Who Took a Gap Year? What Were They Looking For?

A gap year rarely eases the anxieties of your twenties. More often it makes them erupt all at once.

Every year, 1,000 young Chinese people get on a plane to New Zealand. They have decided to leave home for a year, and at the other end no job or course of study is waiting for them. "We don't know what's going to happen" — they know that perfectly well, and they call this year a "gap year," a somewhat long halftime break.

Song Zhao was on one of those planes. He had been a new engineer on a construction site, and a year and a half in, he was bored and fed up. In the winter of 2012 he squeezed in the IELTS exam, and on his way to the airport he stuffed a big handful of Chinese knots into his suitcase.

Two years later Xiao Zuo, a young woman from Shifang, in Deyang, Sichuan province, made the same decision. She had been a travel obsessive in college and had planned to go abroad. Instead she spent the four years after graduation at a state-owned enterprise. Once she got on that plane, the line going around was that "the first person in Deyang with a permanent state-sector post has quit."

Hong Shanhu had heard that countless people want a seat on that plane every year, and that it is first come, first served. To improve her odds, this young white-collar worker in Xiamen sat at her computer and waited; she had even practiced filling in the application form ahead of time. When the quota opened, other equally determined young Chinese people flooded in and the system crashed. She refreshed for more than an hour, and the effort paid off.

Now they have all boarded that plane, holding a working holiday visa issued by New Zealand. Since 2008, New Zealand has offered this chance to people aged 18 to 30 from mainland China, so they can travel, live and work there and earn their travel money as they go. Such chances are rare. Only two countries, New Zealand and Australia, currently grant working holiday visas to young Chinese people.

Enthusiasm for the "gap year" is plainly growing. Companies and institutions have spotted the opening. Both Qyer.com and Lonely Planet have launched grants to fund young people's travel. The China Youth Development Foundation set up the "China Gap Year Program," while nonprofit programs such as the Youcheng Foundation's "Young Eagle Program" and the "Grit Program" funded by the Gates Foundation offer more tailored gap years, in which the year's assignments include rural fieldwork and internships at nonprofits and internet companies.

According to the New Zealand Consulate-General in Shanghai, the 1,000 spots were gone within 9 hours in 2014. This year it took 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Gap Year

A working holiday is only one way to take a halftime break.

In the 17th century, the sons of British aristocratic families toured Europe, visiting museums, looking at paintings and tasting wine, seeing for themselves what they had only read about in class. This "Grand Tour" was the ancestor of the gap year. In the 1960s, after the Second World War, Britain's baby boomers set out from London along the "Hippie Trail," a route across Europe and Asia that ran south toward India and Nepal, and started the fashion for "gap year travel." Western governments encouraged the young to go far and meet other cultures, hoping that understanding across borders would help head off another world war.

Thanks to those traditions, young people in Europe and the United States still take a year, after finishing high school or graduating from college, to do things they had never had the chance to do: travel around, volunteer, learn a new language or a new craft.

According to data from Britain's Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, about 5% of British students who won a university place in 2012 chose to defer for a year. The famous case is Prince William: after leaving Eton College in 2000, he did volunteer work in Chile with Raleigh International, and photographs of him cleaning toilets went everywhere.

This April the Obamas announced that their elder daughter, Malia, would take a gap year before starting at Harvard. Including Malia, about 1% of admitted American students defer. Advice and help for them comes from a nonprofit, the American Gap Association; its research found that American students grew markedly more interested in gap years between 2005 and 2015, with the number choosing one in 2015 up 22% from the year before.

By the time Chen Zihao heard about this fashionable idea in China, it was already a little late.

In 2014 Chen Zihao, a student at the University of International Business and Economics, failed to win a place abroad. After graduating he interned at the International Poverty Reduction Center in China while studying for the GRE and the TOEFL. The internship paid 1,000 yuan a month, and he moved into a temporary prefab shed on a rooftop. The job was not full-time; the rest of the time he mostly stayed up late. Having so little to do made him anxious, but a fellow intern, an older student from his school, told him: "Isn't this a gap year?"

