The main street of Maotanchang, a secluded town in the furrowed hills of eastern China’s Anhui province, was nearly deserted. A man dozed on a motorized rickshaw, while two old women with hoes shuffled toward the rice paddies outside town. It was 11:44 on a Sunday morning last spring, and the row of shops selling food, tea and books by the pound stood empty. Even the town’s sacred tree lured no supplicants; beneath its broad limbs, a single bundle of incense smoldered on a pile of ash.
毛坦厂是一座僻静的小镇，坐落在中国东部省份安徽，周围是沟壑丛生的山峦。它的主街道上空荡荡的，一个男人在机动三轮车上打瞌睡，两个老妇扛着锄头朝城外的稻田缓缓走去。那是去年春天一个星期天上午的11点44分。在鱼塘旁，一排出售食品、茶叶和书籍的商店无人光顾，就连镇里的神树下也没人许愿；在宽大的树冠下，一柱香在一堆灰烬上闷烧着。

One minute later, at precisely 11:45, the stillness was shattered. Thousands of teenagers swarmed out of the towering front gate of Maotanchang High School. Many of them wore identical black-and-white Windbreakers emblazoned with the slogan, in English, “I believe it, I can do it.” It was lunchtime at one of China’s most secretive “cram schools” — a memorization factory where 20,000 students, or four times the town’s official population, train round the clock for China’s national college-entrance examination, known as the gaokao. The grueling test, which is administered every June over two or three days (depending on the province), is the lone criterion for admission to Chinese universities. For the students at Maotanchang, most of whom come from rural areas, it offers the promise of a life beyond the fields and the factories, of families’ fortunes transformed by hard work and high scores.
一分钟后，就在11点45分，寂静被打破了。上万名少年涌出了毛坦厂中学高耸的大门。其中很多人都穿着同款的黑白两色风衣，上面印着英文口号“I believe it, I can do it”。现在是午餐时间，而毛坦厂中学是中国最神秘的“备考学校”之一：这是一所强化记忆的工厂，有2万名学生，人数是该镇的官方人口的四倍。他们不分昼夜地学习，为俗称“高考”的普通高等学校招生全国统一考试做准备。高考每年6月举行，为期两到三天（取决于不同的省份），相当严酷，是中国大学录取学生的唯一标准。毛坦厂中学的学生大部分来自农村，而高考为他们提供了一个机会，让他们不被农田和工厂生活所局限，能靠努力学习和高分来改变家庭的命运。
Yang Wei, a 12th grader at this public school, steered me through the crowd. A peach farmer’s son in half-laced high-tops, Yang had spent the previous three years, weekends included, stumbling to his first class at 6:20 in the morning and returning to his room only after the end of his last class at 10:50 at night. Yang and I met at this precise moment, after his Sunday-morning practice test, because it was the only free time he had all week — a single three-hour reprieve. Now, with the gaokao just 69 days away — the number appeared on countdown calendars all over town — Yang had entered the final, frenetic stretch. “If you connected all of the practice tests I’ve taken over the past three years,” he told me with a bitter laugh, “they would wrap all the way around the world.”
杨维（音）是这所公立学校的高三学生，父亲是桃农。他穿着系了一半鞋带的高帮运动鞋，带领我穿过人群。三年来，杨维每天早上冲去上6点20开始的第一节课，晚上10点50最后一节课结束后才回到自己的房间，周末也不例外。周日上午的模拟考试结束后，杨维和我在这个精确到分的时间碰面，因为这是他整整一周中唯一的空闲时间，而且仅有三个小时。现在离高考只有69天了——镇里各处都能看到倒计时器——杨维已经进入了最后的疯狂冲刺阶段。“如果把我过去三年做过的所有模拟试卷连在一起，都可以绕地球一周了，”他苦笑着对我说。
Yang and I had communicated on social media for weeks, and the 18-year-old seemed almost giddy to be hosting an American expatriate. Yet there was a crisis brewing. Even with all the relentless practice, Yang’s scores were slipping, a fact that clouded over the lunch I ate with his family in the single room that he and his mother shared near the sacred tree. We were joined by Yang’s father, visiting for the afternoon, and his closest friend from his home village, a classmate named Cao Yingsheng — all squeezed into a space barely big enough for a bunk bed, a desk and a rice cooker. The room’s rent, however, was high, rivaling rates in downtown Beijing, and it represented only part of the sacrifice Yang’s parents made to help him, their only son, become the first family member to attend college.
杨维和我在社交媒体上已经联络了好几周。对于招待一名常驻中国的美国客人，18岁的他好像有点犯晕。然而，一场危机正在酝酿。虽然一直在参加模拟考试，杨维的分数却在下滑。我和他的家人共进午餐时，这件事搞得气氛颇为阴沉。他和母亲住在神树附近的一个单间里，我们就在那里吃的中饭。下午来看他的父亲也到了，还有他的同乡同学、最好的朋友曹英生（音）——所有人都挤在这个勉强够放一张上下铺、一张书桌和一个饭锅的狭小空间里。这间房的租金很高，可以和北京市中心的地段媲美，但这只是父母为了培养独子成为家里第一个大学生而做出的部分牺牲。
Yang’s mother, Lin Jiamin, quit her garment-factory job to support him in his final year of cramming. Cao’s mother came to live with her son as well. “It’s a lot of pressure,” said Cao, whose family paid more in school fees than Yang’s family — about $2,000 a semester — because of his low marks entering high school. “My mother constantly reminds me that I have to study hard, because my father is out working construction far from home to pay my school fees.” The room went quiet for a minute. They all knew this was the boys’ fate, too, if they failed to do well on the gaokao. “Dagong,” Yang said. “Manual labor.” He and Cao would have to join China’s 260-million-strong army of migrant workers.
杨维的母亲林佳敏（音）辞去了制衣厂的工作，来支持他最后一年的备考冲刺。曹英生的母亲也过来和儿子一起居住。“压力很大，”曹英生说。因为他中考的分数不够，家里交的学费比杨维多，每学期差不多1.2万元人民币。“我母亲总是提醒我，一定要努力学习，因为为了给我交学费，父亲到了很远的建筑工地打工。”房间里静了一分钟。他们都知道，如果高考没有考好，孩子们的未来也是一样。“打工，”杨维说。“体力劳动”。那样的话，他和曹英生就得加入中国2.6亿的农民工大军。
Yang was eager to be a good host. But as his mother plied us with chicken wings and sesame tofu, his eyelids drooped. Yang’s mother wanted him to study after lunch, but his father interceded. “The brain needs a rest, too,” he told his wife. With hardly a word, Yang climbed into the top bunk and collapsed with his high-tops still on.
