Read an exclusive excerpt adapted from Model Minority Gone Rogue: How an unfulfilled daughter of a tiger mother went way off-script by Qin Qin (Hachette Australia, March 2024):
Dragon Fire
Moving to China seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Going back to my birth country even came with a poetic idiom: luòyèguīgēn, a falling leaf returns to its roots. But telling myself I no longer needed to tick boxes I never needed to tick in the first place – that seemed a little hollow. Somehow I still kept stumbling back into the pressure cooker then rationalising the decision as good for me. The more I tried to shrug off the badges, the more I collected.
In his autobiography Open, the tennis champion Andre Agassi writes about having a practice court in his backyard. As a kid, his dad made him practice hitting tennis balls over the net from a machine that spat them out. Agassi called that machine the dragon. His dad engineered the dragon to spit out balls faster and faster. But Agassi’s biggest enemy wasn’t the machine, his dad told him. It was the net. Agassi’s dad raised the net over fifteen centimetres higher than regulations. If, his dad reasoned, an under-sized seven-year-old child could hit over that high net, then he would make it to Wimbledon. I had my own dragon and net, even though I didn’t play tennis. In my world, the dragon began as a relentless stream of homework, and the net was the standards and expectations I faced, which somehow kept getting higher and higher, more elusive and unreachable.
The dragon kept morphing, and the expectations kept getting higher. It started with doing well at school. After university, the net was raised to making money and climbing the corporate ladder. I thought I’d escaped it by going into teaching, but then the yardstick got even harder to measure up to: I was trying to help each student fulfil their potential. At Harvard, that transformed into solving the world’s education problems. The curriculum was designed around ‘learning to change the world’, literally. How on earth would I reach such an imposing goal? Yet here I was in China, trying to reach it regardless. The net had been raised again. I could no longer see past it.
The longing to return to the Middle Kingdom and discover my roots came from a genuine place inside me. It was much truer than the corporate ladder dreams I’d convinced myself I wanted. The China pull, I’d called it. As a teenager, alongside the feminist polemics, I’d been fascinated by modern China, spurred by Wild Swans and my mother’s traumatic Cultural Revolution stories. I learned about periods of vast upheaval, and revolution after revolution. Reading accounts of China was an immersion in a whole other world. From my cul-de-sac in suburban Canberra, it felt as far removed as Mars, but it was a world that had shaped me in ways I couldn’t fathom.
Now, I’d made it back to China again. I arrived in Beijing to attend a Mandarin program, IUP, at Tsinghua University for three months. The Chinese didn’t muck about with learning. Being in the country that revered education for social progression put my striving into perspective. For over two thousand years, until 1904, imperial exams were a triumphant archway for ambitious men to enter the gentry class of ‘scholar-official’. Candidates crammed from childhood and took the exams in tiny cells. They were expected to stay in these cells for the duration of the exams, which could last several days. Women went through their own parallel: a thousand-year tradition of torturous foot binding.
Test takers sometimes retook the exam for decades as there was a brutal one per cent pass rate. Meanwhile, mothers kept breaking their daughters’ foot bones. As a modern woman, I was living with the legacy of both – which dovetailed into the messaging, ‘Try harder. There is no other way except to keep working your ass off. And it will hurt.’ It was embedded into my DNA. China and Tsinghua were probably not places for me to escape this messaging. The MIT of China, Tsinghua was there for me to gain more prestige, pressure and further expectations.
The motto of the program was ‘INTENSELY RIGOROUS’ (shouty all caps, in case we missed the point). Chinese-style learning was no joke. Literally, no joking. ‘You’re not here to have fun. Sorry,’ the program director warned us at our orientation. ‘We’re here to help you make progress in your Chinese, not to help you enjoy life.’ Each day we took four hours of classes, and were expected to study for another four to six hours. In the closed-book classroom sessions, students were to ‘engage and challenge each other’ (according to the program website). At least they weren’t pretending education was anything but adversarial and competitive here. Bring out the brain swords!
Each character consisted of a combination of only eight basic strokes. Yet it enraged me to memorise these lines, dots and hooks. Everyone who wrestles with this language must have a masochistic slant. The teachers felt personally responsible if we hadn’t memorised an entire essay or the twenty-plus new vocabulary words assigned each day. They gave us instructions on what food to eat and to not stay out too late. ‘2 am is late,’ the director said, in case we weren’t sure about the parameters. If anyone still harboured thoughts of rebellion, the director ended with one final caution.
‘One student a few years back was drinking beer on the rooftop. He fell off. Then died.’ Then, a minor crisis hit. My job offer in Beijing to establish an elite private school was rescinded. I wound up teaching English to young adults, while arranging fifty informational interviews to find a job with no leads. Unsure what else to do, I travelled for five months, visiting relatives in Guiyang and Xinyi and living in hostels around Yunnan smoking weed, hanging out with others on the periphery. There turned out to be plenty of other young Chinese women who had quit their mind-numbing jobs and were travelling alone too, who lied to their mothers about what they were doing.
