‘My Path’ after twenty years

Goliath was pelted with ten million stones every June. It must be painful.
— Me, commenting elsewhere

After the faith fades, the ritual remains.
We still carry stones — not for victory,
but to remember our past goals.
— ChatGPT, mimicking a contemporary

Twenty-two years ago, a college fresher penned an essay titled My Path. She began with a modest line: ‘I don’t consider myself a winner. I am just an ordinary person who keeps growing and thinking.’

Then: The age of Ciang and Qu

She, Ciang Yaucuang in the conventional romanization of this blog, was anything but ordinary. She outperformed her peers at a top-tier high school and enrolled in School of Life Sciences, Peking University in 2003, then a holy grail for the academically gifted. In retrospect of the tragic land, the people suffered from pounding and isolation, and the skeptics of knowledge treking the wild, Ciang can not be deduced to a blessed girl or a persistant figure from Confucian fable. She was admired not only for her achievements, but for the way she presented: humble, sincere, infused with a humble love for learning itself. ‘Accept knowledge with a heartfelt and humble love,’ she wrote, ‘and try to understand its beauty.’ It might be appropriate to quote a full paragraph:¹

Mathematics and physics have concise definitions, rigorous proofs, ingenious reasoning, and countless perfect rules and truths. To carve a regular hexagonal cross-section into a cube is, for me, a sheer delight for no reason — it is symmetrical, thus perfect. Deriving the same solution respectively through the theorem of momentum and the conservation of mechanical energy is also a pleasure for no reason — they outline truth from aspect to aspect, allowing me to discern the contours. Chemistry and biology are filled with strange phenomena, wondrous legends, mysterious substances, and countless reflections on life. When you hold the sky-blue crystals of copper sulphate in your palm, would you not handle them with the utmost care? As if admiring a delicate, fragile work of art. When you trace the shadow of a paramecium under the microscope, would you not feel elated? As if encountering one of the Creator’s miracles.

Eighteen-year-old Ciang casts pebbles into the mist, much like one searching for paramecia under a microscope. Between the beauty of knowledge, and the homily of ideal life, she finds solace only in her own company.

There might be thousands of people asking on the other side of paper: was that really love for learning? Or was it the love of winning? Ciang exposed her failure — with evident outcome, for if things have not been like that, this idol would not exist. I dare not speak for Ciang, but I remember my high school self clearly. I honestly believed I ‘loved learning’, until when my grades fell and the next level slipped from reach. Was it ever love? Or just pride, dressed in school colours?

Ciang was not alone. Her story, including how she have earned titles like ‘top ten campus beauties’ and ‘classroom runway shows’², was peddled by Qu Qieptau, a fellow Life Sciences student. His bestselling book, as suggested by the title, Secret: Tricks of Geniuses from Peking University, mixed tactical advice with mythic storytelling. It inserted figures like Ciang in pages: students with 30,000-word English vocabularies, unbeatable rhetorics, élite physical stamina. The 1980s-style ebullient stories softened the monotony of time management charts and review schedules. Readers didn’t just want to succeed. They wanted to succeed like that. Perhaps the emergence of the book and a surge of similar publications was due to the slow transition within the publishing industry.

It has been another decade when I came across Qu’s book.

When Qoo Iaw Dang Heocbah, a student-run screen time manager and forum whose name translates to ‘I want to be a top student’ launched in 2013, my primary school classmates and I dismissed the ‘proactive phone lock’ as a rather tedious joke. By secondary school, the platform had become a socialing paradise. There were timers, productivity logs, and taglines lifted straight from Qu’s chapters. It was there that I met my peers, earnest, funny, anxious, half-hoping to become another Ciang.