杨维很想当好东道主。不过，当他的母亲给我们不断送上鸡翅和芝麻豆腐时，他的上下眼皮直打架。母亲希望他在午饭后学习，但父亲替他求了情。“大脑也需要休息休息，”他告诉妻子。几乎没说一个字，杨维爬进了上铺，倒头就睡，运动鞋也没来得及脱。
Nothing consumes the lives of Chinese families more than the ever-­looming prospect of the gaokao. The exam — there are two versions, one focused on science, the other on humanities — is the modern incarnation of the imperial keju, generally regarded as the world’s first standardized test. For more than 1,300 years, into the early 20th century, the keju funneled young men into China’s civil service. Today, more than nine million students take the gaokao each year (fewer than 3.5 million, combined, take the SAT and the ACT). But the pressure to start memorizing and regurgitating facts weighs on Chinese students from the moment they enter elementary school. Even at the liberal bilingual kindergarten my sons attended in Beijing, Chinese parents pushed their 5-year-olds to learn multiplication tables and proper Chinese and English syntax, lest their children fall behind their peers in first grade. “To be honest,” one of my Chinese friends, a new mother, told me, “the gaokao race really begins at birth.”
对中国家庭来说，没有什么事情比高考日益迫近更磨人了。高考——分为理科和文科——是中国古代科举制度的当代化身。科举把年轻男性筛选到国家官员体系中，通常被视为世界上第一个标准化考试制度，延续了1300多年之久，直到20世纪初才废除。如今，每年有超过900万名高考考生（参加美国SAT[学术能力评估]和ACT[美国大学入学考试]的学生合计不到350万）。但是，中国学生自从进入小学的那一刻起，就开始承受着死记硬背和机械重复的压力。即使是在我的几个儿子在北京上的一所比较自由的双语幼儿园，中国父母也让自己5岁的孩子学习乘法表及正规的中英文语法，以免在一年级的时候落在同龄人后面。一个中国朋友最近当上了妈妈，她告诉我，“说实话，高考竞争从孩子一出生就开始了。”
China’s treadmill of standardized tests has produced, along with high levels of literacy and government control, some of the world’s most scarily proficient test-takers. Shanghai high-school students have dominated the last two cycles of the Program for International Student Assessment exam, leading more than one U.S. official to connect this to a broader “Sputnik moment” of coming Chinese superiority. Yet even as American educators try to divine the secret of China’s test-taking prowess, the gaokao is coming under fire in China as an anachronism that stifles innovative thought and puts excessive pressure on students. Teenage suicide rates tend to rise as the gaokao nears. Two years ago, a student posted a shocking photograph online: a public high-school classroom full of students hunched over books, all hooked up to intravenous drips to give them the strength to keep studying.
中国标准化考试的马拉松不仅提高了公众的文化水平和政府的控制力，还造就了世界上最可怕的考试达人。在国际学生评估项目(Program for International Student Assessment)的上两次测试中，上海的高中生蝉联榜首，导致多名美国官员将这件事与更大意义上的“斯普特尼克卫星(Sputnik)时刻”联系了起来，认为它是中国即将超越美国的征兆之一。然而，尽管美国的教育工作者试图探究中国人应试能力的奥秘，高考却在本国遭到了抨击。一些人说它扼杀了创新思维，给学生施加了过于沉重的压力，不符合时代精神。青少年自杀率往往随着高考的临近而上升。两年前，一名学生在网上贴出了一张震惊众人的照片：在一所公立高中的课堂上，学生们埋头看书，所有人都在打点滴，以便获得继续学习的能量。
Beijing is now pushing reforms to reduce student workloads, expand the curriculum beyond core courses and allow universities to consider factors other than gaokao scores. Yet the government efforts have received token compliance from an entrenched bureaucracy and outright resistance from many parents who fear that easing the pressure could hurt their children’s exam results and jeopardize their futures. “China is caught in a prisoner’s dilemma,” says Yong Zhao, a professor of education at the University of Oregon and the author of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?” “Nobody is willing to break away, because the gaokao is still the only path to heaven.”
中央政府正在推动改革，以减少学生的课业负担、让课程设置不仅限于核心课程，并允许各大院校考虑高考分数之外的因素。然而，政府的努力不仅面临着根深蒂固的官僚体制的阳奉阴违，还遭到了很多家长的坚决反对，因为他们担心，减压可能会不利于自己孩子的考试成绩，危及他们的前途。“中国陷入了囚徒困境，”俄勒冈大学(University of Oregon)的教育学教授、《谁怕那条大恶龙》(Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?)的作者赵勇说。“没人愿意放弃它，因为高考仍是通往天堂的唯一途径。”
Even as cram schools have proliferated across urban areas, Maotanchang is a world apart, a remote one-industry town that produces test-taking machines with the same single-minded commitment that other Chinese towns devote to making socks or Christmas ornaments. The glut of university students may have eroded the value of a college degree, especially as unemployment and underemployment rises among new graduates. And many wealthy families are simply opting out of the system, placing their children in private international schools in China or sending them abroad for an education. But for those of limited means, like Yang, the economic uncertainty has only intensified the gaokao competition; a few points either way could determine whether a student qualifies for a degree that is worth something — or nothing. “The competition is fiercer than ever,” says Jiang Xueqin, an assistant vice principal at Tsinghua University High School. “And rural students are getting left behind.”
中国各地的城市已经涌现了大量备考强化学校，但毛坦厂仍然独一无二。这是一座偏僻的单一产业城镇，出产的是应试机器，就像其他一些专门生产袜子或圣诞饰品的中国乡镇一样心无旁骛。大学生过剩可能已经削弱了高校文凭的价值，尤其是在应届毕业生失业率和就业不足率双双上升的情况下。很多富裕家庭干脆选择不进入这个系统，让自家子女就读中国的私立国际学校，或者把他们送到国外去接受教育。但是，对于那些家庭条件有限的人，比如杨维，经济上的不确定性反而加剧了高考竞争的激烈程度；几分之差就能够决定一个学生究竟是进入学位含金量高的学校，还是一无所获。“竞争比以往任何时候都更加激烈，”清华附中副校长江学勤说。“而且农村学生越来越落后。”
Isolated in the foothills of Anhui, two hours from the nearest city, Maotanchang caters mostly to such students and prides itself on eliminating the distractions of modern life. Cellphones and laptops are forbidden; the dormitories, where roughly half the students live, were designed without electrical outlets. Romance is banned. In town, where the rest of the students live, mostly with their mothers in tiny partitioned rooms, the local government has shut down all forms of entertainment. This may be the only town in China with no video arcade, billiards hall or Internet cafe. “There’s nothing to do but study,” Yang says.
