Born in 1954, He Was in the First Class of University Students After China Restored the Gaokao | Housing and Our Lives ⑩

Housing is the largest thing a person can buy, and it is one witness to how an individual's life changes. QDaily is running a series of reports that use housing as a thread, to see what happened in the years behind us.

It is time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it. Most of the story was written by the generation before.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a belief in progress and development; a conviction that society will keep opening up better and larger space for the individual; that effort earns its reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

These, in fact, are universal values.

When a word like "history" is set in front of us, it tends to disappear under grand narratives. We would rather use interviews at the smaller, human scale, and sort out what we can.

We begin this record with "housing," the thing people watch most closely in their own lives.

One evening in September 1977, the loudspeaker at a tractor factory in Baoshan, Yunnan Province, carried the national news broadcast. The first item was the restoration of the gaokao, the college entrance exam, which the Cultural Revolution had shut down for ten years. Liang Yong'an remembers walking out of the building and standing on the steps of the two-story factory office. "Right then I felt in my heart that life was about to change completely."

The following year he was admitted to Fudan University with the highest score in Yunnan Province on the Chinese-language paper. It took him seven days by bus and train to get from Yunnan to Shanghai.

From the first class of university students after the gaokao returned in 1978 to his present post as a professor in Fudan's Chinese department, Liang Yong'an has lived here for nearly 40 years. His housing has gone from a single iron bunk in a dormitory to the 69-square-meter apartment he owns now. In the 20 years before that, as his father was transferred from posting to posting, he moved through no fewer than ten homes in at least four Chinese provinces.

Liang Yong'an was born in Weihai, Shandong, in 1954. He followed his parents to the People's Liberation Army Artillery Engineering Academy in Nanjing and then to the Military Telecommunications Engineering Institute in Xi'an. In Nanjing he lived in the earth-yellow rows of single-story army barracks; in Xi'an he squeezed into a communal dormitory with his father. As soon as the Cultural Revolution began, the family was reassigned to the party school in the Baoshan region of Yunnan, where they lived in a courtyard compound built by the overseas Chinese businessman Liang Jinshan.

Liang lived in that compound until he finished high school in 1973. That same year he joined 890,000 other "educated youth" across the country in going down to the countryside, moving from Baoshan to a Dai village in the Nujiang Gorge in Yunnan. The walls there were woven from bamboo and let the wind through; the roofs were piled with thatch and leaked when it rained. He did not find it hard, because "back then I just felt we had to change the country — our generation had to turn the countryside upside down."

Not long after his years as an educated youth ended, Liang left for Shanghai to study. He still remembers how ravenously people read on the Fudan campus in 1978 — under the streetlights, in the library, at every desk in every classroom. Campus speech contests argued over "enlightenment, idealism, and the fate of the nation." By the time the class of 1986 arrived, that scene was gone.

The people who had read under the streetlights were now sitting around talking, enjoying an easy summer. The students split into two camps: the "mahjong faction," who played mahjong, and the "TOEFL faction," who studied for the TOEFL. They chased pleasure and were uneasy about the future at the same time, and "America" became a new prospect and a new way out.

The campus was a small model of the society around it. China was turning from a society organized around politics and morality into one organized around the economy — around money, which at its extremes makes tragedy easier to produce.

Liang felt this most directly in 1993, when his closest friend went into real estate in Hainan and made 60 million yuan in a single year. A year later the state pulled its capital back out, and the friend's project fell from 6,600 yuan per square meter to 1,000. "He kept thinking it had hit bottom, hit bottom, hit bottom… He never imagined it would keep collapsing," Liang says.

He regretted his friend's losses. He was more disappointed by a society built on speculation and money. He describes that period as the one in which "all of China's 1980s ideals came crashing down." He spent a year surveying rural culture in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, and published books of literary criticism, but came to see that none of it changed anything: "After the 1990s I felt we no longer belonged to this era — what you were thinking about wasn't what everyone else actually cared about."

Society went on developing on the raw instinct of economic desire.

Liang's idealistic phase is over, but he still thinks the generation now in its 50s and 60s is the greatest in Chinese history — the one that witnessed China's deepest changes.

Today he writes for three hours and reads for four, every day, a habit he has kept for years. In 2010 he bought a 60-square-meter house in the old town of Xitang. He likes to write under its small bridges and willows, and he wants to settle there — because apart from that place, he does not know where else he should put down roots.

