Inside a Chinese Test-Prep Factory

By BROOK LARMER

DEC. 31, 2014

Maotanchang: Study City

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.

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.

‘If you connected all of the practice tests I’ve taken over the past three years, they would wrap all the way

around the world.’

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

‘He’s like a ghost. But he motivates me, because I never want to go through this again!’

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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Xu Peng, center, is the only student from Maotanchang High School to have gained admission to the prestigious

Tsinghua University in Beijing. Credit Sim Chi Yin/VII, for The New York Times

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!”

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.”

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.

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.”

The head teachers’ schedules are so gruelling — 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!”

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.”

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.”

‘We have to do all we can. Otherwise, we will always blame ourselves.’

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

Xu in a classroom at Tsinghua, considered the M.I.T. of China. Credit Sim Chi Yin/VII, for The New York Times

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brook Larmer is a contributing writer. His last article for the magazine, about the tennis player Li Na, was

recently included in “Best American Sports Writing 2014.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page MM35 of the Sunday Magazine with the

headline: Cram City. Today's Paper|Subscribe