It’s funny when people learn about my age; the conversation would almost certainly start with an “Oh my god how are you so young?” and end with a “You looked/sounded way older than you are.” I’m not even that much younger than most of my friends. I didn’t start college at age of 14 or finish 2 Ph.D.’s at 19. I didn’t drop out of university to become a billionaire. Maybe one day.
All I did was skip 2 grades, say “nope” to high school, get into a college, and quit that to get into a university on the other side of the planet.
This is about why and how I did it.
I was never a patient kid growing up. I started going to school when I was 3, but couldn’t stand the idea of being still for more than 30 seconds; staying in classrooms for a few hours was a solid torture. 2 years and 4 kindergartens later, I quit school and started possibly the best days of my life. I did exactly what a 5-year-old would do if they didn’t need to be in school — I played outside.
This was Shenzhen, China in 2003; without all the screens, sounds and the internet that we have today, life for a 5-year-old was slow. Minutes felt like days and days like years while I admired the clouds lying on the rooftop. Back in the days when one could see the clouds in China.
I did that for 2 years. At this point, I’d received zero education from school.
At 7 years old, I was sent to a local primary school and I was a year older than most of my classmates. Days went by rather uneventfully, until the first day of grade 3, when mom thought it would be a great idea for me to carry the tuition to school myself. I got to school and handed the envelope full of money to the teacher, and started to wonder why I haven’t seen any other kids do the same. Later that day I found out that it was because, among the 800 kids in my school, I was the sole student paying tuition.
I didn’t understand that because my parents had moved from different cities to Shenzhen, my household registration was ‘temporary’ instead of ‘permanent’, that public schools charged students with temporary household registration extremely high amount of tuitions while local students paid practically nothing, or that such policies were designed to prevent large population flow by discouraging students from moving to new cities.
Hey, I was 9.
I understood that I was paying more, and that it’s unfair. I knew that my classmates and I were eventually going to middle school, so I needed to figure out a way to get there without paying a cent more.
I decided that I was going to skip as many grades as I can. My parents were fully supportive. Surprise. So I studied as much as I could throughout the summer.
We didn’t know at the time, however, that every school had one unanimous, implicit rule: no skipping grades. After getting rejected by 5 schools and shut down in the face by the head of Department of Education of the city, I was on the verge of giving up. I put my last bit of hope on a private school 2 hours away from home.
They simply said, no.
There were, however, exams for transferring students happening on the very same day. I sneaked into one of them, naively thinking that since I already came all this far, if I can pass this test I could show it off to my friends. Only when I got into the exam room did I realize that there were students from different grades sat together and given exams in one single classroom. So I found a seat, sat down, calmly put down my name on the exam sheet and checked off the option “Transfer from grade 5 to grade 6”
2 weeks later, phone rang; I passed. Apparently, they didn’t do any background checks on these kids.
Another 3 years later, I was at the end of the middle school era(9th grade for North America). Along with the 16800 highly competitive students in Shenzhen, I had to take Zhongkao, the Chinese Senior High School Entrance Examination. To get into high school, one would need to compete with every single student from the same city to get into their desired high schools. It’s like the SSAT from the states, but with more tears and blood.
I applied to only 2 schools: the best high school in Shenzhen in the past 10 years, and a college that accepted middle school students. The concept of college isn’t quite the same in China as it is in North America. One generally goes to college to study only the technical aspects of a specialized job. Therefore, most students would rather go to the worst high school instead of a college. My marks weren’t good enough for the big shot high school so I ended up going to the college — I made this decision under a whole lot of pressure, since going to colleges instead of high schools was considered devastating to one’s education. According to them:
going to college means you can’t go to high school
not going to high school means you can’t go to university
not going to university means you are uneducated, therefore earning no respect
I made my decision public; a lot of friends sent their condolences; teachers tried to help me find alternatives; and parents, well, they said nothing for a long time. Everyone tried their best to help me avoid this.
I think it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
The college was 5 hours away from home, located right next to the seashore, surrounded by a few gorgeous beaches and small ancient villages. I studied Graphic Design and Animations, so for the first 8 months, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I draw and paint. Nothing else. It was quite meditating and peaceful; so much so that I would give anything to find that peace again in life. It was a perfectly timely buffer after all the stress brought by Zhongkao.
So while all my friends were busting their brains out for Gaokao, the Chinese equivalent of SAT, I was living like a hipster god; I would carry my drawing board out to either the beach or a corner of the village, rain or shine, and start drawing. Not that I was any good at it, I just loved drawing.
I remember the taste of salt amongst sea breeze, the gazing stars of the sky, the night we climbed over the fence to sneak out of the school at 2 a.m. to swim in pitch black. Sometimes I tried to imagine what my life would’ve been had I gone the way everyone wanted me to go. Even just the thought of that version of me creeped me out.
I lived in a 900 ft² room with 11 people. There was no hot water or heater in the winter; nor was there a working air conditioner in the summer. Despite the late night cold showers and middle of the forest life drawings sessions accompanied by families of mosquitos, somehow those seemingly worst days were, in fact, the best ones in my short life.
Friendship, nature, and art — sounds cheesy, but this was the best education a 13-year-old could ever dream of, yet it didn’t last as long as I wished it did.
A year later the school moved to a new campus in downtown Shenzhen. Another year passed and we were no longer taught to be creative; we were taught to be workers manufacturing animations frame by frame, following the stream of thoughts of someone else’s. That wasn’t what I signed up for.
So I decided to leave.
Before I left, I found the CAD and digital drawing tools that we were using interesting (Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Adobe Photoshop, etc). I wanted to be able to make them myself, because that would be pretty cool. So I definitely needed to get into a university program since the college didn’t have a computer science related program.
But guess what? Every university also had one unanimous, implicit rule: no transfers from colleges. That was(and still is) how discriminated college education was compared to universities. No Chinese universities would ever take me in as a transfer, and since I didn’t have a high school diploma, none would take me as a freshman either.
I turned to the 9-year-old me; he told me that I needed to sneak into a transfer exam.
I spent a summer studying for everything that I missed out on; Math, English, Physics, Chemistry, and I even had time for a few APs such as Calculus and Computer Science. Then I came to a high school in Canada, took the entrance exam and got ranked into grade 12.
Much déjà vu.
8 months later, I graduated with a high school diploma and came to Waterloo. I started as a freshman in Computer Engineering in 2015 and I even got to work at Autodesk last summer.
So next time when you are wondering why I’m still not legal to drink in Ontario, here’s your answer. Also, give it a month.
