‘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 the holy grail for the academically gifted. She was admired not only for her achievements, but for the way she presented: humble, sincere, infused with a professed love for learning itself. ‘Accept knowledge with a heartfelt and humble love,’ she wrote, ‘and try to understand its beauty.’ ¹

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, polished into something nobler? Yes, Ciang exposed her failure, with an evident subsequence that otherwise we would not read her. I can’t speak for Ciang, but I remember myself 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, with an excerpt of My Path, 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 featured figures like Ciang: students with 30,000-word English vocabularies, unbeatable logic, 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.

I discovered Qu’s book later, during the climax of Qoo Iaw Dang Heocbah, a student-run forum whose name translates to ‘I Want to Be an Academic Overachiever’. It was both a screen time recorder and 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 someone like Ciang.

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 games or gadgets frequently accused by Qu, Heocbah, and anonymous parents. I was distracted by my own mind — by books that were not assigned, by thoughts that did not fix into the upcoming exam. I was seen as learning excessively, a beautiful misunderstanding.

Still, Ciang, and 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 Weiming 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 narrow, 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. 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 — alumni of Ciang’s legacy. Having ‘succeeded’ in the old sense: accepted to top universities, hired into stable jobs, often in competitive cities or industries, they continue to post silhouettes from their ‘commute-study-journal-sleep’ routines, intercut with moments of skincare, tea brewing, or ukulele. These are not resession from productivity. They are polymaths, carrying out professional work while holding fast to the rituals of their adolescent selves.

They no longer declare a love of biology or literature as in My Path. They speak of 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 ².

The identity of the overachiever has fragmented. In Ciang’s time, her identity was inseparable from her academic devotion — ‘I love learning,’ she wrote. Today, that same sentiment is filtered through ambiguity: ‘Just a normal day 🍃📚✨’ If Ciang was a priestess of excellence, present-day equivalents are curators of experience.

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 — and so the act of pursuing it has become ritualistic, symbolic, aestheticized.

It is not a simple change from campus to workplace. Most of these influencers never claim to be influencers. They insist on being normal. They emphasize their jobs, their exhaustion, their profession. Yet they still frame their lives through petty tricks. An unexpected perfect portrait, a sunlight-shed balcony, a dim corner in a recent concert. And theoretically (only unfriendly for observation), a startup to become the next Amazon.

So what has changed? The stakes are no longer exams, but identity maintenance. Each post is an echo: I am still going. I am still worthy of the path. Even if I never became Ciang, I am not lost. Excellence is not gone. Simply migrated into aesthetic balance, emotional fluency, and curated normalcy.

The mutation of the culture is not a decline in willpower, nor a rebellion against study, but rather a sideways drift. The generation that once idolized Ciang has not abandoned their ideals. They instead translated them — into makeup, lo-fi beats, carefully placed camera, and fragile but persistent rituals of self.

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 may have recited ‘I love learning’ as doctrine, but 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. For Ciang, biology was the beautiful object. For many now, the process itself — the method, the rhythm, the visible effort — has taken over as the point. The substance is replaceable. 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. Thus, the reward becomes the act itself — stylized, shareable, looped.

Yet something is lost. Not purity, not discipline — those are intact — but a certain coherence. The older culture, for all its rigidity, gave its devotees a structure in which they could believe too much. Now, many believe just enough to keep going, but not enough to be transformed. Ciang’s alumni sitting by Weiming Lake, instead of composing another My Path, are moaning their ephemeral careers like anyone else.

It is the deepest irony: 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, have abandoned the old temple. Her rumoured move away from biology ³ suggested a broad yet dangerous drift: the dream of integrity replaced by adaptability, linguistic fluency, and social intelligence. But still, it does not make the idea of learning a failure. The subculture 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 ultimate question is not ‘where is the right path?’ But rather, ‘what kind of story can we 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

It’s 11:47 p.m., 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 that says only ‘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 subway stops away — a younger girl is posting a video: Study With Me, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., 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 gone from her life — not erased, but faded. 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 — 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. Resented them, sometimes. 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 a.m.; 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. Where once the goal was entrance into a world of science and seriousness, student-influencers today are generalists in excellence, their value measured not only by grades but also by voice, poise, and adaptability. They sell not just effort but persona.

The aura of the path remains. It is a pounding, for us finally not keeping the promise. We believed we loved learning. Perhaps we did. Perhaps we loved being told we did. Or perhaps we loved what it made us look like. The truth, as always, is fragmentary.

We are finding meaning, after the sheer failure to become Ciang. Something persists beneath the shifting cultural sediment. Not a shared destination, but maybe a shared motion. The tragedy is not that the path is gone. The tragedy, if any, is that we expected a path at all — linear, final, nameable. 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.

But maybe that is enough.

Maybe the quiet determination of the woman with the flashcards, or the roof-bound technician who still wonders ‘what if’, are not stories of failure, but of cultural memory. They carry forward something we cannot quite define. Not ambition. Not hope. Or no more than a way of being with effort.

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.