毛坦厂中学满足的主要就是此类学生的需求。它被隔绝在安徽的山脚下，距离最近的城市有两小时路程，以屏蔽了现代生活的干扰为傲。学生不准使用手机或笔记本电脑；大约一半的学生住宿舍，房间里特地没有装电源插座；不准谈恋爱。另外一半学生住在镇上，大多与母亲一起栖身在狭小的隔间里。当地政府已经取缔了一切娱乐场所。这可能是中国唯一没有电子游戏厅、台球厅和网吧的小镇。“没什么可以做的，只能学习，”杨维说。
Town planning is not the only means through which the school instills discipline in kids like Yang, a normally fun-loving teenager from Yuejin whom his father calls “the most mischievous kid in the village.” Maotanchang’s all-male corps of head teachers doles out lessons, and frequently punishments, with military rigor; their job security and bonuses depend on raising their students’ test scores. Security guards roam the 165-acre campus in golf carts and on motorcycles, while surveillance cameras track students’ movements in classrooms, dormitories and even the town’s main intersections. This “closed management practice,” as an assistant principal, Li Zhenhua, has termed it, gets results. In 1998, only 98 Maotanchang students achieved the minimum gaokao score needed to enter a university. Fifteen years later, 9,312 students passed, and the school was striving to break the 10,000 mark in 2014. Yang and Cao hoped to be among them.
小镇规划并非学校用来管束杨维这样的学生的唯一手段。杨维来自跃进村，像很多孩子一样贪玩，是父亲口中“村里最调皮的孩子”。毛坦厂中学的班主任是清一色的男性，对学生进行军事化教育，并经常施加惩罚；他们能否保住工作岗位，能拿到多少奖金，均取决于他们提高学生考试成绩的能力。安保人员驾驶着电瓶车和摩托车，在占地面积近千亩的校园里巡视。教室、宿舍乃至镇上的主要路口均都安装着摄像头，监视着学生们的一举一动。校长助理李振华说，这种“封闭式管理”能起到效果。1998年时，只有98名毛坦厂中学的学生达到了本科院校录取的最低分数线。15年后，学校有9312名学生达到了本科线，还想努力在2014年突破万人大关。杨维和曹英生希望自己能名列其中。
“We can’t disturb him now,” Yang’s father, Yang Qi, whispered as his son fell asleep on the bunk bed. He put on his aviator glasses, and his wife, in an orange dress and sequined high heels, picked up a powder blue parasol. They were taking me for a stroll around the school grounds. No visitors are allowed on the Maotanchang campus, except during these three hours on Sunday afternoons. Yang’s parents often spent this time crowding around school bulletin boards, scanning the lists for their son’s latest test scores. The ritual was gratifying earlier in the school year, when Yang’s marks were rising close to the level needed to enter one of China’s nearly 120 first-tier universities. But now, securing a place in even a second-tier university looked doubtful. “There’s no need to look,” Yang Qi said. “We just want our son to study hard, because his mother and I never had a chance to go far in school.”
杨维在床上睡着了，他父亲杨奇（音）因此低声说，“我们现在不能打扰他。”他戴上了自己的墨镜，而穿着橙色连衣裙和亮片高跟鞋的妻子拿起了一把浅蓝色的阳伞。他们要带我在校园里四处转转。除周日下午的这三个小时以外，毛坦厂中学不接待访客。在这三个小时里，杨维的父母通常会挤在学校公告栏旁边，仔细查看相关表格，寻找儿子最近的考试成绩。这个学年的早些时候，这个例行活动是让人高兴的，因为那时候杨维的成绩在不断提高，与入读中国近120所一类大学所需的水平越来越近。但现在，能否进入二类大学看上去都不确定了。“不用看，”杨奇说。“我们只是想让儿子努力学习，因为他妈和我都没机会多读书。”
Despite the creeping sense of panic, Yang’s parents seemed eager to show me evidence of the school’s success, as if their own aspirations for upward mobility depended on it. The Maotanchang school began humbly, in 1939, as a temporary oasis for students escaping the Japanese invasion of Hefei, Anhui’s capital. It became a permanent school after the 1949 Communist revolution. Yet half a century later, as China’s coastal economy boomed, it was a neglected hulk, hollowed out by rural-to-urban migration and buried in debt. Its resurrection hinged on China’s decision in 1999 to make what is often referred to as a “great leap forward” in higher education. The radical expansion of the education system has tripled the number of Chinese universities and has pushed China’s student population to 31 million — greater than any country in the world. (The United States has 21 million.) And every student must first pass the gaokao.
尽管有一种隐隐的恐慌感，杨维的父母好像还是迫切地想向我展示这所学校的成功，似乎他们自己对向上流动的渴望靠的就是它。毛坦厂中学是1939年日军入侵安徽省会合肥后创办的，当时是作为接收逃离战乱的学生的临时学校，条件颇为简陋。1949年的共产主义革命后，毛坦厂中学成了一所永久性的学校。但半个世纪后，随着中国沿海经济的繁荣，毛坦厂中学成了一个遭到冷落的空壳。它被从农村到城市的人口迁移掏空了，债台高筑。它的复活则源于中国1999年做出的一项决定。那项决定的内容，常被称作高等教育的“大跃进”。教育体系的急剧扩张让中国大学的数量增加了两倍，大学生人数增至3100万，比全世界任何一个国家都多。（美国的大学生人数为2100万。）所有学生都必须先通过高考。
Like the ancient imperial exam, the gaokao was meant to introduce a measure of meritocracy into an otherwise elitist system, creating a path of upward mobility for students of meager backgrounds. (The top scorers on the keju, after enduring days locked in a windowless cell, had the honor of entering the Forbidden City in Beijing by the emperor’s middle gate.) But rural students are still at a severe disadvantage. Villages like Yuejin, where Yang’s father is the Communist Party secretary, have poor school facilities and a paucity of well-trained teachers. Wealthy urban families can hire private tutors, pay for expensive preparation courses or bribe their way into the best city schools. The university quota system also skews sharply against rural students, who are allocated far fewer admissions spots than their urban peers.
