The other day, my awesome Chinese colleague and lunchtime culinary tour guide Liheng asked me for an opinion. She has had limited experience editing students’ essays, and as a Chinese woman unfamiliar with the American college application process, she didn’t feel she really knew what universities were looking for. So she handed me a printout of a girl’s first draft and asked me what I thought.
It didn’t take a long time to form a strong opinion. The essay needed some serious work. I could have predicted the whole thing from sentence one – if sentence one had been written the way it should have. The girl wrote about her shyness, and her attempt to overcome it by acting in the school play. Of course, the attempt was a success; she got a large role and was complimented for her thespian talents. She learned that not being shy is a better state of affairs than its alternative.
Liheng is singlehandedly responsible for my lunching on such delicacies as the above, a 2.5 kilo fish wood-roasted then stewed in a dark broth of Szechuan spices and medicinal herbs, and served over a flame with piles of goodies – enoki mushrooms, tofu cubes, water spinach, winter melon – to drop into the bubbling broth.
Organizational and prose issues aside, the essay fell flat because it was, for a college personal statement, painfully unoriginal. Shy Chinese students are not hard to come by. Those among them astute enough to understand the above stereotype and try to combat it in their essays are also, unfortunately, a dime a dozen.
So, turning to Liheng, I said that if the girl were unshakably attached to her topic, she’d need to put some serious work into it – reorganizing its structure into a more logical, compelling flow, and turning her flat prose into something more vivid and exciting. Ideally, however, she’d ditch the thing altogether in favor of anything she could come up with that was, well, more unique.
To which Liheng asked me what Americans really meant when they said unique.
Because unique is a word at the center of the American college application process, and, really, the American philosophy, while in China, it seems to be a word that’s not so easy to grasp. Once grasped, its importance is equally difficult to justify.
America’s systematic valuation of uniqueness seems to me to be a very foreign concept here. As I’ve consistently heard from expats and locals alike, the whole schooling system in China is based much more than our own on rote memorization of other people’s thoughts or creations. While little American scholars across the 50 states learn to read by differentiating 26 simple letters and internalizing the rules that govern their permutations, Chinese students sit down to memorize, 10 a day, the 8000 characters that equal average Chinese literacy. If they want to reach the extra-literate elite, they have additional thousands left to sear into their hippocampi.
Which is not to say that there isn’t much in Chinese education that is creative. But even when students do things that aren’t rote – working on a school newspaper, joining a robotics club, acting, debating, doing community service – they seem far less apt than us Americans to suggest that these behaviors are anything outside of the ordinary.
Another unrelated culinary photograph. You look upon the sad wreckage that inevitably follows a Liheng-guided meal. Even the fish skulls have been picked clean.
“There are a billion people here,” the thinking seems to go. “Likely millions run their school newspapers, tinker with robots, act, debate, and help out in their local communities. They may be slightly smarter or more involved than less active students (or sillier, for wasting their time on things that don’t prepare them for quantifiable testing), but unique is not a word that fits, at least literally.”
I’m tempted to agree that there is something fundamentally disingenuous about the American demand for singularity – especially in a country like China. An American college-application process that asks applicants to self-advertise is pushing students towards a nested oxymoron of a balancing act: Following a pack in the communal attempt to seem different by showcasing effectively identical personality traits and behaviors.
Looking at students’ essays here reminds me of the migraine that was staring at a blank page, racking my brains for an attention-grabbing way of advertising myself without saying anything about myself at all. The oxymoron seems to strike with double force for Chinese students.
But this culture-compounded paradox is not the only thing that makes these applications so difficult for Chinese students. The greater issue with asking students here to display their “uniqueness” is that their visions of what uniqueness is don’t line up with the visions of the colleges from which they so desperately seek acceptance.
Once again, this seems to be largely a cultural thing. I haven’t seen a single essay here that actually strives to be that American version of unique that is centered on mental self-sufficiency. The true gem of an American personal statement is that one that goes off and talks about something totally random, impressing on readers through both form and content the startling difference of its author’s way of thought.
An essay about your fanatical obsession with The OC (and what about you/The OC provokes said intensity of feeling) may seem suicidally off-topic. It is, however, a far better way of demonstrating your personality and intellect than a page-long melodrama describing the lessons you learned from your utterly banal experience cranking out that issue of your school newspaper (however much sleep you lost in the process).
However unintuitive writing such an essay may feel in the US, it is even more so here. In China, competition is much more straightforward. There is an airtight coupling between Gao Kao scores and college acceptance. To get to the front of the metro escalator crowd (incidentally, one of my favorite parts of the morning commute), you just sprint there when the doors open. The tricky American concept of entering the best schools by being oblique and personal, rather than simply performing strongly and pointing at your strong performance, seems to really throw the students here.
A few weeks ago, I would have sided with the Chinese students and their families in their irritation at the opaqueness of this assignment. I would have reveled in the fairness and predictability of a system like the Chinese one, that – however loosely its criteria may reflect what is important (whatever that means) – has criteria to begin with.
Having read several student essays, however, I feel a new respect for this tricky element of the college application process – at the same time that I feel new sympathy for students in China applying to the US, who go through years of a very difficult and competitive educational system that systematically un-prepares them to stand out.
However much it may trick students here, there is something incredibly effective about this personal-statement method of testing a student. Intentionally or not, the open-ended personal statement has been morphed into something that truly demands intelligence, ingenuity, and risk from its authors. Applicants can only fully win the game if they spot the questions behind the questions, decipher exactly what can and cannot be said, successfully plot out their idea in relation to others’, and then whisk it all together with artistic flair.
That blank computer screen may keep tens of thousands of seniors up at night, but the 500-odd word textual soliloquy at end of the tunnel is a fascinating thing. Because as unbelievable as it may seem at the outset, that visually plain page of black and off-white can leap out at you: witty, memorable, unique.