Postscript to the Competition
"That faint, half-real admiration, those green, unripe feelings. But thinking of my failed competition career, I feel somewhat ashamed."
Today I saw an article on the ZhiXin public account: Thank You, for Once Poeticizing a Person’s Story, Poeticizing a Person’s Dream. The article was very moving—that faint, half-real admiration, those green, unripe feelings. But thinking of my failed competition career, I also feel somewhat ashamed. Our school motto is “Sincerity and Perseverance”—I failed to treat others with sincerity, and I was irresolute in emotional matters, but that is beside the point. I also failed to persevere in my studies. I neither made the team nor qualified for the Qiangji plan. Now, sitting in a dirty boys’ dorm room at some low-grade—bottom-tier 985 university, I truly feel I have betrayed my youth. Yet this only makes me miss that time even more.
Looking back, the beginning of my competition career was in middle school. I am grateful to Teacher Wang Haiping, the informatics coach at Nantong Tianjiabing Middle School, who recruited a batch of kids in seventh grade to be introduced to informatics competitions. At first it was recruitment from the top of the grade, but later anyone willing could attend. The numbers dwindled from two computer rooms to one, to half a room, to the final dozen or so—apart from me, this waste of space, most of them now sit in classrooms at Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan, Jiao Tong, or the University of Science and Technology of China, and one went to Cambridge. I still remember the coach saying ambitiously that he wanted to build an informatics “dream team.” Classmate CFY reached the provincial team level for the popularization group in ninth grade, but what use was that provincial team? Still, we all thought the future would be smooth sailing. We were young then, and did not know that every gift from fate had already been priced in secret.
We all went to Tongzhong. At Jiangsu Nantong Middle School—a school with a long and glorious history but now in year-by-year decline—competition students were generally rare. Although the competition hall of fame still hung with photos of past provincial teams, medalists, and national training team members, those were all from the first few years of this century.
In tenth grade, I sat at the same desk as classmate CQY. Before that, I only knew he was also a fat otaku; his informatics level was very high, second only to CFY. We fought every day. Back then I saw him reading math competition books, and under his influence I decided to give it a try. Maybe it was also because I was very restless in tenth grade, or because the teachers encouraged everyone to “give it a try.” In any case, at the end of tenth grade I signed up for four competitions, except chemistry—I hate chemistry. As for results, informatics yielded the usual regional third prize, which did win me a few self-study periods to “review” (slack off) in the computer room. Math: nothing. Biology: a small municipal award. As for physics, it was as if something had hit me on the head—I actually passed the preliminary exam. This was unexpected: looking back now, if not for this accident, my competition career might have ended then; or, by stricter standards, never existed at all.
In truth, my heart was always in math while my body was in physics. Even regarding my physics ability, mathematical deduction outweighed physical intuition. But math always played jokes on me—what could I do?
So the entire summer vacation was spent in a state of half-slacking, half-reviewing physics. I wrote about my later experiences in another essay, First Experience of the 37th Physics Olympiad.
Then it was back to school, back to regular classes. ZYC said something truly apt: before, I thought the start of school marked the end of summer; now, I take September 18th, the day of the semi-finals, as the end of summer. This also, to some extent, showed my irresponsibility—my failure to persevere in my studies, my failure to realize that competitions had become a duty of mine.
So I got a regional second prize, that is, a Jiangsu provincial first prize (worthless medal). The teachers all advised me that I probably couldn’t get a higher award anyway; besides, the independent enrollment system had already collapsed, the Qiangji plan required a real medal, and even then only for mediocre schools. Even with a medal, only a gold would get you into a good school like PKU; silver or bronze would be barely better than nothing even at our upstream-of-the-Songhua-River 985. In short, they advised me to quit competitions. I agreed—after all, my grades weren’t great. But what prompted me to pick up this path again?
I spent all of eleventh grade in a daze. Life had no direction. I felt like no one in the world cared about me, so I needn’t care about others either.
At the end of eleventh grade, I failed the math preliminary exam, which saddened me for a while. Then came the physics preliminary. I hadn’t prepared at all and barely passed. And so, once again unexpectedly, I began preparing for the physics semi-finals. How history repeats itself!
That summer vacation was quite fulfilling. First I went to Chengdu for a few days, then threw myself into reviewing upon return. I went through Cheng’s book several times, in a spirit of not seeking to understand too deeply. When school started, I hardly noticed. Later, according to the teachers, this year the theory exam would be followed immediately by the experiment and written tests, due to the pandemic. So I crammed the experiment tutorials at the last minute. We studied on our own and explained problems to each other. I forget whether it was WWX or CQY who happened to explain the first written-test problem as the very first problem in our study group. But this still didn’t get me a national first prize. During the day, I first used self-study periods to read and do problems in a neighboring classroom, then started skipping physics and PE classes, and eventually stayed there all day. Tongzhong, after all, is a second-rate school without a competition tradition, not very willing to let us drop out of regular classes for competitions. At night, we attended online classes and explained problems, often until late at night.
How many nights did I discuss problems with classmates until one in the morning. After ending the video call, I would go downstairs to feel the night breeze, light a cigarette, and watch the wispy smoke drift into the air. This atmosphere often made me doubt the meaning of what I was doing. But to strive without knowing the meaning—isn’t that the inevitability of youth?
Once again, the plot unfolded much like the previous year. On the day of the semi-finals, I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten my calculator. Thank you, Teacher Zhu Hua, who ran out to buy one and delivered it to the exam room—although I later found the calculator was in my bag all along. The schedule was very unscientific; only one hour was left between the theory and experiment exams for us to eat and review, though perhaps the physics society assumed we had already reviewed the experiments thoroughly and didn’t need to read.
Looking back now, the most memorable details are not winning awards or taking exams, but the scenes of us discussing problems—even everyone’s expressions are still vivid. What moves me most is not having spent so much time to get two worthless Jiangsu provincial first prizes, but that everyone has since scattered to the winds: Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Hefei, London. Of course, people don’t think of others for no reason; commemorating others, commemorating my competition career, is really just commemorating the youth I lived through. As for the competitions themselves, there’s nothing much to say—they were just university content pushed down into high school.
I recall a lyric from Star Dream Project’s I Like You, which represents me, us, the broad mass of not-quite-successful competition students and our complex feelings toward our competition careers: “Even facing a heartaching, ambiguous distance, I want you to see the courage to love desperately.”
The flowers of competition have fallen, and I am no longer a middle school student.
Finally, here is a reminiscence essay written by the great ZYC, which of course is much better written than mine.