【纽约时报 20141231】中国的考试工厂

满仓

【中文标题】中国的考试工厂
【原文标题】Inside a Chinese Test-Prep Factory
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【原文作者】BROOK LARMER
【原文链接】http://www.newsweek.com/2014/12/05/north-and-south-koreas-absurdist-armageddon-287139.html



一天的学习之后，学生们在晚上11点走出毛坦厂高中。


杨威和他的祖父在毛坦厂共住一个房间。


杨在毛坦厂高中的一本练习册。


专门为复读学生准备的一座校园建筑物，这些人将再次经历高考炼狱来提升他们的考试成绩。


学校的一个公告板上列出了学生的姓名和他们考取的大学。


占地165英亩的校园一角。


毛坦厂高中内禁止使用手机，一个学生在离校园不远处的电话亭。


毛坦厂是中国东部与世隔绝的一座城市，与孩子们一起来到这里的母亲们在做缝纫活计。


妈妈们在一个分割成多个小出租房的屋子里准备晚饭，孩子们会冲回家里，匆忙吃晚饭后，继续学习。


穿着睡衣的父母们等着接孩子放学。


考试前几天，考生的母亲在焚香祷告。


家人放飞灯笼，期盼参加考试的学生有好运气。


学生们乘坐汽车到临近城市参加考试。


父母送别考生。

中国东部安徽省山区中，有一个与世隔绝的小城镇，毛坦厂。镇子的大街上，一个男人在摩托三轮车上打盹，两个老年妇女扛着锄头走向镇子外面的稻田。那是去年春天的一个星期日，上午11:44，一排排的食品店铺、茶叶店和论斤卖草稿纸的书摊空无一人。即使镇子上的“大神树”旁也没有参拜者。在它粗大的枝桠下，几支插在土里的香还在冒着烟。

一分钟之后的11:45，这里的宁静被打破，数千名十几岁的学生从毛坦厂中国高耸的校门口蜂拥而出。很多人穿着一模一样的运动服，上面印着口号“我相信我可以做到”。现在是午餐时间，这里是中国最隐秘的“填鸭式学校”之一，2万名学生——这个镇子常住人口的4倍——不分昼夜地在这里接受中国大学入学考试的培训。这个被称为“高考”的极度紧张的考试，在每年6月份举行，为期两到三天（各省不同），是进入中国大学的唯一标准测试。毛坦厂中学的学生大部分来自农村地区，对他们来说，这是一生只有一次改变与农田和工厂打交道的机会，也是一个家庭通过努力学习和优异的成绩改变命运的机会。

这所学校的12年级学生杨威带着我走出人群。作为一个桃农家庭的孩子，杨在过去三年里，每天（包括周末）在6:20走进教室，晚上10:50结束最后一节课之后回到家中。杨和我见面的时候，刚刚结束他的周日上午模拟考试，这是一周中他仅有的闲暇时间——三个小时的放风。现在距离高考只有69天，这个数字出现在镇子的各处，杨已经进入了疯狂的冲刺阶段。他苦笑着对我说：“如果你把我这三年来所有的试卷都连起来，肯定能绕地球一圈。”

杨和我用社交媒体已经联系了有几个星期，这位18岁的孩子在招待一位美国人时似乎显得有些慌乱。他现在身陷危机，尽管经历无数次残酷的演练，但是杨的成绩在下滑。当我和他的家人在他们合住在大神树旁边的房子里吃饭时，就餐的气氛不怎么愉快。他的父亲和他家乡的一位好朋友曹颖生也来看望他，所有人都挤在一个小房间里，这里只能容纳一张上下床、一张桌子和一个电饭煲。但是房子的租金却比得上北京市中心的价格，这仅仅是杨的父母为了帮助他成为这个家庭的第一个大学生，所付出的牺牲的一小部分。