Technically speaking, screen timeing is truly tedious, and BBS forums have fallen behind the times. Yet looking back at history, Heocbah still held a revolutionary edge: for the first time, individual striving gained a collective template. We buried our heads in screens, feigning deafness to the buzzing local accents behind us, labouring in a utopia where effort guaranteed reward — never considering the mechanisation inherent in it all. In his sequel, The Radish Project, Qu went further, declaring that gyakushū, ‘to turn defeat into victory’, requires no willpower.

We believed in effort. We believed in strategy. Now and then, we believed that if we just worked hard enough, our love would magically pay off. But even then, there was a crack between the reality and the theory/ideal. I was distracted, not by video games or romantic novels frequently accused by Qu, Heocbah, and anonymous parents. I was distracted by my own mind — by books that were not taught, by thoughts that did not fit into the upcoming exam. I was seen as learning excessively, a beautiful misunderstanding. Without asking why, I mimicked Ciang and Qu, unconsciously treating textbooks as my very game, drawing five-star generals on practice problems, and tracking study hours, simply because forum friends across the Southern Mountain did the same.

Still, Ciang remained our reference point, a figure less real than remembered, shining not just because she climbed high, but that she was thought to love the climb. So did her succeessors writing by Wèimíng Lake. Ciang is overly correct: ‘We learn for cultivation and sublimation of our own. Speak not about universities, jobs, or material security. Everything learnt will act on your body and mind, in the subtle change in your state of being.’

Now: Fragmented goals and aesthetics

Ciang was the stoic heroine of the early 2000s. Her path was strait, her goals were, at least believed, legible. Students were persuing success in percentages and placement, drilled into the beauty in truth, even at personal cost. There are many stories that could be told here, but the party parted, the midnight passing.

In another decade, modern Ciang-ites, still stoic figures though, embraced the same struggle dressed in softer fabrics and bathed in better lighting.

On REDnote or TikTok, you see not only students, but also working professionals in their twenties or early thirties, graduated from Ciang’s legacy. Having ‘succeeded’ as in the verbal tradition — accepted to top universities, hired into stable jobs, often in competitive cities or industries — they continue to post slices from ‘commute-study-journal-sleep’ routines, intercut with moments of skincare, hiking, or ukulele. It is not touting ‘multifaceted life’, but rather the life per se, and seemingly that should be. They are polymaths, carrying out professional work while holding fast to the rituals of their adolescent selves.

They no longer mouth a love of biology or literature as in My Path. They speak of self-discipline, resilience, or simply ‘because it’s there’. Excellence remains, only decentralized. No longer measured in rankings or test scores, but in aesthetics, posture, glow. Gone was the exclamation, ‘I love learning,’ implaced by posts filtered through ambiguity: ‘Just a normal day 🍃📚✨’ If Ciang was a priestess of excellence, present-day equivalents are curators of experience.

Change from campus to workplace does not explain all. Most of these influencers never claim to be influencers. They insist on being normal, emphasizing their jobs, their exhaustion, their profession. But they still frame their lives through petty tricks. An unexpected perfect portrait, a sunlight-shed balcony, a dim corner in a recent concert.

This cultural pivot can be traced in both personal and systemic changes. As adulthood began for Ciang’s inheritors, the structure around them collapsed: rising housing prices, declining job security, algorithmic self-exposure, and widespread disillusionment with meritocracy. The reward once promised to academic excellence now feels elusive or delayed. The act of pursuing is the only thing. A generation who once entered the examination hall together now bid of identity maintenance. ‘I am still moving. I am still worthy of the path. Even if I never became Ciang, I am not lost.’ They are whispering. Makeup, lo-fi beats, carefully placed camera, and fragile but persistent self-ritual — Justifying the past with aesthetics.

Remaining ritual and changing course

Across the divide of twenty years there is a dedicate tension between the continuity of form and the erosion of substance. Ciang’s generation recited ‘I love learning’ as doctrine, while present-day Ciang-ites still whisper its echoes in softened tone. Paper and pencils are replaced by Obsidian, Tiger Balm by lipstick, but the posture of devotion remains remarkably intact.

But does that make it the same thing?

