The admission letter from Sichuan

In mid-August, in the heat of a Chizhou summer, the letter came by courier. I knew what it was before I opened it, because the whole household knew, the way every household in the city knows, that the envelope with the university’s name on it has been the family’s business since June. When I finally read the first line, Sichuan University, and the words ‘College of Life Sciences’, my mother was already on the phone to my grandparents, and the news was travelling through the apartment building faster than it could be repeated properly. In a city where the exam is still the main door to a different life, an admission letter is a public event.

The letter did not say much. A few lines of congratulations, a date, a place to report, a list of documents to bring. But everyone read more into it than the paper contained. My parents read a decade of their own choices. The neighbours read confirmation that the system still works, that diligence still gets measured and rewarded. I read the end of one kind of waiting and the start of another. An admission letter is a thin document, and it carries a different weight in every household that receives one.

I chose life sciences deliberately, which is not the same as knowing why. The deciding happened gradually, over the last two years of school, in biology classes that were the only ones I never had to force myself to sit through (as long as they were interesting), in textbooks I kept reading after the exams, in a persistent curiosity about how living things actually work. When I told my parents my first choice was Sichuan University’s life sciences programme, they asked the question every Chizhou parent asks, what will you do with it, and I could not give them the answer they wanted. I gave them the honest one: I do not know yet, but I want to find out. They accepted it, and their acceptance was its own kind of courage.

The geography of the decision deserves a moment. Chizhou sits on the south bank of the Yangtze, in the shadow of the hills, a small city that most of the country has never heard of. Chengdu is twelve hundred kilometres to the southwest, a megacity with food, speech and daily rhythms unlike anything I grew up with. When I searched for the route on the map I kept looking at the distance as if it were the point of the whole exercise. In a way it was. The exam had always been described to me as a way out, and the letter in my hand was the exit ticket, to a city I had never visited, to a subject I had chosen for reasons I was still explaining to myself.

I am old enough now to see what the letter does and does not equalize. It does not erase the difference between the students who arrive at the same college with years of quiet advantages and the ones who arrive with nothing but the letter itself. It does not guarantee anything about the four years or the life after them. But it does something real. It says, in the most official language available, that the work counted, that a seventeen-year-old from a city most people cannot place on a map is now enrolled in one of the country’s most serious research universities, in a field that genuinely interests him. That sentence, however qualified, is worth more than its paper weight.

The envelope is on the shelf above my desk now, next to the reference books I packed for the first term. Later this month, I will take the train west, out of Anhui, across the mountains, to a city of eight million people and a campus I have only seen in photographs. The letter will go in the bag too, because I suspect I will want to look at it again on the first difficult day, to remind myself that I chose this, and that the distance, the school and the subject are all of my own making. The courier brought me a piece of paper in August. It is my turn to do something with it.