杨的母亲林家敏辞掉了制衣厂的工作，在最后一学年来打理他的生活。曹的母亲也来和她的儿子一起生活。曹说：“压力太大了。”他的学费比杨的要贵一些，大约每学期2000美元，因为他进入学校时的成绩比较低。“我母亲经常告诉我好好读书，因为我的父亲远离家乡在建筑工地打工来支付我的学费。”房间里安静下来，他们都知道，如果高考的成绩不理想，这两个孩子的命运也将会如此。杨说：“打工”，他和曹将会加入中国的2.6亿农民工队伍。

杨在努力尽一个主人的职责，但是当他的母亲给我们的碗里堆满鸡翅和芝麻豆腐的时候，他的眼皮开始打架了。杨的母亲希望他在饭后可以看一会书，但是他父亲对妻子说：“孩子的脑子也需要休息。”杨没说什么，爬到上铺一头睡下，鞋都没有脱。

可以说，中国家庭的一切都是以未来即将进行的高考为目标的。这个考试有两个版本，一个关注科学，另一个偏重人文学科，这是被认为世界最早的标准化测试体制——帝王时代的科举——的现代版本。从1300多年前到20世纪初，科举制把民间的年轻人送入国家的行政机构。如今，每年有900万人参加高考（每年参加SAT和ACT的人数不到350万人），而且，中国学生所背负的死记硬背的压力，似乎从小学就开始了。即使在我儿子的那所北京私立双语幼儿园，中国的父母强迫他们5岁的儿子学习乘法表和中文与英文的语法，唯恐他们的孩子在上小学一年级的时候落后。我的一位中国朋友是新妈妈，她说：“老实讲，高考的比赛从出生就开始了。”

中国的标准化考试流程，加上高水平的文化程度和政府管控因素，培养出世界上最恐怖的专业应试者。上海高中的学生在连续两年的国际学生评测项目中位列第一，以致于一位美国高官称其为中国称霸的“斯普特尼克时刻”。（译者注：1957年苏联第一颗人造卫星上天，让美国人突然意识到自身航天科技水平的落后。）但尽管美国教育界在试图神化中国神秘的超级应试能力，高考却在中国国内饱受抨击，人们认为它是一种扼杀创造性思维、给学生带来过重负担的不合时宜之举。随着高考临近，学生的自杀事件频发。两年前，一个学生在网上发布了一张令人震惊的照片。一间中学教室里，学生们在埋头读书，每个人都挂着静脉注射液，给自己补充能量，继续学习。

北京正在努力推进一些改革，来减少学生的负担，扩大核心课程以外的教育内容，并允许大学参考除高考成绩之外的因素作为入学标准。但是政府的努力遭到了根深蒂固的制度抵制，以及来自很多家长的直言不讳的反对，因为他们担心减轻课程负担会影响到孩子的考试成绩，进而威胁到他们的未来。俄勒冈大学教授、《谁在害怕一只又大又邪恶的巨龙》一书的作者赵勇说：“中国就像是陷入了一个监狱中的困局，没有人敢逃走，因为高考依然是通往天堂的唯一道路。”

即使应试教育的学校已经在城市里遍地开花，毛坦厂也绝对是一个另类，这个偏居一隅的城镇一门心思生产考试机器，而其它中国乡镇都在生产袜子和圣诞节饰品。中国大学毕业生过剩的现象，已经降低了学位的价值，尤其是在毕业生的失业和低就业比率在逐年上升的背景下。很多富有的家庭选择逃离这个体制，比如把孩子送进私立国际学校，或者送他们出国接受教育。但是对杨这样选择不多的家庭来说，经济来源不稳定的现状只会增加高考的激烈程度，多几分或者少几分就可以决定一名学生是否可以拿到一个无价——当然也可能是一钱不值——的学位。清华附中的助理副校长蒋学勤说：“竞争越来越激烈了，农村学生已经被甩在后面。”

毛坦厂位于安徽省群山环绕之中，距离最近的城市两个小时车程，这里的一切全部以学生为中心，而且它很自豪地让自己与现代化生活隔离。学校不允许使用手机和笔记本电脑。大约有一半的学生住在学校的宿舍里，那里没有电源接口。禁止谈恋爱。另一半学生住在镇子里，大部分和他们的母亲同住一个小隔间。当地政府关闭了所有的娱乐场所，这里或许是中国唯一一个没有游戏厅、台球厅和网吧的城市。“除了学习，什么事也做不了。”杨说。

