The year I took the gaokao — China’s national college entrance exam — I wrote an essay that, to my surprise, later became one of only two model essays in the official exam guide.
It was the most concentrated proof of whatever writing ability I had, and the first — and most complete — recognition my writing ever received.
Seven years have passed.
I didn’t become a writer, and I didn’t keep writing. But recently, my high school teacher reached out and asked me to write something for the students coming after me. The moment I picked up the pen, I realized I hadn’t truly written anything in a very long time.
I was never one of those people who are good at writing.
After the gaokao, I wrote almost nothing complete.
Work reports, application materials, event plans — putting words down isn’t hard, but that isn’t writing.
The urge to actually write something only came back recently.
I started to see that I hadn’t stopped writing because I had nothing to say. I stopped because we live in an era where expression gets graded. The moment you know you will be seen, you start asking whether your expression deserves to be seen — whether it is good enough, whether it would score well. Writing stops being expression and becomes a selection process; words stop being yourself and become a performance. And inside that system, little by little, I learned to shut up.
At first, I only meant to write down some tips for scoring well. But the further I wrote, the more I found that what I really wanted to put down wasn’t “tips” — it was the thing that has carried me forward through these seven years. Not a habit, not a goal. Closer to a creed: don’t run. Don’t run from expressing. Don’t run from facing the real problem.
I decided to write again not because I’m good at it, but because I finally want to say things — and this time, I’m writing only for myself.
What follows is where that road came from.
In tenth grade, my essays were unremarkable — scores drifting around the class average. I didn’t think I had any particular talent. I wrote by the book, the way teachers taught: stack up viewpoints, patch together examples, make the essay long enough, and hope for a decent score.
But I wasn’t content with “unremarkable.” So I started studying “technique” — advanced vocabulary, ornate sentences, parallel structures, epigraphs, quotable lines. Anything that made an essay look more impressive, I was willing to try.
Then I met bōrě.
That year, I came across the word in a book: “Bōrě — a transliteration from the Sanskrit prajñā, meaning great wisdom.” How mysterious. How profound. How philosophical! The word seized me instantly; I felt I had touched some hidden essence of writing. If I could work a word like that into an essay, wouldn’t the whole thing rise a level?
So I began stuffing bōrě into everything. On life: “Life is like bōrě — hard to fathom.” On growing up: “As a boy I knew not bōrě; only now do I grasp its meaning.” On setbacks, I even wrote: “Fate is like bōrě — sinking or floating, all is practice.” I was sure this made my writing profound. And the result?
It got torn apart.
One day, our Chinese teacher, Teacher Cai, read my essay aloud in class, then sighed: “‘Life is like bōrě’ — what does that mean? Can you explain it yourself?”
I froze.
“Are you using this word because it actually expresses what you think — or because it looks impressive?”
My face went hot. I had believed “advanced vocabulary” would make me write better; all it did was make me a punchline. My classmates picked the word up immediately and started using it on me —
“Today’s math homework is impossible. Absolutely bōrě.”
“You solved that one? So much bōrě!”
“The cafeteria food today is very bōrě.”
From then on, I never dared use a word carelessly again. That was the first time I understood: writing is not the stacking of impressive vocabulary — it is a risk you take in order to express something. To express yourself is to accept the risk of being questioned, misread, even laughed at. But real expression means admitting you can’t say it well yet — and saying it anyway.
Then in eleventh grade, my essays started failing, one after another. The comments filled up with “confused logic,” “unclear theme,” “verbose.” The red marks on my papers were nearly denser than my own writing; every exam felt like a lost battle.
I panicked, and went back to cramming technique — epigraphs, parallel structure, subheadings, golden lines. I piled them all on, trying to engineer a perfect essay.
Once, the assigned topic was “growth.” I racked my brains and produced a meticulously designed piece:
“Wind can scatter the clouds, but cannot scatter memory; the years can take away youth, but cannot take away the first dream.” (A perfect epigraph! Atmosphere! Philosophy!)
Then I cut the essay into three parts, each with its own lofty subheading:
Wind scatters clouds, not memory — on childhood
Years take youth, not dreams — on growing up
Life rises and falls; the original heart remains — the uplifting conclusion
I thought the essay was airtight. The result? A failing grade.
I stormed into the office to confront Teacher Tang: “What is wrong with this essay? I think it’s good!”