‘I feel like an astronaut floating in space,’ I told Topu, after spending my twenty-ninth birthday cycling alone around Lake Erhai. ‘Before you know it, all the chips will fall into place,’ he reassured me. ‘Someday you might just miss limbo-land.’
After my wanderings, I moved back to Beijing and rented an apartment in Yonghegong, a suburb in the city’s east, named for the ancient Confucius temple in its midst. My apartment was in the hutongs, the maze of alleyways formed by traditional courtyard compounds, some laid out 700 years ago. It was off the busy main road, nestled between local families and migrant workers, and more recently, small bars and restaurants. I could spend hours on my balcony looking out over the tiled rooftops of the houses, the warren of lanes built up over the years, and the sparse stars in the Beijing sky at night.
I stood in front of a building in the heart of the city’s embassy district. The outside was painted a vivid cyan, framed with bright white trims around every door and window. Two flags hung above the white awning. One featured a globe inside a laurel wreath. The other was emblazoned with one word in humble lower case: unicef. Looking at the instantly recognisable colours evoked a sense of optimism and boldness.
The UNICEF complex had a perfectly maintained green lawn, a garden filled with plants and a mix of deciduous and evergreen trees, and a swimming pool beside the back building. On blue sky days and especially in spring when foamy blossoms appeared on the fruit trees, it was easy to forget this place existed in a metropolis of 21 million people.
Each morning, I cycled past the sleepy shopkeepers opening their stalls on Guijie, then weaved around Soviet-style apartment blocks and modern shopping malls around Dongzhimen. I turned into Sanlitun Lu. There, I parked my bike, showed my pass to the round-the-clock security guards and walked through the imposing gates. I entered around the back building and headed upstairs to the education section. My desk was bare except for my computer, a desk lamp and a few reports, including a small booklet on the Convention of the Rights of the Child. It was an open secret that the office was allegedly bugged, but I didn’t think about that too much. This was now my new workplace, helping to protect the rights of children everywhere. ‘It’s the best mandate in the world,’ the representative gushed in our first conversation. I scribbled her words down and underlined the phrase, adding exclamation marks.
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Mel texted me a photo she had taken at work, at the United Nations (UN) Headquarters. The circular room looked familiar – I’d seen it on the news when world leaders spoke. She was working in another international development organisation’s UN office, as a senior advocacy adviser. Well, here I am at work! Gosh look at us, Lisa – law degrees, international scholarships, master degrees and UN jobs all by the age of thirty. We are doing okay. I’m proud of me and of you too. Doing okay meant overachieving. We were both still stuck in the belief that our worth came from accumulating accolades.
I had secured a job with UNICEF. Not only that, but I also landed a project in Guizhou with the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The ADB helped alleviate poverty. And UNICEF wasn’t just a job. As its website stated, it was ‘a calling’. That was the language used for recruitment, alongside, ‘Want to change the world? Work with us.’ Most people thought the hard part was getting to Harvard. But the harder part was the life and responsibility that it asked of its graduates. ‘You are here for a purpose beyond yourself,’ the professor impressed upon us at our orientation kickoff. ‘Together you will change the world.’ *Ringing bells, jingling coins, the unmistakable sound of hitting the jackpot*
Harvard, UNICEF and the ADB in their shared mission to ‘make a difference’ slotted together perfectly. I had conveniently forgotten about the critiques of education in development I’d learnt about not that long ago. Besides, this job was guaranteed to be world changing.
For now, I’d found a purpose beyond myself and cleared the impossible net. The Harvard graduate’s life of responsibility would be fulfilled. When I was offered the UNICEF job, I burst into tears – a rare emotional outburst. I thought it was because I was following my dreams. But perhaps it was more tears of relief too, a pressure release from getting past the impossibly high net. Thank fuck I made it, I was thinking.
Agassi hated tennis but enjoyed the feeling of hitting a ball ‘dead perfect’. ‘It’s the only peace. When I do something perfect, I enjoy a split second of sanity and calm,’ he wrote in Open. With UNICEF and the ADB jobs under my belt (plus the latest air purifier, and a well-designed N95 mask since I was in Beijing), I could finally breathe too – at least for a split second. I didn’t know that the dragon never stopped breathing fire, and the net never stopped rising.
LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST EPISODE WITH QIN QIN HERE
About the author
Qin Qin grew up striving to be ‘good’. By 29, she was an ex-lawyer with four degrees working overseas for UNICEF… and a miserable overachiever. After one too many crises, Qin Qin chose to question the script, a journey she explores in her debut memoir, Model Minority Gone Rogue (Hachette ’24). Qin Qin was named a 40-under-40: Most Influential Asian-Australian and is a librarian and regular speaker. Her life mission is to live consciously on her own terms.