城镇规划不是学校管束这些学生的唯一方法，杨本来是个爱说爱笑的孩子，他的父亲说他是“村子里最淘气的孩子”。毛坦厂清一色的男性老师不仅传授课程，还经常用军队里的方式惩罚学生，他们的岗位和奖金取决于学生的考试成绩。保安在占地165英亩的校园里开着高尔夫球车或者电单车巡逻，摄像探头监视着学生在教室、宿舍，甚至镇子里街道上的一举一动。用助理校长李振华的话来说，这种“严密的监控模式”的确有所收效。1998年，毛坦厂的学生中只有98人达到了高考最低录取分数线。15年之后，9312人通过了分数线，学校计划在2014年突破1万人。杨和曹希望成为他们其中之一。

“我们别打扰他，”杨的父亲杨琦在儿子睡着后低声说。他戴上眼睛，她的妻子穿上一件橘色外套和一双点缀着亮片的高跟靴，拿起一把灰色的雨伞。他们要带我逛一逛校园，除了星期日下午的这三个小时，校园不接受来访者。杨的父母通常会利用这段时间在人群里查看学校的公告板，了解儿子最近的成绩。这个仪式是学校在年初开始举办的，当时杨的分数还够得上中国120所一类大学录取分数线。但是现在，连二类大学的分数线也不能保证。杨琦说：“不需要再看了。我们只是希望儿子能努力读书，因为他妈妈和我都没有在学校里待很久。”

尽管心头萦绕着恐慌的情绪，但是杨的父母似乎迫切希望让我了解这所学校成功的历史，似乎他们的远大志向完全取决于此。毛坦厂学校最早在1939年成立，在日本侵略安徽省省会合肥时，收容了一些逃难的学生。1949年共产党革命之后，变成了正式的学校。半个世纪之后，中国沿海地区的经济蓬勃发展，它似乎变成了一个无人理会的空壳，因为大批的人涌向外地，学校陷入了债务危机。它的复兴出现在1999年，当时中国决定采取所谓的高等教育“大跃进”政策。教育体系的急速扩张让中国的大学数量增长了三倍，学生人数达到3100万——超过世界上任何一个国家（美国大学生人数为2100万）。而每个学生都必须参加高考。

高考与古代帝王的人才推举制度类似，其目的是在精英领导制度中加入知识和学术的衡量因素，为出身低微者提供一条上升的道路。（在科举中获得最高分数的人，在忍受了多年寒窗之苦后，有机会从皇帝进出的正门进入北京的紫禁城。）但是农村学生依然面临着严峻的不利形势。像杨的家乡跃进村，杨的父亲是党支部书记，那里的学校设施简陋，缺少优秀的教师。有钱人家可以聘请私人教师，支付昂贵的课外补习费用，甚至贿赂官员进入最好的学校。大学的录取名额明显歧视农村学生，城市学生被录取的机会要高很多。

农村儿童需要帮助，毛坦厂因此来满足这种需求。起初，这所学校在正规课程之外提供特殊的备考课程，收取较少的费用。政府在2004年禁止公立学校额外开设收费的课程，于是学校管理者干脆村把整个公立学校的课程转化为强化备考的内容。（10到11年级的学生每周有两个小时的选修课——音乐、艺术或者体育，12年级的学生没有选修课，全部都是高考课程。）更大胆的是，他们建造了一所纯私立的教学楼，专门供“复读生”使用，也就是那些极其希望提升分数的高中毕业生，他们愿意花钱再进行一次高考。这样的举措得到了回报。坐落在校园里的“复读楼”与学校共享大部分资源，现在是最赢利的一项服务，有6000名学生支付从几百美元到将近8000美元一年的学费。（低分学生需要支付更高的学费，这样既提高了学生的成绩，又可以给学校创收。）杨说：“这所学校富得流油。”他搀着我的胳膊走过学校大门的保安处，语气中没有责备，而是充满崇敬。


