Culture & Daily Life
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Inside China’s Gaokao: Why One Exam Shapes Millions of Lives
Every June, some 13 million Chinese students sit the gaokao, the national college entrance exam. A single score decides which university, which city, and often which career. Here is how the exam works, why one number carries so much weight, and how it compares with the SAT and A-levels.
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The Tally Marks on the Wall: A Chinese Life Story
Xiao Yu is eight, living with his grandmother in a village courtyard while his parents work in a factory a thousand kilometers away. Every evening he crouches by the wall and adds one chalk stroke, counting the days until the new year. When his mother calls to say they might take him to the city, his grandmother has to decide what is best for a boy who has learned to count the days.
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The Folding Stool at the Matchmaking Corner: A Chinese Life Story
Chen Meifeng is sixty-seven and eats alone, three days from the same pot. Every weekend she takes a sheet of paper to the matchmaking corner in the park, advertising her grown son. There she meets Zhou Dehai, also there for a daughter who married years ago. A quiet story about two widowed people, a folding stool, and one meal eaten down to the bottom of the box.
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The Only Child and the Fold-Up Cot: A Chinese Life Story
Su Xiao is an only child, an accountant in the provincial capital, two hundred kilometers from her aging parents. When her father goes into the hospital she asks them three times to come and live with her, and three times they refuse. Then she opens a tin box on top of a wardrobe and finds a passbook, a page in her mother’s handwriting, and a secret kept for three years.
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Inside China’s Marriage Market: Why Parents Choose Their Children’s Spouses
Every weekend, in parks across China, parents gather with laminated pages listing their grown children’s age, height, degree, income and property. They call it the matchmaking corner; foreigners call it the marriage market. This is how it works, why it exists, and why the young people it is meant to serve often stay away.
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The Bride Price My Mother Set: A Chinese Life Story
Lin Xiaoman is a nurse in a county hospital. Zhang Lei repairs cars in the provincial capital. They have been together four years. Then her mother writes one number on a page torn from an account book, and the two families stop speaking. A story about bride price, face, and a sentence one woman heard at her own wedding thirty years ago.