What follows is Liang Yong'an's account in his own words, one way to come to know him:

Born in Shandong, Settled in Yunnan

I was born in Shandong and spent part of my childhood there, in the kind of village courtyard house you find around Weihai. The wind was fierce and the snow heavy in winter, so the stone walls were built up as high as the windowsills, very solid. Just inside the gate there was a small passage. Why did we have a little courtyard like that? Because my father's family was reasonably well off and he went to school. Once he started studying he came to believe in the Communist Party, and at 16 he ran off to find it. So although our family had once been big landlords, we were at the same time a Communist Party military household. When the landlords were struggled against, the houses were stripped bare and people were left with a shack, but our family still kept a small courtyard.

The house had three rooms across the front — you walked into the main hall, with a bedroom on one side and a side room on the other. It was a courtyard, divided down the middle. My father and mother, my grandmother, my older brother and I all lived there.

Later Nanjing set up the army's highest academy, my father went there to work, and we left Shandong, so I mostly grew up in Nanjing. The housing there was army barracks — earth-yellow, pale-yellow single-story rows of them. A whole family lived in one room back then, and the four of us lived in one. The school was huge. It had started as the PLA's Advanced Infantry School, later became the PLA Artillery Academy, and today it is Nanjing University of Science and Technology.

I remember my mother cooking hairy crabs in Nanjing very clearly. As a child I would look at the crabs, dark and black, and wonder how they turned red so fast once they went into the pot. It seemed magical, and whenever she cooked them I stared the whole time. Hairy crabs were cheap then — a few cents apiece at most.

Summers in Nanjing were interesting. Oil and gasoline were scarce, so the engines ran on coal gas, and the buses on the road all drove around with gas bags strapped to their backs. You saw buses like that all over the country at the time.

In 1959 the Military Telecommunications Engineering Institute was founded in Xi'an, and our family moved there. My mother worked at a clothing factory on the northern edge of the city. The institute was brand new and housing was very tight, so she rented a place from a farming family in the northern suburbs. The school was in the southern suburbs, a whole district away. It was a proper farmer's courtyard — there were two rooms in the back courtyard, and the family rented that back courtyard to us.

I lived in that courtyard until I started elementary school in 1961. In my first class I noticed that the paper was dark. The country was in its years of hardship, the paper was coarse, and only the first page was printed in red with the national flag and the words "Long Live the Communist Party"; after that the pages went dark.

In the second semester I transferred to the southern suburbs, to the army school for officers' children at the Xi'an academy. One memory stands out. My father once brought food back from the canteen — green peppers stir-fried with meat. It was 1961, the country was in great difficulty, and meat was rare and hard to come by, but I could not stand chili peppers, so I dumped the peppers and the meat into the bin. My father was furious: "So many ordinary people don't have enough to eat, and here you are throwing meat away."

While I was at that school we moved four times. At first I stayed briefly with my father in the communal dormitory. Then we were given a room close to it, in a two-story building — a row of rooms with a corridor down the middle. There was open ground downstairs, overgrown with grass; I dug it up myself and planted a small patch of castor beans, which yield castor oil. Then we moved near an orchard where the fruit grew large — apples, peaches, grapes. Finally we settled in the dormitory quarter close to the elementary school.

In 1966 the Cultural Revolution was about to break out. Our school, together with the Harbin Military Engineering Institute and the Chengdu Military Institute of Telecommunication Engineering — now the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China — took off their uniforms together. They went from army units to three schools under the National Defense Science and Technology Commission. The commission belonged to the defense industry, but people no longer wore uniforms. So most of the staff who stayed were teaching and research people, and many of the military cadres had to be reassigned.

There were several directions on offer: go support the frontier in Xinjiang, go to Yunnan, go to Guangxi, and so on. The party school of the Baoshan prefectural committee in Yunnan was short of people, so my father took the whole family and moved to Yunnan. We were not necessarily keen to go at the time, but it turned out to be the right choice.

The Cultural Revolution started right after we arrived. Staying in Xi'an would have been trouble, because things there got very chaotic — struggle sessions, beatings. It would have hit us hard and our schooling would have suffered. Everything fell apart; my old elementary school classmates in Xi'an were shipped off to Hanzhong to build railways.