和古代的科举考试一样，高考是为了在精英主义体系中引入一种英才教育的衡量方式，为出身卑微的学生创造一种向上流动的通道。（锁在没有窗户的小屋里数天后，科举考试中的高分获得者将有幸从平日里只有皇帝才能走的中门，进入紫禁城。）然而，农村地区的学生依然处于极度不利的境地。在杨维的父亲担任村支书的跃进村，教学设施简陋，缺乏训练有素的老师。富裕的城市家庭则能请家教、支付昂贵的补课费，或是通过行贿入读市里最好的学校。高等院校的配额制度也明显倒向不利于农村学生的方向。农村学生分到的招生名额，比城里学生要少得多。
Rural kids needed extra help, and Maotanchang leapt in to serve their need. At first, the school offered extra exam-prep courses outside the regular curriculum for a modest fee. When the government banned tuition-­based courses from public schools in 2004, the local administrators turned the entire public-school curriculum into an intensive cram course. (In 10th and 11th grades, students are allowed two elective hours per week — music, art or physical education. In 12th grade, no electives are permitted, only gaokao courses.) More audaciously, they opened a private for-profit wing that catered to “repeat” students — high-school graduates who were so desperate to improve their scores that they would pay for the privilege of going through the gaokao mill again. The move paid off. The “repeater” wing, which sits on the same campus as the public high school and uses many of the same resources, is now the school’s biggest profit center, with more than 6,000 students paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to nearly $8,000 a year in tuition alone. (Students with low scores pay the highest fees — a tuition structure designed to ensure a high rate of success and revenues for the school.) “This school is rich beyond imagination,” Yang Qi said, holding my arm as we strolled past security guards at the gate. His tone was one not of reproach, but of admiration.
农村孩子需要额外的帮助，毛坦厂中学就是应这样的需求而生的。起初，学校以较低的收费提供课外的应考培训。2004年政府禁止公立学校进行有偿补课后，当地相关部门将整套公立学校教育转变成了强化补习培训。（在高一和高二，学生每周可以上两个小时的选修课——音乐、美术或体育。到了高三，学校不允许学生上选修课，只能上高考要考的课程。）更大胆的是，他们开办了一所以盈利为目的的私立学校，接收“复读”的学生。复读生已从高中毕业，但非常迫切地想提升成绩，因而愿意付钱去再次经历高考的磨难。此举带来了回报。“复读生”所在的大楼，与公立的毛坦厂高中坐落于同一个校园，共用许多资源，是毛坦厂中学盈利最多的中心。那里的6000多名学生一年交的学费，在几百美元到近8000美元（约合5万元人民币）之间。（学生的成绩越差，交的学费越高——这种学费设计是为了确保学校有较高的成功率和收入。）经过校门口的保安时，杨奇挽着我的胳膊说，“这学校钱多得你想都想不到。”他的语气里没有指责，倒是有钦羡。
Inside the gate, Yang Qi eagerly pointed out the fruits of the school’s recent $32 million expansion: a gargantuan LED screen, a sports complex, giant statues of Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping and, up on the ridge above, a glimmering hourglass-shaped building — administrative offices that looked more like an airport control tower or a prison lookout. The grounds themselves were as manicured as an American college campus, albeit one with decorative rocks adorned with the school’s motto: “We don’t compete with intelligence but with hard work!”
进了校门，杨奇迫切地指出了学校最近投资2亿元人民币扩建的成果：一块巨大的LED屏幕、一座体育中心、高大的毛主席和邓小平雕像。屋脊上还有一栋微微发光的沙漏型建筑，那里是行政办公室，看上去更像是机场的指挥塔台，或是监狱的瞭望塔。校园本身和美国院校的校园一样，修剪整齐，不过这里安放着一些装饰性的石头，上面刻着校训：“不比智力比努力！”
The most important new structure is a five-story brick building that houses classrooms for repeat students. As I watched thousands of repeaters flood back into the structure that Sunday afternoon — their weekly breaks are only 90 minutes — I recalled how Yang had referred to them as the school’s “most desperate students.” So many are packed into each classroom — more than 150 each — that, students say, teachers bark out their lessons on bull horns. The boy living in the room next to Yang’s was a repeat student who bombed the gaokao the year before. He was now cramming until 1:30 every night, and his class ranking had risen 2,000 places since the start of the school year, placing him in the top third of his class. “He’s like a ghost,” Yang told me. “But he motivates me, because I never want to go through this again!” His mother retorted, “Even if you fail, we couldn’t afford another year here.”
最重要的新建筑是一栋五层的红砖楼房，复读生就在其中的教室里上课。在那个周日的下午，当我看到数千复读生涌入这栋楼时，我想起杨维说过的，他们是这所学校里“最拼命的学生”——他们每周的休息时间只有90分钟。每间教室里都塞满了学生，超过150人，学生们说，老师讲课时得用喇叭大声喊才行。住在杨维隔壁房间的男孩就是一个复读生，一年前高考落榜，现在每天晚上要复习到凌晨1点半。自从新学年开始以来，他的名次已经上升了2000位，进入了年级的前三分之一。“他就像一个鬼，”杨维告诉我。“但他对我是种激励，因为我绝不想再过一遍这样的日子了！”他母亲接过话头说道，“就算你落榜，我们也没钱再供你在这里读一年。”
Yang’s parents and I lingered in front of the rows of dormitories where their son spent his first two years at Maotanchang. Ten students, sometimes 12, bunked in each room. The wire mesh covering the windows — “to prevent suicide,” one student told me later, only half-joking — was festooned with drying socks, underwear, T-shirts and shoes. The dorms have few amenities — no electrical outlets, no laundry room, not even, until a separate bathhouse was installed last year, hot water. There is, students note, one high-tech device: an electronic fingerprint scanner that teachers log into every night to verify that they have conducted their obligatory bed checks.
杨维的父母和我在一排排宿舍前徘徊，他在毛坦厂读书的头两年就住在这里。每个房间里住着10名甚至12名学生，全都是上下铺。窗口覆盖着丝网，后来一个学生半开玩笑地对我说，这是为了“防止自杀”。丝网上挂满了晾晒的袜子、内衣、T恤和鞋子。宿舍几乎没有什么设施——没有电源插座，没有洗衣房，在去年修好一个独立的澡堂之前，连热水都没有。学生表示，这里倒是有一种高科技设备：电子指纹扫描仪。教师每晚都扫描一下指纹，表示自己已经按规定查了房。
Perhaps nobody on campus is more motivated — and exhausted — than Maotanchang’s 500 teachers, whose jobs hinge on their students’ success. Base salaries for teachers are two to three times as high as China’s normal public-­school wages, and bonuses can easily double their incomes. For each student who gets into a first-tier university, the six-member teacher teams (a head teacher and five subject teachers) share a $500 reward. “They make good money,” Yang told me, “but they face even worse pressure than we do.”