When Hong Shanhu began preparing her own gap year at home, she also felt she was late. She had known about gap years in high school and envied how "kids abroad get to travel overseas before they start college." But Chinese universities do not let students defer; you enroll within a few months of finishing the gaokao, the national college entrance exam.

Asked to describe the young Chinese people who choose a gap year, Tang Diudiu, a junior at Shanghai International Studies University, says: "They live a little more clear-eyed than we do. They make up their minds fast, and they have a really good attitude." Over the past year she ran "gapper 30," a project that recorded 30 gap year stories and became a book, and through it she came across dozens of cases. Most gap year people, she thinks, are not "impressive people who only exist on WeChat" but "people you could reach out and touch."

First Half

At 23, Che Guevara and a friend got on a beat-up motorcycle and spent eight months crossing Latin America, seeing how hard ordinary people's lives were; when the trip ended he began another journey that changed the world. Because of the film The Motorcycle Diaries, Li Muze, then 28, decided in 2012 to pause his job at Reuters in Beijing and take a gap year.

Like Tang Diudiu, many people first heard of the gap year from The Belated Gap Year (《迟到的间隔年》), a book Sun Dongchun published in 2009. That year's bestseller began as a hit thread on the Tianya forum. It recounts how in 2006 Sun Dongchun set off with a bank card holding a little over 20,000 yuan, passed through six countries including Thailand, Myanmar and India, and met his wife, a Japanese woman, while volunteering in India. A life redirected, love found, and afterwards a career made out of writing about the gap year: the story was too successful, too seductive. The publisher even billed it as "the first landmark book in China to promote the idea of 'gap year' travel."

But once they grew restless and started preparing for the year, there was a lot to weigh.

Li Muze's colleagues and friends all thought quitting to travel was "unnecessary." His direct boss tried hard to keep him and promised a month off to recover. He wavered: "Work was going well, life in Beijing was comfortable, and I was almost 30 at the time. Should I put everything down to do this?" Six months before quitting he started on his visa and his flights, and over a year he traveled through Southeast Asia and came back and made a book out of it. In the book he argues the decision was not impulsive.

Hong Shanhu comes from a traditional family in Quanzhou. By the time she was 26 and preparing to go to New Zealand on a working holiday, her parents had switched into marriage-pressure mode. She had to tell them the trip was for work and training, and at their request she went on three or four blind dates before leaving, having agreed that if she found a suitable match she would stay in China.

Xie Anni's answer to the Zhihu question "why do so few Chinese college students take a gap year" drew 1,041 upvotes. Her first obstacle was her own school. In 2012 she applied for permission to intern abroad, and the academic affairs office assumed she was pushing her graduation back a year; it even accused her, in language meant to frighten her, of "wasting national resources." But she already had an internship offer, and she was more determined to pause her studies than they expected. She dug out the school's Student Handbook: "I wore out the pages on degree length and academic years from flipping through them, and I kept going to the academic affairs office to argue. I stopped just short of hunting down the university president."

In the end she got her leave of absence.

A Somewhat Long Halftime Break

Young people who go to New Zealand on a working holiday usually land first in Auckland. New Zealand's largest city has a big Chinese population, which makes it the easier choice for newly arrived young Chinese people whose English is shaky.

Xiao Zuo's first job was in a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. She had never done housework at home, and she cut her fingers four times in two weeks. A few months later she worked the peach line at the largest cannery in southwestern New Zealand, from 1pm to 10pm, prying out the stones one by one. After four days she could not stand the tedium and switched to picking fruit outdoors as a seasonal worker.

Song Zhao lasted one day at a Chinese restaurant. "The boss was a total ripoff": he was paid NZ$6 an hour, less than 30 yuan, under half the legal minimum of NZ$14.25. After quitting he began "a life of goofing off for a while, then switching jobs." His second job was at a laundry, shaking the debris out of tablecloths, duvet covers and bedsheets; in less than a week the boss decided he worked too slowly and fired him. Then he picked cherries for 20 days, already the longest he stuck with anything.

But Song Zhao's year in New Zealand has turned into exactly the kind of gap year the program most likes to advertise.