徐鹏（中）是毛坦厂中学唯一一个被清华大学录取的学生。

在大门里面，杨琦急着让我看这所学校最近耗资3200万美元扩张的成果：一块巨大的LED显示屏、一座体育馆、巨大的毛泽东和邓小平塑像，以及一座矗立在山脊上沙漏型的建筑物——学校的教学办公室，看起来就像机场的控制塔台，或者监狱里的瞭望台。学校的环境就像美国大学的校园一样干净整洁，一块用来装饰的大石头上面刻着学校的格言：“不比智力比努力。”（译者注：后半句是“不看起步看进步。”）

最醒目的一座新建筑物是专门供复读生使用的5层教学楼。当我看到数千名复读生在享受了一周一次的90分钟休息之后陆续回到这座楼里，我想起杨说这些人是学校里“最拼命的学生”。每间教室里有150名学生，教师必须用扩音器讲课。住在杨隔壁的就是一个复读生，在去年刚刚经历了一次高考。他现在每天学习到凌晨1:30，自从学年开始，他在年级中的排名已经上升了2000位，稳坐前三分之一的位置。杨对我说：“他就像个鬼一样，但是他也在激励我，因为我可不想再来一次。”他的妈妈训斥他：“就算你考不好，我们也没钱再供你一年。”

我和杨的父母在宿舍楼外徘徊，他们的儿子在毛坦厂的前两年就住在这里。每间宿舍住10到12个人，窗户上缠着铁丝网——一个学生后来半开玩笑地告诉我，这是“为了阻止自杀”——上面挂着袜子、内衣、T恤衫和鞋子。宿舍内部枯燥乏味，没有电源线、没有洗衣房，甚至在去年开辟独立卫生间之前，连热水也没有。但是学生们说，这里有一个高科技设备——指纹签到机，教师每天晚上都要做例行的查房。

或许学校里最积极、最心力憔悴的人，就是毛坦厂的500名教师，他们的工作与学生的成绩息息相关。这些教师的基本工资是中国普通公立中学教师工资的两到三倍，而奖金可以让他们的收入轻松翻倍。每当一名学生被一类大学录取，6名任课教师（1名班主任和5名科目教师）可以得到500美元的奖励。杨说：“他们赚大钱了，但是他们面临的压力比我们还要大。”

班主任的时间安排非常紧张——每天要花费17个小时管理100人到170人的班级，所以学校要求只招聘年轻、单身的男性。这个岗位的竞争异常激烈。教师办公室的墙上贴着各个班级每个星期考试成绩的累计排名，学期末排名垫底班级的教师会被开除。所以教师们督促学生的办法千奇百怪。学生们告诉我，除了用尺子打手，有些教师让学生之间相互竞争，就是所谓的“死亡游戏”——输家要整个早上站着上课。还有一个流传很久的故事，一位成绩较差学生的母亲被罚站在儿子的教室外面一个星期。对于复读生，教师们永远有一句无情的口头语：“记住你是个失败者。”

毛坦厂最著名的毕业生是一个瘦瘦的19岁男孩，名叫徐鹏。尽管他看起来并不像一个受虐狂，但是用他自己的话来说，之所以来到这所学校是因为“我想去一个残忍的地方”。

徐是中国的6000万“留守儿童”之一，由他的祖父母抚养长大，他的父母在遥远的无锡做水果生意。初中的徐放任自由，逃学、与朋友痴迷游戏，他的祖父不得不把他的父母叫回红井村。他母亲停止工作并专心孩子的教育之后，家庭的收入锐减。尽管徐努力不让母亲失望，但他在中考时的成绩依然不理想，失去了进入当地最好的高中的机会。他的母亲非常沮丧，连续和他谈了几天。在没有更多选择的情况下，徐来到毛坦厂。他对我说：“我只知道这家学校非常严格，甚至让有的学生想自杀。我被这一点吸引了，我觉得我能管好自己。”

