To explain how an ordinary person born in Nantong, Jiangsu, in the early 1980s developed the complex, layered outlook I have today, we must return to the historical foundations of 1980–2000: years poorly understood at the time, whose effects kept revealing themselves afterward.
Our generation’s inner world did not emerge from nowhere. It was repeatedly shaped as the country moved from closure toward openness, from scarcity toward growth, and entered the world system before completing its own modernization. This shaping came not simply from grand narratives, but from family values, shifting social expectations, the spillover of international events and countless concrete changes in city life, all arriving during our most impressionable years.
My parents belonged to the generation that experienced the Cultural Revolution and the movement sending urban youth to the countryside.
They had seen knowledge degraded into a marker of class allegiance, then witnessed its public dignity restored. Their faith in education became almost religious—not because they were especially highly educated, but because they knew knowledge could be taken away and could also rescue a life at a decisive moment.
For them, “education changes your fate” was not a slogan. It was a moral coordinate rebuilt on the ruins of an earlier world. They passed it intact to their children, hoping we would follow a more stable, predictable path, spared as much upheaval as possible.
My childhood unfolded within that story: mathematics and science meant safety; the university entrance exam was the gate; a degree conferred identity; a public-sector post or major company meant lifelong stability. At the time, much of this fitted the prevailing logic—provided one assumed that our own country was the world’s starting point, around which its rules would gradually unfold.
At almost the same time, the world beyond Chinese cities began expanding, changing and spilling inward at an unpredictable speed. It quietly introduced an entirely different reality to a child who had not yet fully understood his parents’ story.
Nantong was among the earlier Chinese cities to join an outward-facing economy. In 1993, it established a sister-city relationship with Izumi in Japan. Life in a developed country ceased to be merely a textbook or news abstraction. Through television, school activities and actual exchanges, it became something directly perceptible.
To a primary-school pupil from an ordinary salaried household in the 1990s, Japanese homes with telephones on both floors, clean streets and well-developed infrastructure were striking. Visiting Japanese children carried instant cameras, wore well-fitting clothes and spoke softly. These scattered details gradually formed an intuitive but incomplete impression:
The world was larger than what I could see, more complicated than my parents described, and moving closer to us. Yet we did not really understand it.
We had not grasped another fact: the world approaching us had not just appeared. It had been operating for a long time, and its order was already unequal.
Meanwhile, global forces were quietly changing family life. After reform and opening, Nantong gained many export-processing businesses. Profits from foreign orders at my parents’ workplace improved our family income directly for the first time. Part of that income eventually became my first computer with a dial-up connection.
In the 1990s, owning a computer was far from automatic. For an ordinary family, it represented a real connection to the world—not only technically, but in expanding what the future could contain. The internet showed me that the world was neither merely an abstraction in textbooks nor a symbol filtered through one narrative. It was a space I could reach and explore myself.
The family’s belief in education as a route to social advancement took root alongside the incoming logic of openness, competition and globalization. The two were never naturally compatible.
My parents’ story emphasized stability, order and established paths. Globalization revealed concentrated opportunities, differing rules and competition that did not begin from fairness. In adolescence, the two did not collide directly, but gradually produced an inner tension I could not clearly name.
Before university, both narratives shaped me. We sang “We Are the Heirs of Communism,” believed in ideals and imagined the world beginning in a country reborn from a century of catastrophe. At the same time, we watched Disney on television and hoped to celebrate birthdays at the new KFC down the street. We listened to fierce social criticism from Taiwanese public intellectuals, then browsed China Can Say No at bookstalls, already feeling the emotional force of great-power narratives.
In my first year of university, enrollment expansion became a visible watershed. Once-scarce undergraduate status multiplied within a few years. My program’s intake rose from 40 students to 100, then 200. The ranks of the supposedly favored few expanded rapidly. A degree was no longer a guarantee of stable status, but a new starting point.
Society’s attitude toward credentials shifted from scarcity to ubiquity, from reverence to caution, and from seeing education as the decisive class threshold to noticing its mismatch with market needs. This was not theoretical. Every young person experienced it directly.
For the first time, I dimly sensed that even following my parents’ prescribed route exactly might not deliver its promised certainty. Lacking evidence, I soon dismissed the feeling as youthful restlessness and suppressed it.
If these changes still occurred within the rules, another loosening was already happening in the everyday places that rarely enter written accounts.
In the Soviet-style housing compound where I grew up, the rules had once seemed clear and uniform: grain coupons meant food, the work unit meant identity, school meant a future. Adults occasionally mentioned someone in lowered voices—“not respectable,” “has been in prison,” “a bit of a hoodlum.” Such people usually stood outside the system and were never held up as examples.
Yet they were among the first to step beyond its rules.
Small wonton stalls appeared outside the primary school: sheet-metal stoves, white enamel bowls and steam rising before dawn. If a family temporarily lacked grain coupons or had no time for the work-unit canteen, a few jiao bought a filling breakfast. No rationing, no registration and no explanation of where you belonged.
For most children, it was just a bowl of wontons. Looking back, it was a quiet but real signal: rules could be bypassed, and workable paths existed outside the established order. Contracting, private enterprise and cash transactions—terms later written into economic history—first entered ordinary lives through such modest scenes.
We did not understand their significance. We only knew that the world was changing, and not always as the textbooks said it would.
In this environment, assumptions loosened almost without our awareness. Knowledge remained the most trusted route, and effort was still widely believed to produce rewards. Yet exceptions appeared in daily life. The world was opening to us without becoming fully intelligible. We had not yet found the language to describe that change.
That is what I mean by an internal fault line.
It is not a psychiatric condition. It is the tension an individual feels when multiple value systems begin losing their fit, before recognizing that the supporting structures themselves are changing.
Our parents’ logic of stability continued to operate inside us, while the next historical wave made it increasingly difficult to match reality’s pace. Globalization encouraged us to look outward and gradually revealed that the world did not unfold with China as its origin.
This fault line did not simply make our generation fragile. It also developed a complex, alert outlook: neither blindly trusting our surroundings nor readily abandoning possibility; neither betting everything on one institution nor refusing to understand tensions between different sets of rules.
We were not merely people trapped in the cracks of our time. Within those cracks, we were beginning to learn how to construct supports of our own.