Baoshan, as it turned out, had a particular quality: it was a Han region, and the locals all considered themselves people from Jiangsu, from Nanjing. Back when Zhu Di fought the Jianwen Emperor for the throne, a great many nobles were banished and driven out there. So they had a strong cultural tradition and took education seriously; the local high school, Baoshan No. 1 Middle School, was very good. When we got there, teaching was in fact being taken seriously. In Xi'an I would have learned nothing.

The party school we lived in had been a large stretch of old houses belonging to the capitalist Liang Jinshan. He was a patriotic overseas Chinese, very rich, and during the War of Resistance against Japan he even donated the money to build the Huitong Bridge across the Nujiang River. He had once been a laborer and made his fortune in Burma.

What he built was one of those grand old-society compounds, one courtyard deep, two deep, three deep. It was enormous: three deep meant you went into one courtyard, and inside it was another, and inside that another, and then one more. Quite something. Beside them were side buildings, a whole spread of them. In the end he lived in three upstairs rooms on the east side of the first courtyard and gave the rest to the party school. Later we lived there too.

The courtyard was paved with flagstones and cobbles, with raised terraces around the edges, not a flat run. The courtyard itself sat low, sunken, with the buildings lifted a little above it. Each household had a room. You went in from the west, because many old Chinese courtyard compounds are not entered through the main gate, and as you walked in you saw the two-story courtyard building. That was not all — there were outbuildings beside it, and a large lotus pond in full bloom.

"Giving My Whole Life to the Frontier, Spending It All Here — That Would Mean Something Too"

By 1967, when we reached Yunnan, I was due to start middle school, but the Cultural Revolution was such a mess that classes stopped for three years in the middle. The system then was two years of middle school and two of high school, so with three years lost we had to double back for two more. I had only had a little elementary school before things resumed.

When I finished middle school I could have gone to work in a factory, but I wanted to go to high school, so I didn't. I had hoped that by the time I finished high school the gaokao might just be coming back and I could catch the wave. It still hadn't come back.

Our teachers were fairly optimistic in that period; they felt the country was steadying. In 1972 Beijing was discussing it too, and the People's Daily started running articles about putting more weight on basic education. We sensed the chaos of the Cultural Revolution slowly turning back toward normal, and everyone had a vague feeling the gaokao might return.

But it still hadn't when I graduated from high school in 1973. I remember it clearly: in October 1973 I went down to the Nujiang Gorge to work in the countryside.

I can't say I was completely disappointed, because after middle school I had written a short story and sent it to the provincial paper, the Yunnan Daily, and it was published. If you could write, you were taken seriously, so when I went down to the countryside I was marked out for cultivation. As soon as I arrived they put me in charge of the educated youth in the brigade's six or seven villages, and made me captain of the militia company as well — the militia was there to back up the army if fighting broke out, and to do military training the rest of the time. So the whole thing felt different when I went; I had a sense of mission.

Back then I liked reading philosophy and political economy, and I was full of idealism — I felt we had to change the country. We came out of an agricultural society that was still backward, so I felt our generation absolutely had to turn it upside down. I was young and had that kind of burning heart.

The call at the time was to "put down roots in the countryside." What I thought was: best of all would be to become an official or go to university, but if that wasn't possible, then giving my whole life to the frontier for the country's sake, spending it all here, would mean something too.

We wanted to change the countryside, so we tried new farming methods. Rice seedlings had always been raised in the paddy, then pulled up and transplanted; we read about a new technique — rolling seedling mats on concrete, on the sports ground — and started experimenting with it. The educated youth came to me with their problems too; sometimes someone would pick up a club to go after another person, and I had to go over and talk them down on the spot.

At first four of us educated youth lived in a side room of a farmer's house. Dai families all build around a courtyard. Once inside, the front section was two stories; one wall was woven bamboo strips and let the wind through, and the other three were earthen walls topped with thatch. The upper floor held farm tools and stores.

The side room was usually crude — through the thatch above you could see the stars, and it leaked whenever it rained. But we didn't feel it was hard, because we had come to the countryside prepared for hardship. Conditions were bound to be poor, and we were young and didn't care. I was eighteen or nineteen, and I could take a great deal.

