Me vs. Gaokao: How It Broke Me

With the last class of the day finally over, I walked out of the cramped classroom, down the corridor, turned the corner — and there it was: a huge digital countdown screen.

Today’s number felt a little different: “200 days left until Gaokao.”

That was the moment when everything started to fall off track — or at least, that’s how I remember it.

The evening study session began. I sat in front of a pile of test papers and sighed. Lately, one thought kept circling in my mind: What’s the point of Gaokao? Is this really the most important thing in my life? Why am I pouring all my effort into meeting expectations I never chose? Why am I grinding myself down day after day, just because someone told me Gaokao is everything?

I was confused.

Twelve hours a day trapped in the classroom. Sacrificing after-school time, sports, even sleep — all for studying. Endless exams. And everywhere you turned: manipulative propaganda plastered across the walls. Hollow slogans glorifying suffering, sugar-coating the struggle, dressing up obedience as ambition.

“No pain, no gain.”

“Endure the bitterest hardships — earn the highest scores.”

How come so many of my classmates didn’t seem to have any doubts about what was happening around them? They looked so certain, so determined.

Ever since I began questioning everything around me, I completely lost the motivation to prepare for Gaokao. The doubts fractured my mind — but my body held on, just barely. Then my biggest academic obstacle showed up.

The science exams: physics, chemistry, biology, all packed into one brutal, two-and-a-half-hour endurance test. It wasn’t just an exam — it was two and a half hours of nonstop calculation, memorization, pressure building with every minute, my head pounding, my hand going numb. A marathon I never signed up for. I hated it. Separate subject exams had always made me feel more in control, but this high-intensity grind left me completely drained every time. And they forced us to do it every Sunday. Sometimes, when they laid the paper flat in front of me, I just sat there — frozen, staring, doing nothing.

All that remained in my memory was suffocating exhaustion. It felt like prison. It wasn’t studying anymore. It was scraping by — just trying to stay afloat.

During evening study sessions, I secretly read so-called Xianshu — only to be caught by my homeroom teacher, who confiscated the book. (Xianshu were always harmless books — novels, magazines, anything labeled as a distraction by the system.)

I slipped out of the classroom at night and wandered onto the football field, just to breathe, to feel a shred of freedom. But every time I returned, my teacher asked where I had been. She didn’t understand why I was acting so strange. She even asked me if I was secretly dating someone.

I laughed to myself — cold and bitter. Did I really look like someone who still had the energy to chase girls?

Those last few months before Gaokao were a nightmare.

Every single day, the only thing on my mind was: “When will Gaokao finally come?” Not because I cared about the exam — but because it felt like the only way to escape all this crap.

As expected, my grades were collapsing like a staircase — dropping one level at a time, exam after exam.

Looking at my scores, my mom didn’t know what was wrong with me. All she noticed were the surface symptoms — insomnia, constant anxiety, total exhaustion, tinnitus, even obsessive-compulsive tendencies I couldn’t control.

But she couldn’t see the real problem: I was falling apart inside. It wasn’t physical or mental stress. It was a spiritual collapse — a total crisis of meaning.

She took me to the hospital — neurology, ENT, anywhere that might offer an answer.

Eventually, we got something: one doctor said the tinnitus happened because I was paying too much attention to it; another said it might be incurable.

Other than that, we got nothing.

On the surface, my mom looked even more anxious than I did. Then, out of nowhere, she brought home a bag of mysterious Chinese medicine. And every night, after a full day of “prison time” at school with classmates and teachers, I had my own “poison time” at home. I had to force down a bowl of bitter, black liquid.

She tried everything to cure me — or at least, to fix my body. Or maybe, just to save my grades.

At the beginning of that period, I believed scores were everything. Judging by how people reacted, I thought I was right. But gradually, nothing seemed to matter anymore.

All I wanted was to escape. But all I could do was wait. Endure the numbness, the slow unraveling — until that day finally came: Gaokao.

I still remember the day Gaokao ended. I came home and had dinner with my mom. She asked me, “If your score isn’t good, you can always repeat the year.”

That was the final straw. The brief, quiet relief after Gaokao vanished. Months of suppressed emotion exploded.

I lost it. I broke down completely — crying, screaming: “I’d rather die than do that year all over again.”

Looking back now, I’m still not sure how I made it through those months. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe some part of me never came back — from that classroom, from that exam, from that so-called “rite of passage.”

Even years later, whenever I hold a pen, my hand trembles — that same old fear rushing back, the panic of running out of time. Some random nights, I wake up from nightmares, back in that classroom, trapped in those months, like I never left.

They told us Gaokao would change our lives.

It did — just not in the way they promised.