在毛坦厂的校园里，积极性最强也最疲惫的人，或许就是这里的500名教师了。他们的饭碗系于学生的成绩。该校教师的基本工资是中国普通公立学校的两到三倍，奖金常常会和工资一样高。每有一个学生被一类大学录取，六个人组成的教师团队（一个班主任，五个不同科目的教师）就能获得500美元的奖金。“他们挣钱很多，”杨维告诉我，“但他们的压力比我们更大。”
The head teachers’ schedules are so grueling — 17-hour days monitoring classes of 100 to 170 students — that the school has decreed that only young, single men can fill the job. The competition to hang onto these spots is intense. Charts posted on the walls of the faculty room rank classes by cumulative test scores from week to week. Teachers whose classes finish in last place at year’s end can expect to be fired. It’s no wonder that teachers’ motivational methods can be tough. Besides rapping knuckles with rulers, students told me, some teachers pit them against one another in practice-test “death matches” — the losers must remain standing all morning. In one much-discussed case, the mother of a tardy student was forced to stand outside her son’s class for a week as punishment. For the repeat students, the teachers have a merciless mantra: “Always remember your failure!”
班主任的日常工作非常辛苦——每天17个小时监督100到170名学生——所以学校规定，这个岗位只招年轻的单身男性。班主任岗位竞争很激烈，教员室的墙上张贴着图表，按照每周考试的总成绩给每个班级排名次。到了年底，学生成绩垫底的教师可能会被开除，难怪教师用来激励学生的方法可能会很粗暴。学生们告诉我，除了用尺子敲打指节之外，一些老师还让学生在模拟考试的“死亡比赛”中较量——输了就要被罚站一上午。有次罚站的情形让众人议论纷纷：一个后进学生的母亲，被迫在儿子的教室外站了一个星期。对于复读的学生，教师们有一句冷酷的口头禅：“永远不要忘记你的失败！”
Maotanchang’s most famous graduate is a skinny 19-year-old with hair flopping over his eyes. His name is Xu Peng, and though he hardly looks like a masochist, he was drawn to the cram school because, as he puts it, “I wanted a cruel place.”
毛坦厂最有名的毕业生是19岁的徐鹏。他身材瘦削，头发耷拉下来遮住了眼睛。虽然看上去不像是受虐狂，但是他说，之所以选择这所学校，是因为想去一个“严酷的地方”。
Xu grew up as one of China’s 60 million “left behind” children, raised by his grandparents while his parents worked as migrant fruit sellers in the distant city Wuxi. His grandfather summoned his parents home to Hongjing village, however, when Xu spun out of control in middle school — skipping classes, sneaking out with his friends, becoming obsessed with video games. The family income dropped when his mother stopped working to devote herself to his education. Despite bearing down to please his mother, Xu still faltered on the high-school entrance exam, ruining his chance to get into the region’s best high schools. His mother was so upset that she barely spoke to him for days. With few options left for high school, Xu turned to Maotanchang. “I only knew that the school was very strict, to the point that some students had supposedly committed suicide,” he told me. “That convinced me. I didn’t believe I could discipline myself otherwise.”
和中国的6000万“留守儿童”一样，徐鹏是由祖父母带大的，父母则在遥远的城市无锡贩卖水果。然而，当徐鹏在初中表现失控时——逃课，与朋友偷偷外出，沉迷于电子游戏——祖父把父母叫回了宏景村（音）。母亲不再工作，一心只管他的教育问题，家庭收入下降了。尽管努力要让母亲高兴，但是徐鹏在中考时还是失利了，没能进入该地区最好的高中。他母亲非常气恼，好几天没有和他说话。可供选择的高中很少，徐鹏选择了毛坦厂中学。“我只知道这所学校非常严格，甚至有一些学生因此而自杀了，”他告诉我。“于是我就相信了。我觉得如果不这样，我就会管不住自己。”
Not long after arriving at Maotanchang, Xu decided that his teachers weren’t cruel enough. The school’s fixation on raising its gaokao success rate — its biggest selling point — means that teachers work most intensively to lift marginal students past the minimum scores required for second- or third-tier universities. “Their focus is to get everybody above the line,” Xu says. “But if you’ve got good-enough scores to pass, they stop paying attention.” During his first two years, Xu decided he had to develop his own fanatical sense of self-control. He filled every spare moment with study, testing himself between classes, on the toilet, in the cafeteria. Late at night, after the lights went out at 11:30, he sometimes used a battery-powered lamp to keep going.
到毛坦厂后不久，徐鹏就觉得，老师们还不够严酷。这座学校最关注的是提高高考上线率——这所学校的最大卖点。这也意味着，教师要把主要精力放在让成绩较差的学生，达到二类或三类大学的最低录取分数。“他们的侧重点是让所有人都过线，”徐鹏说。“但是，如果本来成绩就足够好，他们就没有那么关注你了。”在这里的头两年，徐鹏决定，他必须培养强烈的自制力。他把所有的空闲时间都用来学习，课间、上厕所、在食堂里，他都会做自测。有时深夜11点半熄灯之后，他还会开着电池供电的灯继续学习。
By his third year at Maotanchang, when his mother came to live with him in a rented room in town, Xu’s test scores began rising to the top of his grade — first among thousands. Xu’s head teacher pulled him aside early in the spring of 2013 to tell him that he had a chance to become the first Maotanchang student ever to be admitted to Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, known as the M.I.T. of China. Over the years, Maotanchang has earned a reputation as an assembly line for second-tier universities. Now, the teacher told him, school administrators were so keen to have a student admitted to one of China’s top universities that they were offering a sizable reward: nearly $50,000 to be divided equally among Xu’s family, his middle school and — naturally — his teachers at Maotanchang.
在毛坦厂的第三年，母亲也来到这里，带着徐鹏住进了在镇上租的房间。这时徐鹏的考试成绩开始提高到年级第一——几千人中的第一名。2013年初春的一天，徐鹏的班主任老师把他叫到一边，说他有可能成为毛坦厂有史以来第一个考入清华大学的学生。这座位于北京的著名高校被誉为中国的麻省理工学院(MIT)。多年来，毛坦厂被当成了向二类大学输送学生的生产线。现在，老师告诉他，学校的管理层非常期望有人能考上一所中国的顶尖学府，他们将给这样的学生颁发一大笔奖金：30万元，由徐家、他的初中，当然还有他在毛坦厂的老师平分。
Before the gaokao, Xu holed up in a hotel near the exam site in Lu’an city and didn’t emerge for 48 hours. “My parents thought I was a maniac,” he told me. “They couldn’t understand why I refused to come down from my room. But memorizing this material is like training for the Olympics. You have to keep up the momentum. Skip a day or two, and you can get off form.” The extra push might have helped: Xu scored 643 out of a possible (but never achieved) 750 on the gaokao. Tsinghua’s minimum score for students from Anhui province taking the science exam was 641. He made it by just two points.