Broadly speaking, educated youth had some guarantees. The state gave each of us one jin of meat a month, about half a kilogram, which we bought at the supply and marketing cooperative with a fixed quota and coupons. For every educated youth sent down, the state also allocated 300 yuan — not into your hand, but to the commune and the production brigade, and it could be used to build housing for us. Fourteen of us later used that money to put up a new two-story building, tiled on top and thick earthen walls outside. Inside it was all wood paneling, since local timber was cheap, and the doors and frames were wood too.

Four rooms upstairs, four down, a wooden staircase, and solid-wood windows. We thought at first it would be better for the women to live upstairs and the men downstairs, since the upper floor had wooden flooring, but the local farmers objected. In Dai culture, they said, men are the sky, and women must not walk around above men's heads. They told us, "If you let the women live upstairs, we will never deal with you again." Well — once we heard that, it suited us fine, since the men had wanted to be upstairs anyway.

The postman brought newspapers only once a week, so we relied on the radio for news, and we listened to Voice of America. We listened every day, but not openly; we did it quietly. Voice of America had English and Chinese broadcasts, mostly analysis of Chinese politics — the far left of Chinese politics, the dark chapters of Communist Party history. It was nothing like the language we were used to. It opened up another linguistic system, the political language of the West. They also played pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan, which was lovely to listen to.

Those two years in the countryside opened a completely different life for me. The Nujiang River, the Gaoligong Mountains, different flowers on the slopes in different seasons. Whole hillsides of azaleas and rhododendrons; in March the kapok trees along the border flowered before they leafed, which was especially beautiful. In the dry season there were silver sandbanks, and the mountains were covered in olive trees, hawthorns and cane fields.

You blended into nature there without effort, and you could feel how rich and open it was. That is why I have always felt that however boisterous human vitality gets, however wild, it still cannot match the permanence of the Nujiang. That impression has stayed with me. Ever since, I have loved nature and natural things and disliked anything contrived.

As an educated youth I ate grain and vegetables I had grown myself for the first time. Watching something go into the ground with your own eyes and then seeing the big tomatoes, big eggplants and green peppers come up — you suddenly find the taste, and the happiness, are different from anything bought. You realize that in this world it is what you make yourself that brings you the greatest happiness. That conviction took hold in me, which is why I have never liked cutting corners or daydreaming about something for nothing. Without those two years in the countryside I could never have understood any of it.

"Life Was About to Change Completely"

The rule then was that after two full years in the countryside you could be recruited for factory work. In October 1975, with the Cultural Revolution not yet over, I went to a recently built tractor factory as secretary of the Communist Youth League branch, and trained as an electrician at the same time.

I remember one evening in September 1977. I was copying something out in the factory office with the national news broadcast on — there was no television then, only radio. The first item, I remember, was the restoration of the gaokao, coming out of the loudspeaker. I walked out of the building on my own and stood on the steps of the two-story factory office, and right then I felt in my heart that life was about to change completely.

I knew at once that I would sit the exam. I wasn't sure I'd get into a good school, but I thought I should get in somewhere, because even when I went down to the countryside after high school I carried two big boxes of books with me and read every night. I had kept the habit of studying.

After hearing the news I started preparing without a moment's hesitation. The exam was in January and I had two months; the elder of my younger brothers sat it with me. The results came out in February — Fudan University had admitted me. My marks were decent; on the Chinese paper I got 96, the highest in Yunnan, and afterward my score was printed in the Yunnan Daily.

That year more than a thousand people took the exam and 28 were admitted, so the odds were very long. But my brother and I both got in, and my father was overjoyed — truly overjoyed.

I remember setting out from Baoshan on March 3. It took two days by bus from Baoshan to Kunming, because the roads then were all mountain roads. I stopped a day in Kunming, then took the train three days to Shanghai and arrived on the 9th. I started at Fudan in 1978 and stayed until the end of 1987, from undergraduate all the way to a doctorate.

At first we lived in Building No. 4 at Fudan — four iron bunk beds to a room, seven of us in it, one bed given over to trunks, and two long desks pushed together in the middle. It was so tight inside that you could only slip through the gap between the beds and the desks.

There were 52 of us in the class when we entered. Then there was a group of somewhat older Shanghai locals whose scores were a little lower; places were limited and they couldn't get in at first. To let more people go to university, enrollment was expanded, and our literature class took 20 more, bringing us to 72.

