Editor’s note: Vocational school students make up nearly 50% of China’s youth population today, yet their voices are largely absent from public discourse. Published in 2023, “Wild Wheat” is a collection of essays, scripts, poems, and short stories that captures the discrimination, joy, and confusion these students face. Here, three contributors to the book share their stories.

Finding his own road

In 2018, after missing the cutoff for high school admission by more than 20 points, Xiao Tan enrolled in a five-year vocational program in Guangzhou, capital of the southern Guangdong province.

His parents were already unhappy about his exam scores, and so was he after he eventually started classes at his new school. He found that the other boys just spent their days trying to hook up with girls on the WeChat messaging platform or fighting over video games.

He had a good relationship with his homeroom teacher, but that broke down after the teacher joked in class about beating his daughter with a stick. Xiao Tan, who had once been beaten by his father with a length of pipe, didn’t see the funny side, so began skipping the teacher’s lectures. “You must have principles,” he says. “At the very least, you should always be just and kind.”

Realizing he wasn’t learning anything meaningful in class, he began spending more time at the Guangzhou Library reading books, participating in volunteer activities, and making handicrafts with children affected by serious illness.

However, trouble erupted at home, too, when Xiao Tan turned 18 and his mother suddenly demanded he start giving her all his wages from his part-time jobs, to “repay his debt.” He refused, arguing that it was the parents’ responsibility to feed and clothe their child. In the end, he decided to move out and rent a place of his own.

He’d been working odd jobs since the age of 16, including at a smartphone component factory in Dongguan, a manufacturing hub in Guangdong, where he spent 11 hours a day bending tabs at the top of batteries.

One of his colleagues there was a vocational student like him. Though sympathetic to his situation, Xiao Tan says he was constantly slacking off, causing his production line to become overloaded with unfinished goods. His eventual replacement was an older student who wanted to pursue a bachelor’s degree, but as his sibling was already at a top-tier university, his parents weren’t supportive.

Xiao Tan felt both anger and helplessness when he heard their stories. He couldn’t understand why people with a lower education were so easily deemed unworthy of investment.

“I can’t help but think of those young people with their anime-inspired shamate hairstyles who used to flood into factories,” he writes in his essay, referring to the flamboyant, working-class youth subculture that gained prominence in the 2000s. “Some were full of passion, wanting to earn money to give their families a better life; others just wanted to be able to scrub up a little better and live with more dignity. Carrying dreams large and small, they entered the hellish world of the assembly line to earn a living. … Now you can hardly find such vivid souls, such energetic people, in factories anymore.”

In the summer of 2022, his school sent him on a one-year “internship” at a factory making power cabinets, where he polished 5-meter-long strips of copper using a bench grinder. He was promised seven-hour workdays and weekends off, but in reality he regularly worked overtime and was given only one day to rest.

A month into the job, Xiao Tan caught his left hand in the bench grinder, tearing a chunk of flesh from his thumb. He required more than a dozen stitches, and even now still experiences pain when he grips things. The school and the factory accused him of “carelessness,” but agreed to pay a small amount of compensation.

Xiao Tan quit the factory and immediately felt a sense of relief. He decided to travel across the country, working as he went, starting in Zhoushan, a coastal city in the eastern Zhejiang province. He spent half of 2023 as a restaurant server on Dongfushan Island, and worked at a guesthouse in Daishan County for another several months.

He remembers one evening sitting with a girl he’d met on the hill behind the guesthouse, discussing literature and history. As the sunset illuminated her face and the wind gently blew her hair, Xiao Tan felt it was the closest he’d ever been to love. She later gave him two books of poetry, both about unrequited love, which he took as a subtle rejection.

During his one year in Zhoushan, he saved 10,000 yuan ($1,395), which he decided to spend cycling through China’s southwest, from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to Lhasa, capital of the Xizang Autonomous Region.

After riding more than 1,000 kilometers — enduring rains, flu, altitude sickness, and hand pain from pushing his bike uphill — Xiao Tan headed to Dali in the southwestern Yunnan province, where he planned to make enough money to buy an electric-assisted bike. There he worked briefly in a tea shop before helping a fortune teller run a street stall in the city’s old town.

During his travels, he encountered several bosses who refused to pay wages and sometimes witnessed outright fraud. But he kept going.

In June 2023, Xiao Tan was supposed to graduate from vocational school, but he never returned to Guangzhou to collect his diploma. “I don’t feel that school ever taught me anything. That diploma means nothing to me,” he says.