The rituals have survived: early rising, colour-coded schedules, even the meticulous highlighting of biology textbooks. Yet the centre of gravity has shifted. No more arguments like ‘paramecium is beauty’ — merely tautology: action is beauty; if it is not, then make it so. Today it might be CFA vocabulary or Duolingo challenge; tomorrow, a dance challenge or a journaling format. Attempt has become aesthetic, portable, and possibly goal-agnostic.

It is not a disarmament of merit. It is an intelligent adaptation to an increasingly precarious world. When Ciang’s path promised, at least nominally, a trade of suffering for stability, the modern scene has internalized the fact that the reward is not guaranteed. The act is the only reward.

When I was idling at high school for some reason and read My Path with my father, I already held this modern view. That a cube has a regular hexagonal cross-section, that the theorem of momentum and the conservation of mechanical energy are equivalent expressions — is this not the most trifle fact imaginable? I would rather spend my time pondering how to derive the Poisson spot.

Yet there is one thing lost. Coherence. The efforts of Ciang-ites have been captured by marginalism, not to mention the ever-declining spiral of silence outside the reach of social media spotlight. Teenage Ciang disbelieved the rumours that education was futile, nor did she subscribe to the complimental notion that ‘higher qualifications = brighter future’. Setting aside the distracting social issues that impacted her academic performance, this naïve-sounding reasoning marks the mindset of a top scholar. Now, the generation believe just enough to keep going, but not enough to change. Ciang’s alumni sitting by Wèimíng Lake, instead of composing another My Path, are moaning their ephemeral careers like anyone else.

For an individual, there is no such thing like changing course. An individual experiences only a fragment of history, yet for them it is the entirety. Individually it can be only spoken that, the very cultural mechanism that once facilitated intellectual progress is now perpetuating self-doubt and fragmented ambition. There is no true self-cultivation in a system-overwhelming world. Students who dreamt to become Ciang now find themselves staying on the path, but without a destination. They persist in the rituals without any kind of conviction.

Even the mythic heroes, like Ciang herself or her avatar, are struggling with social awareness. Her rumoured (but untrue) move away from biology to consultancy suggested a broad but dangerous drift: the dream of integrity, a centurial dream of philosophers attracting students to keep up, has been replaced by adaptability, rhetorics, and social intelligence. The learning subculture, though unbreakable, has mutated from a meritocratic ladder to a mosaic of survival strategies. Some still aim at excellence. Others aim at visibility. Most aim, tacitly, at dignity.

The path is no longer important. We only need stories we can still convince ourselves of.

That story has become quieter. More reflexive. Less triumphant. But it still exists. In every person who wakes up to an alarm they set the night before. In every carefully annotated Kindle passage. In every mundane step taken not out of clarity, but hoping that clarity might someday return.

Interlude: A girl with flashcards

’tis 11:47 pm, and she is reviewing English flashcards at the kitchen table.

The soft hum of the refrigerator marks time more faithfully than her smartwatch. On the table: half a cup of cold barley tea, a cracked iPad, a planner open to a colour-coded page stated KEEP GOING.

She is twenty-eight now. Consultant, or analyst — hard to explain the job to her parents, and harder to explain to herself. The office is quiet, the work ambiguous, the pay enough.

She still uses the same vocabulary app from high school. The interface has changed, but the word lists are eerily familiar. Recalcitrant. Ephemeral. Nonplussed. She whispers them under her breath, like old friends at a reunion where no one is sure who aged better.

Somewhere in another apartment, maybe three stations away, a younger girl is posting a video: Study With Me, 10 pm to 2 am, Pomodoro Timer. The same markers. The same tilt of the lamp. The same desperate tenderness toward structure.

The woman at the table thinks she sees herself in that girl. She wants to warn her, or maybe just apologise. But more honestly, she envies her: the clarity, the flame, the unbroken line between effort and meaning. That line is now bleak from her life. She still does the things. She still counts the minutes, highlights the sentences, chooses the right filter. But the sense of destiny is gone.