The people in our year studied hard, hungry for it, treasuring the chance to learn, and we respected our teachers — unlike the Cultural Revolution, when anyone educated was a bourgeois intellectual. Now the teachers were great scholars again, and every one of them was held in enormous respect.

Everyone read furiously — Western classics, works from the 15th century, the 18th century — and a great deal of philosophy and history. The library and classrooms were packed, every seat taken, and people read everywhere, even under the streetlights. The appetite for reading was extraordinary then. The classes that followed for a few years were still serious, but things changed with the class of 1986, who came straight from high school. Our own year included people who had been high-school seniors as far back as 1966 alongside people who had graduated from high school in 1978. The youngest in our class was 18, the oldest 34.

By 1986 the students were basically all fresh from high school, and the culture was very different.

Our year still had a sense of duty to family and nation, and idealism; by the time the 1986 class arrived the atmosphere had changed. Their middle and high school years all came after reform and opening began. They started middle school after 1980, when the whole social climate was shifting, revolutionary feeling had already receded, and the focus was on building the economy.

The 1986 class began to love life itself. It showed most clearly after dinner. We used to rush off to claim seats in classrooms and the library; the 1986 class sat around on the lawn in circles, talking, enjoying the start of summer and the warm weather, full of the feel of ordinary life. Girls sat on the grass in skirts. Nobody studied the way we had.

The earlier years cared about the country, about enlightenment, idealism, the fate of the nation — the large, sweeping subjects. From the 1986 class on, the attention went to the value of individual existence and the variety and richness of modern life.

I remember the school's speech contests. In our years the topics were things like "Me and My Motherland." Once the 1986 class came in, their speeches were all personal feeling. One young woman spoke about a train from Shanghai back to Nanjing, where a man's suitcase was full and he had nowhere to put his hand luggage, so he asked her to lift her legs out of the way. She stood up in her speech and said, "How can a man today ask a woman to keep her legs up just so he can fit his bag in? That's disrespectful." That was the kind of feeling and subject it was — all the moods of daily life.

Over time the current moved further from revolutionary feeling toward the secular, from a society organized around politics and morality to one organized around the economy. Was I disappointed? Not really, because I strongly supported the liberation of the individual, individual rights, the richness of a person — I only hoped a person could have that richness and still care about the country and its people.

A normal person is necessarily rich and whole, and wholeness includes both the duties of a citizen and a full life. So we came to believe that a good country, a good society, a good era must pursue national prosperity and strength and also allow individual happiness and variety.

In 1988 a group of eight or nine of us — with Li Liangrong, dean of Fudan's School of Journalism, and Ge Jianxiong from the history department — wanted to make a television documentary series together, on the fate, the existence and the transformation of the Chinese in a new era. We planned eight episodes and called it Heavenly Questions (《天问》).

The first episode was to open with Tiananmen slowly opening up, the camera pulling back to reveal Tiananmen Square, a place that had always been solemn and grave, the daylight shifting, and then suddenly ordinary people appearing, flying kites. It was meant to stand for an era moving toward a state in which the people were more liberated, more awake.

We were also deeply influenced by the new generation's pursuit of humanism and of individual liberation. On the individual side, rights consciousness, consciousness about how to live, consumer consciousness were all rising, but the sense of nation and of state seemed to be weakening in step — and it shouldn't have been, should it? We felt the era was a seesaw, out of balance.

Our reason for making the series was to make the country better and society more fully developed, because change tears everything down and something has to be put together again, some modern reconstruction, right?

We took the script to a deputy director of the State Education Commission. He asked, "Is this film meant to make the Chinese people support the Communist Party or oppose it? Because your demands for freedom are very high, and your calls for democracy are very strong." He said the script was critical — that it criticized society's suppression of the people's freedom and democracy.

At first it was just sent back for revision; in the end the project collapsed entirely and could never be made. The whole country was changing course. Many idealists gave up and went into business. The country moved onto the track of a market economy, and the atmosphere of the 1980s was gone.

I really did feel let down, because those of us in literature and the humanities hoped for a kind of human development in society, a building up and growing of the person — not only an economic society chasing material growth, in which a person is merely an instrument, right? However well the economy does, if people themselves have not developed, then their way of sensing the world, their way of thinking, the rules they live by, none of it has grown on its own.

So society lacks that kind of growth, and cultivating it takes centuries. In the end a person has to have a soul; ordinary people cannot build their lives and their happiness on material things alone.