高考前，徐鹏躲在六安市考场附近的一家酒店里，48小时没有出门。“父母觉得我疯了，”他告诉我。“他们不明白我为什么不肯从屋里出来。但是记忆这些资料，就像是为奥运会做赛前训练，必须保持状态。休息一两天，你就不在状态了。”这种额外的努力可能产生了效果：徐鹏的高考分数为643分，总分是750分（但从未有人得到过满分）。清华大学在安徽省招收理科生的最低分数线是641分，徐鹏高出两分。
Xu’s achievement is so well known in Maotanchang that Yang refers to him as “a cult figure.” The tiny space that Xu and his mother rented out last year is now advertised as the “zhuangyuan room,” a reference to the top scorer in the ancient imperial exam. Maotanchang administrators brought Xu back to campus during the previous school year to give a motivational speech to 300 specially selected students — the top scorers from each class. Just as the Chinese masses are exhorted to “study Lei Feng” — a selfless model soldier who gave his life for the motherland — Maotanchang students are now encouraged to “study Xu Peng.”
徐鹏的成就在毛坦厂家喻户晓，以至于杨维把他称作“偶像”。徐鹏和他母亲之前租住的房间，如今被宣传为“状元房”。状元指的是古代科举考试中的第一名。上一学年，毛坦厂中学的管理层把徐鹏请回校园，向300名经过挑选的学生，也就是每个班成绩排名最高的学生，做励志演讲。就像中国号召民众向把生命献给祖国的无私战士雷锋学习一样，毛坦厂中学现在号召学生们“学习徐鹏”。
When I met Xu on Tsinghua’s grassy campus last spring, near the end of his first year, he still looked out of place: a young villager in a threadbare blazer, sleeves pushed up his arms. Many of the students around us were members of China’s urban elite, wealthy and worldly young adults armed with iPhones, frequent-flier cards and a nuanced understanding of “Harry Potter” and “The Big Bang Theory.”
去年春天，我在清华大学校园里的一片草坪上和徐鹏碰面，当时他的第一学年就快结束，但仍然显得有些格格不入：一个来自农村的年轻人，穿着破旧的外套，袖子捋到了手臂上。我们周围的很多学生都来自中国城市的精英阶层，他们富裕、谙熟世事、使用iPhone手机、拥有航空公司的里程卡，而且对《哈利·波特》(Harry Potter)和《生活大爆炸》(The Big Bang Theory)有详细的了解。
Xu looked gaunt. He showed me his student-ID photo, taken the previous fall, when his face was round and fleshy. “I’ve lost seven kilos” — 15 pounds — “because I can’t get used to the food,” he said. The freedom of university life took adjustment, too. “There are no rules here,” he said. “I was so confused during first semester, because nobody told me what to do.” Xu, an engineering major, is learning to enjoy new things: hanging out with friends, doing volunteer work, spending weekend days in the park. “I’m still studying hard,” said Xu, who wants to pursue graduate studies in the United States. “But now I can finally breathe.”
徐鹏显得有些憔悴。他给我看了自己学生证上的照片，上一年秋天拍摄的这张照片里，他的脸圆圆肉肉的。“因为吃不惯这里的饭，我瘦了七公斤，”他说。大学生活的自由，也需要适应。“这里没有规矩，”他说。“第一学期我很困惑，因为没有人告诉我要做什么。”徐鹏读的是工程专业，现在正在学着享受新事物：和朋友一起消磨时间、做义工，周末去逛公园。“我学习还是很努力，”徐鹏说，他想去美国读研究生。“但现在我终于可以松口气了。”
When I returned to Maotanchang in June, the night before the students’ mass departure for the gaokao, the darkened sky was illuminated by dozens of floating paper lanterns. The ethereal orange orbs rose higher and higher, until they formed a constellation of hope. I followed the trail of lanterns to their source: an empty lot near the school’s side gate. There, several families were lighting oiled wads of cloth. As the expanding heat lifted their lanterns off the ground, their prayers grew louder. “Please, take my son past the line!” one mother intoned.
去年6月，大批学生离开学校赶赴考场的前一天晚上，我又到了毛坦厂。几十盏飘动的孔明灯照亮了黑暗的天空，它们发出空灵的橙色光芒，越升越高，犹如一个象征着希望的星座。我循迹找到了孔明灯升空的地方，那是学校侧门附近的一片空地，一些考生的家人点燃了浸过油的布团。热气把孔明灯带离地面，人们的祈求声也变得更响亮。“请让我的儿子上分数线！”一位母亲吟诵着。
As the glowing lanterns soared unobstructed into the night air, families cheered. One lantern, however, became tangled in electrical lines. The student’s mother looked devastated — for this, according to local belief, was a bad omen, all but dooming her child to finishing “below the line” on the gaokao.
明亮的孔明灯顺利地升上夜空，考生的家人们欢呼雀跃。但其中一盏被电线缠住，放飞这盏灯的母亲看起来深受打击——按照当地的说法，这是个恶兆，预示着她孩子的高考分数会“过不了线”。
For a town that turns test preparation into a mechanical act of memorization and regurgitation, Maotanchang remains a place of desperate faith and superstition. Most students have a talisman of some sort, whether it’s red underwear (red clothing is believed to be lucky), shoes from a company called Anta (their check-mark logo is reminiscent of a correct answer) or a pouch of “brain rejuvenating” tea bought from vendors outside the school gates. The town’s best-selling nutritional supplements are called Clear Mind and Six Walnuts (the nuts are considered mind-boosters in large part because they resemble brains). Yang’s parents did not seem especially superstitious, but they paid high rent to live close to the mystical tree and its three-foot-high pile of incense ash. “If you don’t pray to the tree, you can’t pass,” Yang says, repeating a local saying.
尽管这座镇子将备考转变成了死记硬背和不断重复的机械程序，但是毛坦厂仍然充斥着走投无路之际产生的迷信和风俗。许多学生都有某种“护身符”，比如红色内衣（人们认为红衣服很吉利）、安踏牌的鞋子（对勾形的商标让人联想起正确答案），或者从学校大门外的商贩那里买到的“健脑”茶包。镇上最畅销的营养品是“脑清新”和“六个核桃”（核桃之所以被认为可以增进脑力，很大程度上是因为形状像大脑）。杨维的父母好像并没有特别迷信，但是他们愿意支付很高的租金，就为了住得离神树及树下大约三尺高的香灰近一些。杨维复述了一句当地的说法，“不拜树，考不出。”
Just up the alley from Yang’s room, I met a fortune teller sitting on a stool next to a canvas chart. For $3.40, the man in the ill-fitting pinstripe suit could predict the future: marriage, children, death — and gaokao scores. “Business is good these days,” he said with a broken smile. An older man in an argyle sweater and a Chairman Mao haircut watched our exchange. This was Yang Qiming, a retired chemistry teacher, who told me he had seen Maotanchang grow from an impoverished school of 800 students, when he joined the faculty in 1980, to the juggernaut it is today — a remarkable transformation during a period when most rural schools have withered. Even so, he grumbled about the deadening effects of rote learning. “With all this studying, the kids’ brains become rigid,” he said. “They know how to take a test, but they can’t think for themselves.”
