Han Yaping scored 699 on the gaokao and was preparing to apply to Tsinghua. In an interview, she offered some advice to classmates who were glued to their phones: do what is appropriate for your stage of life; if you do not endure the hardship of studying, you will endure the hardship of life; only when you reach a certain height can you better control your phone. The reaction was not gratitude. Parts of the internet read her as condescending—a successful student using her own experience to lecture others—and the criticism turned into online abuse.
I find that hard to swallow. Her words were ordinary, far less blunt than a saying people use in my village: money is hard to make, and shit is hard to eat. Put any one of her three sentences into a search engine and you will find pages of near-identical slogans. 'If you don't eat the bitterness of study, you'll eat the bitterness of life' is especially worn out. I would bet that most parents who have heard it have repeated it to a child. The only difference is that some children take it in and others let it go in one ear and out the other. So I genuinely cannot see where the condescension is, or what makes her arrogant.
It reminds me of something curious. Years ago, students loved to quote Rousseau: 'Nature made me, and then broke the mold.' At some point the line vanished. For a while, Chen Yinke's 'independent thought, free spirit' was everywhere in essays; in recent years it is rarely invoked.
What slogans do people quote now? Apparently none. In the age of the internet and social media, we no longer seem to share a common set of ideals. A common condition is this: people lack both the ability and the desire to compete, yet they are unwilling to lie flat and feel they have no choice. They cannot reach up and are uncomfortable down; their whole mentality is off balance. When they see someone climb, they sneer that the higher you climb, the harder you fall. When they see someone fall, they announce that they saw it coming. The result is that no person is right and no thing is right. Only what I find meaningful is meaningful; only what I find valuable is valuable. What pleases me is good advice; what costs me effort is bullshit—and if it is bullshit, it deserves a retort.
The same sentence from a famous professor draws a shrug: 'What rubbish. So-called experts are just like that.' From a 'small-town exam grinder,' it is like stepping on a tail. The response jumps straight to the person: 'So what if you got into Tsinghua? Does that make you a success? And even if you are a success, does that give you the right to criticize? Look at your background—my family is not a low-income household either. Look at your age—a kid pretending to be a big shot. You only scored well because your parents gave you good genes; if I had your IQ, I would have done better. And after Tsinghua you will still be a wage slave, just like me.' If she had changed her line and said, 'Go ahead, play on your phone; it won't affect your grades,' she would have been called heartless.
We live in an era where resentful people are everywhere, envious people are everywhere, sensitive and suspicious people are everywhere, and anything that makes a cat meow or a dog bark can collect likes. The problem is not what you say. It is whether you are the one saying it. As Lu Xun put it in A Madman’s Diary: 'I won't reason with you; in short, you should not have said it. If you say it, you are wrong.'