"A Badly Warped Society"

What I felt most sharply was that in 1993 and 1994 real estate was booming everywhere. I had a friend doing real estate in Hainan, and he asked me to come and see that kind of society for myself — economic life surging, investment fever running high.

He had lived in a very plain room in Hangzhou, and once he got to Hainan he bought himself a large villa. Three years of hustling, then more than 60 million yuan from real estate in a single year — a villa, a Mercedes 500, two big dogs at home.

He had divorced his wife and then moved back in with her. When the two of them were struggling together things had been fine; once they had money they fought constantly. She felt she could earn money too and would give her opinion; he felt she interfered too much at home, that many of her opinions were off, that she insisted on putting herself where she didn't belong. Staying at the villa, we watched them throw things at each other and smash glass. It was badly warped, and everyone was anxious inside.

They split up in the end. In that kind of economic society, people didn't seem to care much about such things anymore, did they?

We were good friends. Before he left Hangzhou for Hainan he told me he was mainly going to make money, and that once he had money he could be a free writer, an independent author. In 1993, when I went to see him, we walked near his villa on Hainan after dinner and I asked him, "When you first came here you told me you wanted to be a writer. What's your plan now?"

In my heart I very much wanted him to come back to Hangzhou. He thought for a while, then said, "I can't give this up. I have a lot of competitors here. Honestly their quality and ability are poor, but they're competing with me now, and if I pull back I'm handing them my turf. I won't accept that. I still have something to prove."

He never came back. So I have known many people who set out wanting to become free and compromised in the end anyway.

Then in 1994 the central government ordered all capital invested in Hainan withdrawn, because much of the money was banks speculating. Once the capital pulled out, real estate dropped fast. He had built a twin-tower block; just as the capital was starting to retreat someone offered 6,600 yuan per square meter, and he wouldn't sell. If he had, he could have taken a very large sum back to Zhejiang. He thought it was only a temporary chill and that prices would rise again. Instead the price kept falling from over 6,000 down to a little over 1,000, and at a little over 1,000 no one would buy at all.

He had a very good plot in Beihai too, and that fell just as fast. In the end he brought only five or six million yuan back to Hangzhou. Once there he invested in an adhesive-tape factory in Fuyang, but the market was weak then, so he borrowed first, ran into cash-flow trouble, and had to sell the factory, leaving him with two or three million. A year after he sold, as it turned out, the market picked up and the factory sold very well for the buyer. My friend later became a deputy general manager at a company in Ningbo — a salaried employee.

I thought it was a great shame, and he regretted it deeply. If he had sold the Hainan property earlier, he worked out, he could have walked away with nearly 80 million yuan and done something very big back in Hangzhou. Hainan's direction was clearly down, but he kept thinking it had hit bottom, hit bottom, hit bottom, and never imagined it would keep collapsing.

He stopped contacting me afterward, because his pride was strong and he didn't want to. He felt that after all those years of fighting, the result fell far short of his ambitions. Back then he had even urged me to come to Hainan, saying I could make more than a million yuan a year.

"The Ideals of the 1980s Came Crashing Down"

In the 1980s we felt the country had a lot of hope, that many things could reach everyone. The Sichuan People's Publishing House's Toward the Future series in the early 1980s was hugely popular, with huge print runs; the whole nation was curious about the unknown and about democracy. So you felt then that there was something to strive for, that idealism still counted, that what was needed was a spiritual awakening and a new set of values.

After the 1990s I felt we no longer belonged to this era — what you were thinking about was not what everyone else actually cared about in their own lives. Doing it made no difference; society went on developing on the raw instinct of economic desire regardless. We edited a Western Literary Criticism series at the time, but by the end the idealistic phase was over, and it felt as though the whole thing simply could not touch the ground.

I also spent a year surveying rural culture in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, visiting the cultural stations of 26 townships across the Jiangyin countryside. Everyone felt the same thing: in the countryside, if someone had been a member of the China Writers Association, people used to find that warm and impressive. That changed. People decided the Writers Association was nothing much, but introduce someone as General Manager So-and-so, a big boss, and it was a different matter entirely.

In the villages what everyone cared about was how to make more money. The entire local government was busy with development — how could a village get more factories? They brought in Shanghai's "Sunday engineers," engineers from Shanghai factories who went to Jiangsu each weekend to advise. The stock market was rising then too, which added to the shock, and a great deal was changing.

