“It was the summer of 2000. I was 15, and I had just finished my high school entrance exam. I had made considerable improvements from where I started in first grade, when I had the second-worst grades in the class and had to sit at a desk perpendicular to the blackboard so that the teacher could keep an eye on me. I had managed to become an average student in an average school.

My parents, by then, had concluded that I was not going anywhere promising in China and were ready to send me abroad for high school. Contrary to all expectations, however, I got the best mark in my class and my school, ranking me among the top ten of more than 100,000 students in the whole city. Though my teacher and I both assumed the score was wrong when we first heard it, I got into the best class in the best school in my city and thus began the most painful year of my life.

My newfound confidence was quickly crushed when I saw how talented my new classmates were. In the first class, our math teacher announced that she would start from chapter four of the textbook as she assumed, correctly, that most of us were familiar with the first three chapters and would find it boring to repeat. Most of the class had been participating in various competitions in middle school and had become familiar with a large part of the high school syllabus already and had grown to know each other from those years of competitions together. And here I was, someone who didn’t know anything or anyone, surrounded by people who knew more to begin with, who were much smarter, and who worked just as hard as I did. What chance did I have?

During that year, I tried very hard to catch up: I gave up everything else and even moved close to the school to save time on the commute, but to no avail. Over time, going to school and competing while knowing I was sure to lose became torture. Yet I had to do it every day. At the end-of-year exam, I scored second from the Bottom of the class—the same place I began in first grade. But this time, it was much harder to accept, after the glory I had enjoyed just one year earlier and the enormous amount of effort I had put into studying this year. Finally, I threw in the towel and asked my parents to send me abroad. Anywhere on this earth would surely be better.