “avoiding the situation” that commonly leads to “internalizing or externalizing problems” (1). When facing academic or emotional stress, “almost all student participants mentioned that they tended to suppress the unpleasant feelings” (Zhou et al.). In focus groups, students “recommended that we provided skills training for them to regulate their negative emotions when they felt stressed.” Zhou et al concluded that “participants demonstrated consensus that they did not have the skills to cope” (1). This widespread lack of coping skills reveals a deeper structural problem: why have students never been taught how to process and express their stress?
The interviews in Zhou et al’s study indirectly provide an answer. One participant shared that “many times when I told my parents about my stress, they would analyze the situation from a different perspective and [try] to prove that it was my problem, and it made me very annoyed” (7). Another stated that during conflict with his parents, he had to remain silent because “if I really refute them, my parents might cry” (5). Zhou et al’s findings suggest that in many cases, emotional expression is perceived by students not as a means of seeking support, but as a potential trigger for conflict or guilt. Building on this, I believe that for many Chinese students—especially those in high-pressure academic environments—silence becomes more than a coping mechanism: in their eyes, to speak up is to disrupt harmony, while silence is a way to preserve peace, even at personal cost. In such a social atmosphere, silence is no longer just an unfortunate reality but becomes a self-imposed strategy.
This silence forged by a collectivist sense of self-sacrifice echoes the dynamic forcefully imposed on the writer’s aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman, who, after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, was shamed and expelled by her family. The family, deeply rooted in traditional Chinese values, viewed the aunt’s act as a disgrace that threatened the honor of the entire household. Amid the rigid moral expectations of early twentieth-century China, Kingston’s aunt ultimately took her own life by jumping into the family well, following a prolonged period of emotional torment. The warning to Kingston in her mother’s telling is especially striking: “You must not tell anyone . . . We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (Kingston 3). Her mother’s words are not meant to evoke sympathy, but rather serve as a moral instruction centered on preserving the family’s reputation.
Reading the story, what shocked me most was not the aunt’s suicide, but the realization—through Kingston’s eyes—of how completely her aunt’s feelings and existence were erased by both her family and the surrounding culture. The aunt’s thoughts, fears, and experiences were deliberately excluded from the family’s narrative—most of those who knew of her existence, like Kingston’s father and other relatives, chose to pretend “she had never been born”, silencing her memory under the weight of cultural and familial shame (Kingston 3). The kind of silence Kingston depicts is not a personal choice but a structural compulsion. This silence is a cultural mechanism: it defines what can be expressed and what must be hidden, thus shaping the boundaries of emotional expression. When the aunt’s actions and experience did not conform to the morally acceptable ones in society, her existence and voice had to be entirely denied. Even though being pregnant was in her expectation—as Kingston’s mother said, “In early summer she was ready to have the child”—people didn’t accept this situation (3). This denial was not only of her as a person, but also of all individual emotions that might challenge social norms and collective honor.
I believe my uncle may also have been shaped by this culture of silence. In a time when most people around him were toiling in the fields just to have enough to eat, the hardship of studying probably felt insignificant by comparison. Perhaps that is why, when he shared his story with me, he focused on the achievements he made, leaving out the exhaustion of preparing for the Gaokao. When I reflect on the silence of my uncle, the silence of students facing the Gaokao, and the silence of the voiceless woman in Kingston’s text, I realize that what hides behind these silences is not just personal repression and pain, but deeper social and cultural operations. The constant definition of what may be expressed and what must be hidden creates countless silenced subjects. Their emotions, struggles, and pain are systematically denied and erased, while their silence is misinterpreted as ‘strength’ and praised as a necessary virtue.
Whether it is the Gaokao system’s discipline of students or traditional culture’s oppression of women, silence here acts as a tool of power. It can significantly undermine our ability to express authentic emotions, without us realizing that this ability has already been compromised. After being morally coerced into silence time and again, and then inexplicably praised for being ‘obedient’ and ‘considerate,’ we young people may begin to internalize silence as a ‘normal,’ even ‘noble’ way of living. What was once the forced acceptance of silence is gradually redefined—invisibly—as a voluntary choice.
What we might deeply reflect on is: when society refuses to listen to these voices hidden beneath structural silence, what do we actually lose? What we risk losing may not only be the freedom and space for individual emotional expression, but also the possibility for us as a society to deeply understand each other and understand humanity. What if, when we can no longer authentically express emotions, we can no longer truly sympathize, empathize, or connect with one another. Just as Kingston chooses to resist the silence imposed by her family through writing, I, too, hope that this essay can begin to question and challenge the silences that have long been taken for granted. When we start listening to the voices that have been hidden, suppressed, and denied, we are not simply restoring individual subjectivity. We are, piece by piece, contributing to the possibility of deeper human connection.
That said, more and more students today are beginning to push back against the legacy of structural silence. They speak out on social media, raise their concerns in classrooms, and are active in counseling sessions. I have friends who took leaves of absence to prioritize their mental health, and others who chose to repeat an academic year rather than accept their failures and mask their struggles in silence. Their actions show us that acknowledging pressure is not a sign of weakness but an act of strength. Silence may have once felt like the only option—but today, at least, we are beginning to understand that it is a choice we are allowed to refuse.
What stays with me most, even after writing all these thoughts, is still my uncle’s silence. Though his Gaokao took place three decades ago—the exam that pulled him out of rural poverty and into one of China’s top universities—I still wish my uncle could speak openly about the pressure and pain he endured along the way. His story of high school may have ended long ago, but the silence he carries still echoes in the experiences of many young people navigating the same system today. However, I can’t help but wonder: what if he had been given the space to talk about his pressure? Would he dismiss it as unimportant, or would he finally be open about the emotional cost he never acknowledged? I’ve never asked. It’s hard for people to change. But perhaps writing this essay is my first step toward asking. Because silence doesn’t break itself.
Works Cited
“Best Global Universities in China.” U.S News & World Report-Education, www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/china.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. “No Name Woman.” The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Vintage International, 1989, pp. 1–16.
Gan, Nectar. “Record 13 million to sit ‘world’s toughest’ college entrance exam.” CNN, 7 Jun. 2024, edition.cnn.com/2024/06/07/china/china-gaokao-2024-record-number-intl-hnk.
Wang, Danning, and Chen Ziyan. “Measures implemented to assist students taking China’s national college admissions exam” Asia News Network, 9 Jun. 2025, asianews.network/measures-implemented-to-assist-students-taking-chinas-national-college-admissions-exam.
Zhou, X., Bambling, M., Bai, X. et al. “Chinese school adolescents’ stress experience and coping strategies: a qualitative study.” BMC Psychol 11, 91 (2023). doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01137-y.
Zuo, Mandy. “Chinese men and male siblings don qipaos to wish students good luck during gaokao university entrance exam.” South China Morning Post, 7 Jun. 2023, www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/gender-diversity/article/3180868/chinese-men-and-male-siblings-don-qipaos-wish.