Thoughts
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
These thoughts have been rotting in my head for too long. I dug this piece out of the rubbish, took it out, and cleaned it up. A kind of awakening, I suppose.
The Survey
A few days ago—or has it been a couple of weeks?—HNU ran another routine survey of students' family backgrounds. I saw two options side by side, “university education” and “unemployed, urban or rural,” and found it oddly funny. I took a screenshot.
Maybe only the “highly educated” end up “unemployed.” If my parents had less education, perhaps they'd have found some sort of work, whatever it was.
The Glow and the Fall
I think of Dad. He was a junior-college student back in 2003, later earned a bachelor's degree from Hunan University through self-study examinations, and once had a thriving career in financial and securities analysis. Back then, money was never a worry at home. I remember Mum once telling me in a whisper that Dad was doing so well he was “making over ten thousand yuan a month.” I didn't understand what the number meant. All I knew was that if I finished near the top of my class, he'd slip me a 200-yuan reward. That became my immediate reason to study hard.
After the pandemic, everything went sharply downhill. Dad lost his job and stayed home playing games all day. It wasn't until I started university that I discovered, for the first time, that even ten yuan of spending money had to be carefully budgeted. I still don't know what happened in between.
Mum quit her job too. She said she was tired of the company and wanted to move. In my earliest memories, she was an accountant, staying up late studying for one certification after another. The year she passed some important qualification, we all went out for a buffet to celebrate. Later, she left the local Audi branch for a smaller company, but became its finance director. Her income doubled; so did the pressure. She often didn't get home until ten at night, worked seven days a week, and her phone never stopped ringing. Eventually, she decided to “take a break first.” The result: our family's income stopped altogether.
How will we pay next semester's tuition? I don't know either.
Most people my age are watching their parents reach the peak of their careers. I'm watching the tape run backward. The home once described as “comfortably off” could cave in at any moment now. That's made me especially sensitive to the word “security.”
It just feels a little ironic. Usually, the parents of kids my age at least have jobs, right? Some might have become supervisors or moved into management, with stable work… Some might have built careers for themselves and raised their children well… Even in the most ordinary families, surely the parents have jobs, earning at least 3,000 yuan a month…?
But then I look back at my own family. A family that, especially in financial circles, was once considered “fairly comfortably off.” That has fallen apart, and I feel unsafe.
The change feels like coming home from primary school in a downpour, watching the other children get picked up by their parents while I rode my bicycle home alone, holding an umbrella.
No one was coming for me. Grandma was in poor health, Grandpa wasn't coming either, and Mum and Dad were far away in different cities.
I could only make my own way.
Staying Away from Finance
It's interesting: both my parents used to work in finance-related fields, and now finance feels like the last thing I want to touch.
There are so many things I'd like to do: cook in a restaurant, make cakes in a bakery, work as a developer, work in operations. Finance isn't among them. My parents were so close to it, and so was I, but I have no desire to get involved.
Sometimes I wonder what finance really means. Dad once let me play with a stock-market simulator: buy low, sell high. Without any background or knowledge, you can never know whether a stock will rise or fall. With nothing but the belief that “it's low now, so it'll be high later,” you'll never maximize your returns. You might even lose nine times out of ten. Dad laughed and said, “In finance, we're all gamblers. The house is the only real winner.” I still remember that.
I probably hate finance, though I've never said it aloud. It's like a vast, glittering casino that once made my family feel on top of the world, then coldly spat them out in an instant.
I admit I'm financially conservative. So I'll do practical work and live slowly. As a child, I dreamed of studying abroad: America, Singapore, even the northern lights in Scandinavia. Looking at things at home now, I can only shift my priorities to “get a job first.”
Still, it's a little disappointing. What child hasn't dreamed of making a lot of money when they grow up? I always thought that once I got to university, I'd go abroad and see things… America, Singapore, or Germany, Britain, Russia—any of them. I especially wanted to visit northern Europe, because I love the scenery and the aurora. Realizing all of that might remain imaginary leaves me feeling rather helpless.
Sometimes I wonder whether these are dreams or fantasies. Will they really happen? Will I really see those places? I remember wanting, as a child, to study computer science at Central South University and work at the intersection of medicine and computing. Almost everyone told me, “Dreams can come true.” But the gap between that and reality was a handful of exam points that kept me from choosing my dream. That disappointment doesn't go away.
Thoughts
But the fulcrum that first drew me toward medicine has fallen away too.
I wanted to go into medicine from childhood because I wanted Grandma—or all elderly people like her—to be healthier. Cancer survivors, living with so many lasting effects of surgery. I kept wondering whether I could do something to help more people like her.
Losing Central South and Xiangya hadn't broken that anchor. But then Grandma was diagnosed with another cancer. She couldn't bear the various expensive treatments, and surgery wasn't an option. She was also worried about the financial pressure of my parents being out of work. Things dragged on and on. She saw no sign that she'd recover; perhaps deep down she resisted the treatments. The drugs didn't help, though. Her new cancer progressed from an early stage to an intermediate-to-advanced stage. From discovery, to deterioration, to the end—it was only a few months.
As I write this, I'm sitting in a study room.
I'm thinking through these words on a MacBook Air. I like it a lot.
I took it out of my bag, opened it, opened my notes, and spent a minute gathering those thoughts into a piece. Then I formatted it, tidied it up, copied it into the publishing page, and hit send.
This MacBook Air was bought with the last sum of money Grandma personally entrusted to me before she died. During the recent 618 shopping sale, its price dropped as low as 5,400 yuan. I combined that money with my savings and spent it all on this MBA.
I don't know whether it was the right choice. I also know that if I told my parents, they'd accuse me of being an unfilial grandchild. But… but…
If I locked that money away in savings forever, it would earn twenty fen a day in interest. But a MacBook? It could last five years, even ten. It might never earn me a cent; it might be the source of everything I earn in the future. Take it to one competition, and I could earn more than the interest on those savings.
So I chose the latter, firmly.