Once, she believed that hard work led somewhere. That if you threw enough stones, Goliath would fall.

Now she throws them for the sound they make.

Interlude II: A boy on the rooftop

He was never good at exams. Not bad, just... not good.

While others colour-coded their notebooks, he drew maps of imaginary cities in the margins. He preferred long walks to past-paper drills, and often fell asleep in the library with a book that had nothing to do with the curriculum. He never hated school, instead, only not found the urgency that others seemed to carry like oxygen tanks.

He remembers watching the top scorers walk past, neat uniforms and faster footsteps, laughter that sounded rehearsed. They were always reviewing something, always prepared for a eureca moment. He respected them, or in better wording, resented them. But mostly, he felt like he was out of the story.

Now, years later, he works as a technician for a small company that fixes air conditioning systems. An honest work. In summer, his shirt clings to his back by 10 am; in winter, his hands are always slightly chapped. There is a calmness to it, a dignity in being useful. No one asks for grades. No one discusses paramecia.

But some nights, when he finishes late, he climbs onto the roof of a client’s building. Bathing in the wind, he watches lattices of glowing windows. Some flicker with PowerPoint slides. Some with livestreamed lectures. Some, probably, with videos of young people mouthing motivational slogans into ring lights.

He wonders what would have happened if he had chased Ciang’s path. Would it have broken him? Or saved him? He doesn’t know. But he suspects that some of those windows belong to people who feel the same, unsure if they are ahead or behind, unsure what was supposed to happen.

So he stands there a while. Not chasing anything. Not regretting much. Just letting the city breathe.

A path, or a reason to proceed

Ciang’s word path, after twenty years of sedimentation, has been heavier and mystical. The Ciang of 2003 embodied the aspirational clarity of a generation who believed, or at least performed belief, that excellence would carry them forward. But what we have witnessed over two decades is not a collapse of that vision, nor a complete reinvention, but something more ambiguous: a slow diffusion.

It have been no longer a path of Ciang’s own, but of a generation. Some study with monk-like discipline. Some excel in multiple fields. But increasingly, they do so under different lights. While once the goal was entrance into a world of seriousness and sublimity, student-influencers today are generalists in excellence, attempting to re-tie the sailor’s knot by voice, poise, and adaptability.

Twenty years on, the board of Ciang in Baidu Tieba, once flooding the ‘campus beauty’ discussion, has long faded. Yet some persist in quietly refuting rumours, insisting she continues her neuroscience research. Actually, for a scholar, ResearchGate suffices — or conversely, we vent our frustrations in vain, knowing full well that ‘being oneself’ has never been enough. Even if we are Ciang, a few research papers are merely formalities. Passion is a joke in the long academic journey. We seek not to settle and conform. We thirst for answers to the reality, not the scant answer scribbled on yellowed exam papers. Even if we have forgotten what we want.

The path ahead has grown hazy. The aura remains, just to illuminate what the passion made us look like. The tragedy is not that the path is gone. The tragedy, if any, is that we expected a path at all. We believed we are ordained to follow the path. In reality, what we inherited was an illusion of roadposts, a set of postures, and a language for struggle that now often outlives the purpose it once served. From a path seemingly forged by one individual two decades ago, to the flame a few students raised like a manga hero a decade past, to the silent collective subconscious of today.

But maybe, that is appropriate.

We skillfully load the stones and bow our bodies, which does not have to be a story of failure, but of cultural memory. We are doing something we do not fully understand. A form of survival, a sit-in protest, or even the herald of another era.

So this is not a eulogy for Ciang, or for the age of textbooks and flashcards. It is an acknowledgment that the path never really existed the way we thought. In the end of the day, across the scattered stones and mismatched stories, something still tries to walk.

The end

Finally, in a few days, some of my friends will attend the tough exam. Good luck.