But the teachers’ worries were not unwarranted: In an environment organized around and sustained by competition, their stubborn insistence on loafing was an act of subversion. The slackers were not troublemakers by any standard. You’ve made it this far, I remember thinking to myself about my slacker classmates. The rest of us looked on with incomprehension. The parents, no less exasperated, were at a loss, not knowing what had happened to their once obedient, self-driven kids. “Your child has potential!” said the teachers, pointing out that they’d already made it into the famously selective school. Teachers shook their heads with dismay and summoned parents. After midterms and final exams, when rankings were posted at the entrance to the main school building, attracting large crowds of students, they drifted noiselessly by, not bothering to look up their places, because they already knew what they were. They wore large headphones over their ears, eyes to the ceiling during study hours, while the rest of us hunched over our desks. They concealed themselves in the back of the classroom, with Japanese manga or video-gaming manuals tucked inside textbooks as teachers held forth from the lecterns. They were not many, though we all knew who they were. Looking back, I see they were the first victims of what the school was doing to us-and what the state is doing to us now. At the time, they made little sense to me. But some of my classmates seemed to have already cottoned on to the reality of what lay ahead. It was well before the term “lying flat” was coined to describe opting out of the unwinnable race of Chinese academic and career competition. From 2003 to 2005, I was a student at rendafuzhong (the High School Affiliated to People’s University) a notoriously cutthroat institution in the Chinese capital.
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