就在巷子里，距离杨维的房间不远处，我见到一位算命先生。他坐在凳子上，穿着并不合身的条纹西装，身旁是一面帆布的图。只需要花20块，他就可以帮你预测未来：婚姻、子嗣、生死，当然还有高考成绩。“这阵子生意不错，”他尴尬地笑着说。一名身穿花格毛衣、留着毛泽东式发型的年长男子观察着我们的对话，他就是退休的化学老师杨启明（音）。他告诉我，自己见证了毛坦厂中学从一所贫穷的学校，膨胀成今天这种巨大规模的全过程。在他1980年加入教师队伍时，这里还只有800名学生，而在这所中学壮大的同时，多数乡村学校都在萎缩，因而这种转变殊为惊人。尽管如此，他对死记硬背造成的压抑效果仍然颇有怨言。“总是这样学习，娃娃们的脑子都僵掉了，”他说。“他们知道怎么应付考试，可是不会独立思考。”
That night, nearly everyone in Maotanchang seemed to be performing their final rituals. Two girls in school uniforms climbed the long stairway to the Mao statue on their knees, kowtowing at each step as if pleading to an emperor for mercy. In front of the sacred tree, dozens of supplicants — parents and students alike — lit their last bundles of “champion’s incense” and turned the pile of ash into an inferno that would continue to burn through the night. Around the corner, dozens of buses were preparing to carry some of Maotanchang’s more than 10,000 exam-takers to the gaokao site the next morning. The license plates on each bus ended in “8” — considered the luckiest number in China.
那天晚上，毛坦厂几乎所有人都在做最后的祈求。两名身穿校服的女孩跪着爬上了长长的台阶，一直挪到毛泽东像前，每走一步都要叩首，仿佛是在求皇帝开恩。在神树前，有数十名家长和孩子祈福。他们点燃最后的几柱“状元香”，而那堆炽热的香灰还会继续烧一整夜。走过街角，停着几十辆大巴车，准备第二天早上送毛坦厂的一万多名考生赶赴考场。它们的车牌尾号都是8——这在中国被认为是最幸运的数字。
Yang, however, wasn’t feeling very lucky. His smile had disappeared, along with his banter about basketball and the cousin he hoped to join in Shanghai. Yang’s mother was gone, too. Her anxiety had started to make her son tense and irritable, so he asked if his grandfather could take over for her in the final weeks. Now there was only one day left, and Yang had no time for anything but study. His weary summation of years of unceasing effort: “I’m almost done.”
不过杨维并没有感觉多么幸运。他脸上的笑容消失了，不再讲关于篮球的笑话，也没有提希望能在上海碰头的堂兄。杨维的母亲也离开了。她的焦虑开始让杨维感到紧张而烦躁，所以他问能不能在考前的最后几周，让爷爷接替母亲。现在，只剩最后一天了，杨维除了学习没时间做任何事。经过许多年不懈的努力，他疲倦地总结道：“我快要完蛋了。”
Before dawn the next morning, Yang’s parents drove from their home in Yuejin to pick up their son and take him to a rented room near the exam site in Lu’an city. I had stayed the night in a hotel out of town, so they invited me to join them on the bumpy ride into Maotanchang in the mud-encrusted minivan they use to transport peaches. There were no back seats in the van (known in China as a mianbao che, or bread-loaf truck, on account of its shape). I perched on a wooden chair that Yang’s father had placed, untethered, in the cargo area. Yang’s mother sat in anxious silence while his father careered around the curves, sending me and my chair sliding, as he talked about the California peaches he grows on his farm, which he had christened Big Love.
第二天早上天还没亮，杨维的父母就驾车从跃进村的家中赶来，准备接上儿子把他送到在六安市里考点附近租到的房间。前一晚我住在镇外的一家宾馆里，所以他们也邀请我一同前去毛坦厂。我们乘坐着平时用来运桃的面包车，一路颠簸。这辆面包车外满是泥浆，后排也没有座位。我坐在杨维的父亲摆在载货区的木制椅子上，椅子并没有固定。杨维的父亲飞快地开车摆来摆去，他的母亲焦虑地陷入沉寂，我连人带椅子也滑来滑去。他则一直在谈自己在田里种植的加州桃——他把这种桃子称作“大爱”。
The 10,000 or so parents who come to live in Maotanchang will do almost anything to enhance their children’s chances on the gaokao. Many of the mothers, like Lin, lack formal education. Yet they are the fiercest enforcers of the unwritten rules that forbid Maotanchang residents to watch television, do laundry or wash dishes during students’ sleeping time. When an Internet cafe opened in town a few years ago, posing a potential distraction to students, the mothers helped the school carry out a boycott that eventually forced it to close. When Yang’s scores slipped, his mother confiscated his cellphone and made him study late at night while she sat next to him, weaving needlepoint slippers with butterfly and fish designs. During the day, Lin timed her cooking to coincide precisely with class breaks, so her son could devour his meals without wasting a second of study time. “We have to do all we can,” Lin said. “Otherwise, we will always blame ourselves.”
为了提高孩子在高考中金榜题名的机会，来到毛坦厂居住的近万名家长几乎什么事都愿意做。很多母亲像林佳敏这样，缺乏正规的教育。然而最热心地执行一些不成文的规定的，也正是她们，比如禁止毛坦厂居民在学生们睡觉的时间看电视、洗衣服或碗碟。几年前镇上曾经开了一所网吧。由于可能会分散学生们的精力，母亲们帮助学校进行了抵制，最终迫使网吧关门。杨维的成绩下滑时，妈妈没收了他的手机，还让他一直学习到深夜，自己就坐在他身旁做带有蝴蝶和鱼图案的十字绣拖鞋。白天，林佳敏会卡着时间做饭，好让开饭刚好赶上课间，这样儿子狼吞虎咽时就不会浪费一点点的学习时间。“我们得把事情做全了，”林佳敏说。“不然就总是会怪自己。”
It was 5 a.m. when we pulled into Maotanchang, but the crowd of mothers gathered around the sacred tree was already three deep. The flames from their bundles of incense were so hot and the pile of ash so big that we almost couldn’t squeeze past to Yang’s rented room. His mother lit some sticks of incense, planted them in the ash pile and bobbed her head forward and back in prayer. A woman next to her gently swung a bag of eggs in the smoke — eggs, given their head-like shape, are considered a symbol of intelligence.
