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For many students, June means the Gaokao, the national college entrance exam. All these years later, I no longer have the confidence to tackle the science and math sections; the only part I can still manage is the essay. During the exam, the essay is bound by all sorts of restrictions: word count, genre, theme, title, and so on. It doesn't encourage imagination, nor does it truly train logical thinking. After the Gaokao, we all embarked on different paths, and our writing has long since moved beyond the confines of those exam essays. So, I thought I would write a little Gaokao essay of my own, taking only the title and theme from a past prompt and writing wherever my thoughts lead me. This is the second piece.
2010 Zhejiang Gaokao Essay Prompt
Title: Between Role-Switching
It is said that some fledgling birds, after growing up, will bring food back to feed their ageing mothers. This phenomenon is known as "reverse-nurturing."
A similar phenomenon exists in human society. The cultural influence of the younger generation on the older generation is called "cultural reverse-nurturing." For millennia, under the orthodox mode of transmission, where fathers primarily teach their sons, cultural reverse-nurturing was like a hidden undercurrent. But in today's rapidly changing society, young people have gained an unprecedented capacity for reverse-nurturing. In areas such as scientific knowledge, values, lifestyles, and aesthetic tastes, they are increasingly and conspicuously influencing the older generation. Between the teacher and the taught, the roles are often switched.
Using "Between Role-Switching" as the title, you may tell a story, express emotions, or present your views. Any genre is acceptable except for poetry. The word count must be over 800 characters.
When Hana decided to kill her target, her body felt like a traditional straw rain cape, soaked through by years of rain. Fifty years old was a ripe old age for someone who sold death for a living. But time, unlike gold or hatred, cannot be cellared away. It only seeps in—through the cracks in your bones, through the hesitation in every swing of the sword—silently declaring its victory.
In the Jianghu, the martial world, the name "Hana" was like a ghostly talisman. She had become famous at twenty, and for thirty years, anyone who saw her face became a new ghost at the tip of her sword. The world could only imagine whether she was a man or a woman, stout or thin. Her sword was once described as an extension of light, a dawn light that could slice through the night. Her calmness was described as a sickness, a silence that could find peaceful sleep in boiling oil.
But now, the light had grown heavy, and cracks had appeared in the silence. Her steps could no longer synchronise with the falling leaves. When the tip of her sword pierced a candle's flame, it would stir up a faint, imperceptible wisp of wind—a mortal's wind. She knew she was old. The calmness that once allowed her to sleep on a needle's point was now like a stone washed by a stream for thirty years, its edges smoothed and heavy.
The last contract was to kill the chief of the "Zhenyuan" Escort Agency, the greatest in the land. In the past, this would have been just another name on a list to be crossed out in vermilion ink. Take the money, kill the person. No questions about why, no thought for the consequences. But now, as she sat in a teahouse in a small town south of the Yangtze, listening to the patrons at the next table discuss the chief—how he was a man of great integrity, how he maintained the stability of half the martial world—she found herself imagining what the Jianghu would look like after his death. It would likely be a bloodbath, like a drop of thick ink falling into clear water. Perhaps it wasn't the Jianghu that had changed, she thought, but her own sword that had grown dull—dull enough to start pondering matters beyond its edge.
And so, before setting out to take the chief's life, she made a decision that felt foreign even to herself: she would return to her hometown.
She hadn't been back to that mountain in thirty years. In her memory, there was a Cloud-Top Temple in the mountains, a legend spoken of by the village elders of her childhood. They said the temple was hard to find, always hidden in the deepest mists, like a mirage. But anyone who had seen Cloud-Top Temple would be changed when they came down the mountain. In the temple was a magical pool called the "Underwater Pool," bottomless, and it was said that if you could see it, you could find your true self. Those who had seen it also said that while finding the temple was difficult, the path down was short, and their steps would become light and quick, as if walking on clouds.
As a child, Hana had never seen the temple. Now, she wanted to see it.
Returning to the village at the foot of the mountain, she found it even more foreign than her memories. Her childhood village was long gone, and the old houses were completely demolished. In its place stood a bustling market, the cries of vendors in southern and northern accents mingling with the smell of livestock. She stood in the crowd like a true stranger, separated from the surrounding clamour by an invisible film.
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