进入毛坦厂中学之后不久，徐发现教师们没有想象中的那么严格。学校的核心目标——也是最大卖点——是提升高考达标率，也就是说，教师最关心的是提升落后学生的成绩，让他们能达到二类或者三类大学的录取分数线。徐说：“他们主要关心的是让每个人的成绩都能过线，但是如果你的成绩已经很好，他们就不怎么管你了。”在刚开始的两年，徐决定自己制定疯狂的学习计划。他把所有的空余时间都用来学习，课间休息、上厕所、吃饭的时间都用来做小测验。甚至在晚上11:30熄灯之后，他还会用手电筒继续学习。

在毛坦厂的第三年，他的母亲来和他一起租住在镇子里，徐的分数荣登全年级数千学生之首。2013年初春的一个早晨，徐的班主任把他叫到一边，说他有机会成为毛坦厂第一个被清华大学录取的学生，这所大学被称为中国的麻省理工学院。多年来，毛坦厂是一个人所共知的二类大学录取生产车间。班主任告诉他，现在学校领导非常期待有一个学生能被中国的顶级大学录取，他们因此给出了巨额的激励奖金——将近5万美元的总奖金，可以被徐的家人、他的初中学校、当然还有他的毛坦厂中学教师们平分。

高考前，徐把自己关在六安市离考试地点不远的一家宾馆的房间里，连续48小时不出房间。他对我说：“我的父母觉得我疯了，他们不明白我为什么不出门。牢记这些材料就像是为奥运会做准备，你必须一点也不能松懈，有一两天不看书，你就生疏了。”临阵磨枪似乎收到了奇效，徐的高考分数是643分，满分是750分（但是从未有人达到）。清华大学在安徽省的最低录取分数是641分，他仅仅超过了分数线2分。

徐的成就在毛坦厂无人不知，杨把他叫做“崇拜偶像”。徐和他母亲去年租住的小房间现在变成了“状元房”，这是对古代科举考试第一名的称呼。毛坦厂中学领导在上学年把徐请回学校，对300名顶尖学生——每个班级里成绩最好的学生——做了一次激励性的演讲。就像中国人要“学习雷锋”——一个把生命奉献给祖国的楷模士兵——一样，毛坦厂的学生现在要“学习徐鹏”。

去年春天，在他的第一学年即将结束的时候，我在清华大学绿树成荫的校园里见到了徐。他依然看起来不怎么合时宜：一个年轻的农村人，穿着破旧的运动衫，袖子卷起来。我们周围的很多学生都属于中国城市的精英阶层，富有的年轻人拿着iPhone、航空公司常旅客卡片，多少懂得一些《哈利•波特》和《生活大爆炸》。

徐看起来有些憔悴。他给我看他的学生卡上的照片，去年秋天的他脸还是圆圆的。“我瘦了7公斤，因为我不习惯这里的饭菜。”大学里自由的气氛也需要去适应。他说：“这里没有什么规矩，我在第一学期有些无所适从，因为没人告诉我该做什么。”徐的专业是工程学，他在努力享受新事物——与朋友们聚会、做志愿工作、到公园里度过周末。徐说，他想到美国去读研究生，“我依然在努力学习，现在至少我可以自由呼吸了。”

我在6月份回到毛坦厂，那是学生们集体开赴高考考场的前一天晚上。深黑的夜空中有几十只纸灯，亦真亦幻的橙色圆球越升越高，直到变成人们心中希望的星座。我追寻着灯笼的上升轨迹，那是学校侧门的一片空场。几家人在点燃一团布条，热气带着灯笼离开地面，祈祷的声音越来越大。一个母亲说：“求求你，保佑我的儿子分数过线。”


徐在清华大学的教室里，这里被称为是中国的麻省理工学院。

灯笼畅通无阻地飞向夜空，家人们欢呼起来。有一只灯笼被电线缠住，那位学生的母亲看起来既悲伤又震惊。根据当地人的信仰，这是坏兆头，预示她的孩子“过不了高考的分数线”。

