With the ongoing KCSE exam, your kids may be nervous in preparing for the test. However, the Chinese take test-taking - and test-taking superstitions - to another level.
To call China’s high school landscape cutthroat is an understatement. The Chinese equivalent of KCSE, called the gaokao, is taken by 10 million students in June of each year. And Chinese parents will do anything to get a leg up - from eating special foods to spending hundreds of thousands in private tutoring. The gaokao determines what tier of university you will be accepted into, which basically defines the rest of your life.
Not just domestically, internationally China consistently tests at the top for the Program for International Student Assessment, one of the most widely cited measurements of global education, which tests a half million students worldwide. While Chinese schools run on rote memorisation, something I vehemently disagree with, Chinese learning does reinforce discipline and diligence—and the fact that success is based on hard work, not on innate ability. From a young age, my parents ingrained me the concept of chi ku, or eating bitter, and xian ku hou tian, first bitter then sweet. These idioms remind me, like millions of other Chinese children, that achievement is only acquired through sacrifice.
Chinese kids don’t expect much of a childhood; forget birthday parties and sleepovers at friends' houses. I literally didn’t play a computer game until I was in my teens. This kind of one-minded focus on academics in a hyper-competitive environment (think about China’s 1.3 billion population) creates generations of thick eye-glassed, socially awkward, but brilliant test-takers. So despite the fact that even elementary schoolers will stay up until midnight studying, students all believe that they just need to bite the bullet and work hard in childhood so that their lives will be easier in adulthood.
While this mindset helps, so does a $120 billion tutoring market, where students might spend up to 20 hours outside of school with supplemental classes. Even when I was being schooled in the US, during the summer my tiger parents sent me to New Oriental, one of the largest private education providers in China, to take a SAT training course. I’ve never seen a systematic breakdown of standardised test, and I finally understood why the Chinese make perfect scores even on tests in their second language. Test-taking is a science.
But when preparation is not enough, you can always turn to superstition, which is mostly based on complex word play. Firstly, what you eat is what you are. So, you must eat pork cubes with cashews, since “cashews” in Chinese sounds like the word for "wish to pass", and "pork cubes" sounds like "desire for a distinction".
The walnut is another favourite, since the crinkled surface looks like the brain. In traditional Chinese medicine, there is a theory that eating things that resemble parts of the body can actually benefit that body part. Next, you might want to try kiwis, as that Chinese name sounds like “easy to pass exams”. While you may think that noodles are weird thing to eat for breakfast, many students will partake since noodles mean “everything goes smoothly" in Chinese.
When you’re getting dressed in the morning, don’t forget your red underwear, since this is the luckiest colour in China. On the first day of the test, students should wear red and green, signalling "red door opening”, meaning success as soon as someone opens the door, and green lighting the whole way through. On the second day, students should wear grey and yellow, since the two words put together sound like "destined for glory”. Superstition even dictates what the parents wear when dropping off their children. Anxious parents will even wait in the test taking centre all day, praying.
Number play is also an essential part of getting luck on your side. Eight is a lucky number, while seven suggests confusion and should be avoided on test numbers. The right side is auspicious, so make sure you enter the test centre or classroom from the right and exit from the left.
The Chinese are really good at test taking, but part of me just thinks you make a better grade spending all this time preparing for superstitions on studying instead.