我们进入毛坦厂镇时是凌晨5点，但是母亲们已经把神树围了里三层外三层。她们点燃的香束燃起滚烫的火苗，积起厚厚的香灰堆，让我们几乎无法挤过去，继续前往杨维的出租房。他的母亲点了几支香，把它们插进灰里，前后晃动着脑袋，口中念念有词。她旁边的一名妇女在烟雾中轻轻晃动一袋鸡蛋——由于形状像脑袋，鸡蛋被当做智力的象征。
Yang was just waking up when his mother knocked on his window. His luggage was packed the night before — a small bag for clothes, a bigger one for books — but his grandfather seemed agitated. He had wanted to leave earlier to avoid the hundreds of cars and buses that would snarl traffic in town. But there was another reason for his testiness: Somebody — a school official? a neighbor? — had warned him that he would get in trouble for speaking with me. A year after trumpeting its success in the Chinese press, Maotanchang was now seeking a lower profile, in accordance with the Chinese adage that “people fear fame like a pig fears getting fat.” Now, with a trembling voice, Yang’s grandfather asked me to leave. I bid the family farewell and, from a distance, watched them pile into the bread-loaf truck for Yang’s final gaokao journey. As they passed, his father gave a quick toot of the horn.
母亲来敲窗户的时候，杨维刚刚醒来。他的行李已经在前一天晚上收拾好了——一小袋衣服、一大袋书——但爷爷显得很焦急。他原本想早点出发，避开镇上将会阻塞交通的数以百计的车辆。不过，他的焦躁还有另一层原因：有人——学校的管理人员？或者是邻居？——警告过他，和我说话将使他惹上麻烦。一年前，毛坦厂在中国媒体上大肆宣扬自己的成功，如今它却想变低调一点，正如中国谚语所说，“人怕出名猪怕壮”。到了这个时候，爷爷用颤抖的声音请我离开。于是我与这家人告别，然后远远地看着他们挤进面包车，踏上了送杨维高考的最后一段旅程。他们经过的时候，杨维的父亲快速按响了一声喇叭。
Three hours later, at exactly 8:08 a.m., the first caravan of buses filed out the front gate of Maotanchang High School and snaked through the cheering throng of parents and townspeople. In the past, this procession was accompanied by thunderous drums and fireworks. This year, the celebration was muted at the school’s request. But some rituals remained: The driver of the lead bus was born in the year of the horse, a reference not just to the current year but also to the Chinese saying “ma dao cheng gong,” which means “success when the horse arrives.” By the end of the day, Maotanchang would be empty, drained of students, parents and the shopkeepers who lived off them.
三小时后，上午8时08分整，第一队大巴驶出了毛坦厂中学的大门，穿过由加油打气的家长和镇民所组成的人群。过去，这支队伍行进时会伴随着轰鸣的鼓声和鞭炮声。今年，根据学校要求，这种送考方式取消了。但有些习俗仍然得以保留：头车的司机属马。这不仅代表着当年的生肖，而且还讨了中国谚语“马到成功”的彩头。当天结束的时候，毛坦厂会空空如也，里面既没有学生和家长，也没了以他们为收入来源的店主。
Weeks later, when the gaokao results were released, I called Yang. After our last encounter, I feared that he might have stumbled in the exam — and that my presence would be partly to blame. But instead, Yang sounded ecstatic. His score far surpassed his recent practice tests. It wasn’t high enough to qualify for a first-tier university in Shanghai, as he once dreamed of doing, but it would win him entrance to one of Anhui’s best second-tier universities. There’s no guarantee he’ll find a job when he graduates, but he’s eager to learn about the world outside Maotanchang — and outside his narrow schooling. “I studied science there, but the truth is that I like art, music, writing, more creative stuff,” he told me. “I think there are a lot of students like me, who don’t really know much about anything beyond taking the gaokao.” One thing he does know: His life will be different from his parents’ lives on Big Love farm.
数周后，高考成绩公布了，我给杨维打了电话。最后一次见面之后，我一直担心他会在考试中失利——那么我的出现也得承担一部分责任。可是，杨维听起来挺兴奋。他的分数远远超过了在最后那段时间里的模拟测试中所取得的成绩。尽管他的得分还没有高到能够进入上海的一类大学的程度——那是他曾经的梦想——但是却能让他进入安徽的一所最好的二类大学。虽然毕业后能否找到工作，目前还说不准，不过他非常渴望了解毛坦厂以外的世界，当然还有他狭隘的学校教育之外的天地。“我在那里学的是理科，但其实我喜欢艺术、音乐、写作，这些更有创意的东西，”他告诉我。“我想有很多同学跟我一样，除了参加高考，对别的东西知之甚少。”有件事情他是知道的：他的命运将与父母在大爱农场上的生活截然不同。
Not all of the news that day was happy. Yang’s childhood friend, Cao, tanked on the exam — a panic attack, Yang said. Cao’s family was heartbroken. His mother had spent years supporting him as he studied, and his father worked 12-hour days, 50 weeks a year, building high-rises in eastern China to pay the Maotanchang fees. Cao still talked vaguely about becoming an English teacher, Yang said, but his future looked bleak. His family could never afford a repeat year at Maotanchang, and Cao wasn’t sure he could endure it anyway. He really had just one option. “Dagong,” Yang said. “He’s already gone.” Days after learning he failed the gaokao, Cao left their home village to search for migrant work in China’s glittering coastal cities. He would end up on a construction site, just like his father.
当天的消息并非都令人高兴。杨维的童年伙伴曹英生考砸了——杨维说是因为恐慌。曹英生的家人非常伤心。多年来，他的母亲一直陪着他学习，而他的父亲则每天干上12个小时，每年工作50个星期，在中国东部修建高楼大厦，用来负担毛坦厂的费用。杨维说，曹英生仍然含混地表示，自己想成为一名英语教师。然而，他的未来看起来并不光明。他的家庭绝对无力承担毛坦厂的复读费，曹英生本人也不确定自己能否忍受这一过程。他其实只有一个选择。“打工，”杨维说出答案。“他已经走了。”在得知自己高考落榜的几天之后，曹英生就离开了家乡所在的农村，前往光鲜的沿海城市寻找工作。他将来可能也会在建筑工地上打工，就像他的父亲一样。