For that whole year I went back and forth between Shanghai and Jiangyin. I felt that although the rural cultural stations had reading rooms, screening rooms and recreation rooms, this piece of grassroots construction had plenty of problems. We wrote a collection of essays on how to develop rural cultural stations. It was published in the end, and it did no good. People no longer cared about such things. Culture had always been marginal in the countryside, even film had turned into pure entertainment, and people no longer pursued ideals as they once had. The country's ideal then was to build up the economy, and the individual's ideal was to make more money.

The spirit on campus wasn't good either. From 1990 at Fudan, incoming students all had to do a full year of military training, sent off to the army, because after June 4 there was a push to strengthen that kind of education. At Fudan and Peking University both, once you had your admission letter, some students were sent to report to the Dalian Army Academy and others to the Nanchang Army Academy, coming back a year later — effectively a five-year program. Because of this our admission scores and Peking University's fell very low; you could get in at the cutoff for a key university, and the places still went unfilled. People simply didn't want to come.

In 1991 and 1992 the atmosphere on campus had real problems, split into two camps — the "mahjong faction," who played mahjong, and the "TOEFL faction," who studied for the TOEFL to go abroad. It felt as though everyone wanted to leave the country then. Once, three male graduate students and a woman from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics were playing mahjong in the graduate dormitory in Fudan's south campus. She lost all her money and still wanted to play, so she said she would take off a piece of clothing each time she lost again. She ended up stripped to the waist and still wanted to play; there was nothing left to take off. So she said that if she lost again, they could each have a touch.

The head of the school's academic affairs office found out about it later. It was the kind of thing that should have brought severe punishment, but there was no way to punish anyone, because it was too shameful to say out loud.

The society we entered afterward was in effect exactly what Confucius described: first let everyone get rich, never mind how, and only then teach them propriety. That is plainly wrong. Everyone scrambled and struggled for so many years in the drive for material growth and wealth, and so all of China's 1980s ideals came crashing down.

Once the previous generation's ideals fell, there was nothing left. But the new generation is different. They grew up in globalization and absorbed cultures from all over the world. Those born after 1990 especially grew up in comfortable material conditions, so they love art, love the humanities, love the world's variety, nature, travel — everything has become richer. So what is happening now is a remaking, and the spiritual side of that remaking has only just begun.

Still, something is clearly missing from civic character today — responsibility toward society, warmth toward other people, even simple pity, right?

There is a large contradiction now. We pursue first-rate professional skill: foreign languages, specialist knowledge, capability-building are all taken very seriously, because in a modern society you cannot get anywhere without them. But what is missing? The flaw is that while pursuing first-rate professional skill, many people also want to pursue a first-rate life, to be better off than others in society and in housing. What is missing is a universal feeling, a broad heart toward the world and toward all living beings, the will to be an ordinary person who gives off heat and momentum. Someone excellent at the work and also part of the crowd, able to live very simply. That is the kind of person we lack now.

Many people today long for the upper class; in their heads they still carry the strata of a hierarchical society, putting their own worth first instead of folding their own life into society. That is self-contradictory, and further down the line it cannot become public wealth for society as a whole. First-rate professional skill does contribute a great deal, but on the other hand it could contribute much more. So society as a whole lacks a certain push, and that has a negative effect now — the hardening of class lines. It is a society where construction and damage run side by side.

"The Last Generation to Put Itself Last and Others First"

I worked in Japan for three years, first at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, then at Okayama University. My child is studying in Japan now too. In 2002, while I was there, I brought him over to do sixth grade, and he met a different Japan.

We went by boat — Shanghai had two sailings a week to Japan, 46 hours, on a very large ship. In his mind Japan was supposed to be extremely developed, and seeing Kobe from the boat he was disappointed: not as many tall buildings as Shanghai, and not as big. After a week he thought it was wonderful, because in every building and every shop the service was excellent, people were kind and thorough, and the supermarkets were spotless everywhere. He never saw anyone lose their temper; everyone smiled, and there was order everywhere. He said to me afterward, "The outside doesn't look like much, but the inside is so much better than ours."