He glanced at it, shook his head, and smiled: “Is this a piece of writing — or a speech?”
I froze.
“All your techniques are tidy. They look ‘right.’ But they are only techniques — the content is empty. Every sentence here was written to look good, not to say something.”
That day, I went back and reread my essays one by one, and finally saw the problem: I had been chasing formal perfection, when real writing isn’t packaging on the surface. It’s the thinking underneath.
By twelfth grade, I had finally given up the ornaments and begun to actually think about what makes a piece of writing good.
I started noticing that the essays that stayed with me never stayed because of technique. They stayed because they held real life, real conflict, real feeling.
Some classmates wrote about utterly ordinary things, yet their essays had a pulse — one paragraph in, you were inside the story.
One classmate of mine scored high on essays, consistently. I once asked him: “How do you always manage to move people?”
He said: “I don’t try to cover much. I write one small thing, and write it all the way through.”
He once wrote about flying a kite: his parents beside him, the dejection when the string snapped, the persistence when the wind rose again. Family, setback, growth — and himself — all in one afternoon.
He wasn’t writing an essay. He was re-understanding a moment of his life that mattered.
But even knowing all this, my essays in senior year still never reached the level that stuns a room. Honestly, I couldn’t accept it. I was clearly putting in the work — why wouldn’t the scores move? Why did essays that looked about the same as mine score higher? I refused to believe I wrote that badly. So after every exam, I went to the Chinese teacher’s office to battle. Sometimes we discussed things calmly; sometimes we argued until the whole office went quiet. How exactly do you grade? Where did I lose points? Why doesn’t my approach work?
For a while, I felt my relationship with Teacher Tang was tense. I thought he was a nitpicker, forever finding fault, and sometimes I even suspected he was picking on me. But after every exam, I still went to face off with him, trying to figure out what was actually wrong with my writing. I would walk him through my thinking step by step, and I kept asking:
“Why is this essay only a 50?”
“Why does his read about the same as mine and get a 60?”
“How do you actually give these scores?”
At the end of one of those battles, Teacher Tang suddenly sighed and said: “Do you know that in the entire grade, you are the only one who comes to argue with me about scores — every single time?”
I thought about it and said, seriously: “If I did badly, I should figure out why.”
He looked at me, smiled slightly, and said nothing.
In that moment, it hit me — much of the time, we don’t lose on ability. We lose on “forget it.”
And I just wasn’t willing to say forget it.
On the last mock exam before the gaokao, my essay finally received a relatively high score. That afternoon, handing back the papers, Teacher Tang smiled and asked: “So — done battling?”
I shook my head and said, seriously: “It’s not that I’m done. It’s that I finally know what’s worth battling isn’t the score — it’s whether I actually wrote well.” Only later did I understand: I was never fighting for a few points. I was forcing myself to face the real questions — did I actually express it clearly? Did I actually understand what I wanted to say? I wasn’t battling the teacher. I was battling the version of myself that kept trying to please the rubric.
Looking back: it took more than two years of marching into that office, tearing up my old approach, deleting the sentences that “looked right but meant nothing,” before I began to touch the edge of what writing is.
In tenth grade, I thought writing ran on talent and the gloss of vocabulary. In eleventh, on technique — epigraphs, parallelism, subheadings. Only in twelfth did I understand: real writing runs on the refusal to give up.
So does everything else.
A while ago, the author of the novel Mire told a story. He wrote fiction for twenty years and was rejected the whole way. It was his first love who kept encouraging him to continue. Before his work was finally published, she died of an illness, leaving behind one line:
“A life holds a great deal of pain. But look back, and all of it is legend.”
I have no wish to glorify suffering. On the contrary — I am grateful that at every stage, someone was willing to back me. And I’m glad that the moments of frustration, struggle, and refusal to settle eventually became part of me.
Over these seven years, I’ve stumbled down a lot of road — from a student without much confidence to someone gradually finding his direction. What carried me the whole way is really just one thing: don’t run.
Don’t run from expressing. Don’t run from facing the real problem. Don’t run from the fight with yourself.
Even if I say it badly, do it wrong, write it imperfectly — write it down first, face it, and try again.
That is not just the creed writing gave me. It is what I keep choosing to believe.
This was the first post on my Chinese-language blog.