对于一个把应试教育变成机械的死记硬背的学校来说，毛坦厂依然是一个绝望中的信仰，同时充满了迷信色彩。大部分学生都有某种护身符，要么是红色内衣（红色代表幸运），要么是安踏品牌的鞋子（这家公司的标志有点像表示正确答案的对勾），要么是从校外小贩处买来的一小袋“醒脑”茶。镇子里销量最好的营养品是“六个核桃”（核桃因为外观类似大脑而被认为可以提升记忆力）。杨的父母似乎不那么迷信，但他们还是为居住在离大神树和三英尺高的香灰处最近的地方支付了昂贵的租金。杨说：“你不敬拜大神树，考试就不会通过。”这是当地人说的。

从杨家的落脚地往上走，我遇到了一个算命的，他坐在一个凳子上，旁边是一张绘制着奇怪图案的帆布。仅需3.4美元，这个穿着不大合身的服装的男人就可以为你预测未来——婚姻、后代、死亡，当然还有高考分数。他尴尬地笑了笑，说：“最近的生意不错。”旁边有一位老人观察着我们的对话，他穿着一件有花纹的毛衣，留着毛泽东式的背头。这个人叫杨启民，是一位退休的化学老师，他说他亲眼看到毛坦厂从800名学生的穷学校——他从1980年开始在这里任教——发展到今天的庞然大物。而在这个转型期间，绝大部分农村学校都关闭了。即使如此，他依然在抱怨死记硬背教学的弱点：“这样的学习方式让孩子们的头脑变得僵化，他们知道如何应付考试，但是他们不会思考问题。”

那天晚上，毛坦厂几乎每一个人都在完成他们最后的仪式。两个穿着校服的女孩用膝盖爬上毛泽东塑像下长长的台阶，一步一叩头，似乎在乞求皇帝的怜悯。在大神树下，数十人——有家长也有学生——点燃最后一捆“冠军香”，树下的香灰堆变成了钢厂里的炼炉，似乎可以一直烧到明天早晨。在街角，有数十辆大巴车准备在第二天早晨送毛坦厂的1万多名考生奔赴高考现场。每辆车的车牌号尾数都是“8”，这是中国的吉祥数字。

但是杨并没有幸运的感觉。他的笑容消失了，也不再讲那些有关篮球、有关他一直想去投奔的上海堂兄的笑话。杨的母亲已经离开，焦虑的情绪让她儿子感到紧张和急躁，于是他请孩子的祖父在最后几个星期来照顾他。现在距离考试只有一天，杨除了继续学习，没有时间做别的事情。多年来的努力和疲倦汇总成一句话：“就快结束了。”

第二天破晓之前，杨的父母从跃进村开车来接上儿子，把他送到离考试地点较近的六安市一个出租房中。我在镇子外的一家宾馆过夜，所以他们邀请我一同前往毛坦厂。这辆用来运输桃子的小面包车颠簸在崎岖、泥泞的道路上。由于没有后排座位，我不得不坐在杨的父亲给我找来的一个小板凳上，没有安全带。杨的母亲一言不发，父亲时不时高速过弯，让我连同凳子滑向一边。他向我讲述自己种植的加利福尼亚桃子，给这种桃子起名“大爱”。

1万多名在毛坦厂陪读的父母不惜一切代价提升孩子高考的成绩。很多母亲像林一样，没有接受过正规的教育，但是她们是一种不成文规定的强大执行者，比如禁止毛坦厂居民在学生睡觉时间看电视、洗衣服或者刷盘子。几年前镇子里开了一家网吧，有可能转移学生们对学习的兴趣，母亲们帮助学校一起进行抵制，最终让它关门。在杨的成绩下滑的时候，他的母亲没收了他的手机，强迫他学习到深夜，她自己就坐在旁边，织那些配有蝴蝶和金鱼装饰的拖鞋。白天，林精确掌握做饭的时间，与课间休息完美配合，让儿子既能吃饱又不浪费一秒钟学习的时间。林说：“我们必须竭尽所能做这些事，否则，我们不会原谅自己。”

我们在早晨5点进入毛坦厂，但是大神树已经被母亲们里三层外三层地包围。香火的热量烤人，香灰堆变得无比巨大，我们差点挤不进杨家的租房。他的母亲点燃几根香，插在香灰上，上下点头地祈祷。旁边的一个女人在烟雾中轻轻挥舞一袋鸡蛋——鸡蛋圆圆的样子被认为象征着智慧。