When he finally left that elementary school, the whole student body — several hundred children — gathered in the auditorium to say goodbye. The night before, he told me he had to give a farewell speech. What would he say? When I asked him beforehand he said, "I never expected the sky in Japan to be this blue, the air this fresh, the clouds this white — you can't see anything of the atomic bomb going off anymore…" (laughs). I said, "You can't say that!"

The apartment we lived in in Japan was fairly large, three bedrooms and a living room. A feature of Japanese housing is that the bathroom isn't big but the tub is deep, because of the tradition of soaking. Their houses are also lightweight, for earthquakes; from outside they look like concrete, but that is only a facing layer — the surface looks like concrete and the inside is wood.

There is a lot of prefabricated design in the houses, not our banging and hammering. Once, at Kobe University, I thought the bathroom drain was a bit blocked, so I called a service company and they wanted more than 1,300 yuan to fix it. Then I discovered that after all that there was no need to call them at all. That kind of engineering-plastic floor is designed to let air through; you unscrew the screws one by one, open the layer beneath, and clear out what has collected under the air and water outlets. The assembly locks piece into piece, extremely tight, and it also comes apart easily. I thought, why doesn't China do this?

My wife and I live in a Fudan dormitory unit now. In our Fudan years we moved constantly: when we married in 1988 we were given a single room, then moved to a unit with two rooms and a small living room, with a kitchen and bathroom, and finally to a slightly larger one in the south campus dormitories. By then commercialization had started and you had to buy your own home. That unit — 69 square meters, three rooms and a small living room — I bought in 1998 for a little over 10,000 yuan.

Later I also taught at Wonkwang University in southern South Korea. Once there I found that housing in Seoul was ten times the price of Shanghai's — Shanghai was only 2,000 to 3,000 yuan per square meter then, and Korea was tens of thousands. Everyone had a mobile phone, their internet was highly developed, ordinary households all had cars and the expressways were full of them. I felt the Four Asian Tigers really did represent another way of living.

I thought at the time that Shanghai was China's fastest-growing city and might be like Seoul before long, so when I came back in 1999 I bought a home on Sanmen Road. The area was still full of potholes and standing water then, a mess. The apartment had three rooms, one of them 17 square meters, with a large living room, 140 square meters in all, at 2,600 yuan per square meter. That was the biggest decision I had made on my own up to then. I had also had my eye on a place near Linjiang Park in Baoshan District, which was bigger and faced the Yangtze, and I liked it very much — but I would have had to sell this one first. Just then, in 2002, the school sent me to teach in Japan, so I decided not to bother and to sort it out when I got back. By the time I returned the price had risen past 10,000 yuan per square meter.

I love the old town of Xitang; I have been more than a dozen times, and I hope to settle there. It has old buildings, rivers, trees. In 2010, before going to Japan, I bought a house there, 60 square meters including the balcony, two stories, with a river right outside the door. It is inside the old scenic area, upstairs and downstairs, and I plan to read and write there. I bought it for 200,000 yuan; it has since risen past a million. I didn't hesitate over that one either.

I have always thought that my parents' generation never in the end got the recognition and respect from people today that their struggle deserved. Two threads ran side by side in their time: one was class struggle and the Cultural Revolution, the other was construction, with many people sacrificing and giving for the country's larger aims.

Theirs was the harder generation, especially the group who came through after the 1980s and are now in their 50s and 60s. This was one of the hardest stretches in Chinese history — starting from a few hundred yuan a head, in conditions that backward, and creating a miracle in the end.

Making economic construction the center meant, in practice, having everyone work themselves to the bone. Why did the country develop? Mainly because people took less for themselves in the distribution and it all went back in, right? Look at all those expressways — who built the roads? All those migrant workers, on wages that low, which is why it went up so fast; the roadbeds for high-speed rail too, much of it done by cheap labor. That is how the country accumulated and industrialized.

This generation's beliefs were also very traditional — giving everything for the country and for their children. They are the last generation of Chinese to put themselves last and others first. Look at those migrant workers putting everything into the work, not resting at weekends, working overtime purely for their children. The present generation doesn't do that; offer them money to work overtime on a weekend and they still won't.

So this generation carried China through its hardest period and created its position as the world's leading industrial nation. The great scientists deserve admiration, but it was really the mass of ordinary people who drove the country's modernization. They were a great generation, and one that deserves particular respect in history.

Cover image: Unsplash

Graphics: Lin Yuyao