The turning point came in Queenstown. He picked up the guitar and singing he had taken up in college, and found that two or three hours on the street in Queenstown brought in NZ$200 to NZ$300 a day, close to 1,000 yuan. East Asian faces were rare among Queenstown's street performers, which made him popular. Once a middle-aged American man listened to him and said, "Young man, I really love your attitude toward life," then shook his hand; when Song Zhao opened his palm he found US$300 in it and was stunned. Back in China, on the strength of a song he wrote about living in Queenstown and named after the town, he became a singer at Da Bing's Little House, a moderately well-known bar in Lijiang, and changed careers for good.

Stories like his are not common. Wan De'er packed seven projects into his gap year and still regrets it, convinced that laziness cost him many chances.

Wan De'er also answered the Zhihu question about why so few Chinese college students take a gap year. He did badly on the gaokao in 2013, and during the year he spent reapplying to do his undergraduate degree abroad he first joined a youth exchange run by South Korea's foreign ministry, which finally got his Facebook friend count into double digits. Then he went home to Chongqing to start a business around studying abroad and travel, registered a company in Hong Kong, and traveled to Australia, Sri Lanka, India and elsewhere to "build contacts and projects." He also went to Guizhou and Vietnam to research ethnic minorities, and spent a week volunteering (WWOOF) on an organic farm in Japan.

A gap year rarely eases the anxieties of your twenties. More often it makes them erupt all at once. Looking back on that year, Wan De'er regrets not spending more time on Zhihu, so he could have become a minor Zhihu celebrity.

Second Half

One classic question about the gap year is what became of the people who came back. Did their lives turn a corner? Did they succeed in remaking an unremarkable existence?

In the years after The Belated Gap Year, a run of bestsellers about quitting work to travel and chase a dream appeared. Ten Years of Backpacking (《背包十年》), for one, went through 41 print runs after it came out in 2010 and had sold more than 600,000 copies by 2014. Then came gap year travel books like Heading South (《一路向南》) and Working Holiday: One Year, One Dream (《打工旅行：一年实现一个梦》). "Gap year, working holiday, whichever you search for, there are already several books. It's starting to feel like a flood," said Li Jingyuan, the editor who then ran a travel book series at CITIC Press.

Young people are warier now of that kind of dream-selling.

Xie Anni's unusual choice after graduation does not seem to have carried her to a higher rung of her career. She took a year off school, interned for most of it at a consulting firm in a small village near Cologne, Germany, and came back to Nanjing, where the hurrying pedestrians and jammed traffic downtown were more than she could adjust to. She dropped the idea of an exciting life in a big Chinese city and went home to Zhuhai, which has a stretch of sea and scenery like a Spanish coastal town.

Li Muze spent more than 300 days traveling through 15 countries in Asia and Africa. When he came back a year later, he found that many of the interns he had once supervised were now editors in charge of a channel. The only job he could find in Chinese media was "acceptable, a temporary stopgap."

"For the first six months after I came back, I couldn't sit still in the office at all. ... I was in a lot of pain. The things I had tried so hard to escape, the states of life I had tried to resolve and adjust through traveling, didn't seem to have been resolved at all. That's when the doubt and the sense of defeat set in," he said in a TED talk. It took him half a year to settle down and get back to a normal rhythm.

Chen Zihao now wishes he could choose again. While preparing to apply abroad the following year, he also looked for a job as a fallback, but no longer counting as a fresh graduate left him in an awkward spot in the Chinese job market, and companies had been told they could not take on graduates as interns. In campus recruiting he applied to more than a dozen firms that he calls "the fallback companies for students at our school" and did not get a single invitation to sit a written test. By the time he had an offer from KPMG, with a Beijing hukou (household registration) attached, an HR staffer looked more closely and only then noticed he was not a fresh graduate. "Maybe it was a system bug."

"As about as ordinary a person as you can get, I feel that for now these are costs I can't carry. I want a job, I want to make it in Beijing, and I want a hukou," Chen Zihao said.

These young people, hemmed in by attitudes and by the system, might well envy Olivia, a 22-year-old from New Zealand. Three years ago she came to Shanghai to intern through a school program, the kind of thing usually called an "OE," or overseas experience, and close to a gap year. Now she and her boyfriend run a small and fairly successful food company in Shanghai making New Zealand-style pies.

Cover image: a still from On the Road