母亲敲窗户的时候，杨刚刚醒来。他的行李在前一天晚上已经收拾好，一小袋衣服、一大袋书，但是他的祖父似乎有些焦躁。他希望能早点出发，以避开数百辆汽车和大巴造成镇子里的交通堵塞。但是他的焦躁还有另外一个原因，有人——校领导？邻居？——警告他说，和我交谈会有麻烦。自从一年前被中国媒体大肆曝光其成功之路之后，毛坦厂现在希望保持低调，应验了中国的一句谚语“人怕出名猪怕壮”。杨的祖父用颤抖的声音请我离开。我和他们道别，从远处看着一家人钻进面包车，登上高考的最后一段旅程。他们的车经过我身边时，杨的父亲快速地按了一下喇叭。

三个小时之后，上午8:08，毛坦厂中学正门的第一个车队开始蛇行穿过欢呼的父母和镇子居民人群。往年还会有震天的锣鼓和鞭炮声，但是今年学校要求取消这些仪式。但依然还有一些迷信的内容。第一辆车的司机属马，不仅仅是配合当年的本命年，而且为了迎合中国的谚语“马到成功”。当天晚上，毛坦厂这座小镇几乎变成了一个空城，没有了学生、父母，也没有了那些靠他们为生的店主和小贩。

几个星期之后，高考分数揭晓了，我给杨打电话。在我们最后一次相遇之后，我担心他的考试成绩不理想，或许我的出现也有一部分责任。但是正相反，杨听起来非常兴奋。他的分数远远超过最近一次模拟考试的分数，这个分数无法让他进入梦想中的上海一所一类大学，但是足以让他被安徽省最好的一所二类大学录取。他无法保证自己在毕业后可以找到一份工作，但是他已经迫不及待地想要了解毛坦厂以外的世界。他说：“我是理科学生，但其实我喜欢艺术、音乐、写作和有创造性的学科。我想有很多学生和我一样，他们对于高考以外的事情一无所知。”有一点他可以肯定，他的生活必将与父母在“大爱”农场的生活完全不同。

那一天传来的不完全是好消息。杨的朋友曹考试失败了。杨说，这是毁灭性的打击，曹的家人悲伤无比。他的母亲多年来在家照顾他读书，他的父亲在沿海大城市的建筑工地每天工作12个小时，每年工作50个星期，来支付他在毛坦厂的学费。杨说，曹依然在谈他未来做一名英语教师的愿望，但是这个愿望变得越来越渺茫了。他的家人无论如何支付不起毛坦厂复读一年的学费，曹也不确认他是否还能够忍受一年。他现在只有一个选择了，杨说：“打工，他已经出发了。”知道自己高考失败之后，仅仅过了几天，曹就离开家乡，到中国繁华的沿海城市寻找农民工的工作。他或许会在某个建筑工地找到一份工作，就像他的父亲一样。





原文：

Teenagers pouring out of Maotanchang High School just before 11 p.m., after a routine day of study.

Yang Wei and his grandfather in the single room they shared in Maotanchang.

Some of Yang’s work sheets from Maotanchang High School.

A campus building designated for repeat students, those going through the gaokao mill again to try to raise their exam scores.

A board at the school listing former students’ names and the universities they qualified for.

Part of the 165-acre campus.

A student from Maotanchang High School, where cellphones are banned, at a bank of telephone booths not far from campus.

Mothers who moved with their children to Maotanchang, a secluded town in eastern China, making crafts and sewing.

Mothers preparing dinner in a building partitioned into small rental rooms. Their children dash home from campus for quick meal breaks.

Parents, some in pajamas, waiting to accompany their children home from school.

Mothers of test-takers burning incense and offering prayers a few nights before the exam.

Families releasing lanterns in a bid for good luck for students taking the exam.

Teenagers leaving Maotanchang in a convoy of buses for the exam site in a nearby city.

Parents sending off the test-takers.

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.

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.”

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.

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 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!”

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.”

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.

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.