Discovering social value

Tu Mama never took China’s high school entrance exam — she dropped out of compulsory education in her early teens, halfway through middle school, after being wrongly accused of being involved in a brawl on campus. She’d tried to explain to her homeroom teacher and her parents, but no one believed her. So, she just stopped turning up to class.

Shut up in her room all day, she would sleep or play on her phone.

Eventually, after several months, Tu Mama began applying for jobs in her hometown in the northern Hebei province. She also thought about enrolling in a local vocational school that offered a diploma equivalent to a high school certificate, but her parents objected, as they wanted her to finish middle school.

She recalls reading an article at that time that opened her eyes to the possibility that life experience might be more valuable than academic credentials. It was about two high school classmates: one a model student who graduated from university and wanted to teach in their old school, but failed to get the job; the other a dropout who entered the workforce young, started their own business, and later was named honorary principal by the school after making a significant donation.

Using the article, she was able to convince her parents, and was enrolled in a nearby vocational high school to study accounting. However, her enthusiasm took a dent as soon as classes started — the teachers seemed uninterested in teaching, while her classmates mostly played on their phones in class.

Students came from all kinds of backgrounds, although most were middle school dropouts like her. Some were even older than 18, and a few had recently been released from prison. She recalls that almost everyone smoked, and fighting was common.

The girls wore oversized fur coats and tight skirts, carried fluffy handbags, and teetered around in 5-inch heels. Tu Mama had never worn heels, but wanting to fit in, she bought a cheap pair from a street vendor — and every day had to endure the agony of climbing five flights of stairs in them to get to class.

She’d play cards and scroll on her phone in morning classes, go to the hair salon at lunch, and return to school to waste more time in the afternoon. Weekends were spent in internet cafés, pool halls, karaoke rooms, and bars.

However, she soon grew bored and restless, and wanted to start making money, so she found a job at a movie theater, handing out flyers, serving popcorn, and handling customer service. Two months later, she learned that some people in one of her chat groups planned to start their own online temp agency and she successfully applied to join.

Tu Mama, now 16 years old, began working as a liaison between the agency and business owners, a role in which her background was an unexpected advantage — many business owners would turn away university students but saw vocational school students as “one of their own” who understood the real world.

After the service started making a daily profit of 1,000 to 2,000 yuan from commission-based placements, the agency was officially registered as a human resources company. However, the quick success triggered internal disagreements.

Disillusioned, Tu Mama decided to quit the business, and instead she secured a one-year internship with a local animal welfare organization, working as a full-time employee at its volunteer center. The daily routine was mundane, but in caring for the animals, she felt for the first time that she had real social value.

In the past, she rarely received approval from her school or her family, as she was a “bad student.” But at the rescue center, everyone praised her for being kind and capable.

She made many new friends, including with the university students who volunteered, and for the first time she seriously began considering higher education. She eventually enrolled in a vocational college through the spring admissions pathway.

Once classes started, she was the most hardworking student on campus. While many of her classmates were intent on relaxing after enduring the pressures of the gaokao, China’s make-or-break university entrance exam, she knuckled down every day in the library. She ranked among the top students in every subject and even received scholarships.

In her first year, she also joined a part-time, remote bachelor’s degree program at a separate institution, which meant that upon graduation she received both a vocational diploma in secretarial studies and an undergraduate degree in Chinese language and literature. She later earned another bachelor’s degree in social work and was admitted to a graduate program at a Beijing university in 2021.

She believes her vocational background contributed much to her academic success. With secretarial studies, for example, she had worked as an administrative assistant, so many of the concepts her classmates found abstract and difficult, she had already practiced in the real world.

During her studies, Tu Mama also accompanied a senior colleague as an intern at a social service organization that interviews inmates in youth detention centers to understand why they turned to a life of crime. She was shocked to discover that many interviewees were from her vocational school.

She sat across from them, listening in silence and taking notes as they talked. She realized that they were experiencing the exact same inner turmoil that she had, but her role did not permit her to speak with them. “During the interviews, with every tear they shed, I could feel all their pain,” she says. “I knew it could easily have been me sitting there.”

Looking back, she realizes that working at the animal shelter was a turning point, as it was while engaging in social practice that she finally found recognition.

Tu Mama’s postgraduate studies focused on social work. As part of her research, she volunteered at a school and helped students participate in public service activities, so that they, too, could experience a sense of value.

“When I volunteered for the first time, I felt a sense of fulfillment and purpose like never before,” she wrote in the acknowledgement section of her thesis. “My time was fully occupied with something meaningful, and all my busyness had social value. Before that, I’d never felt that I could be of any significance to society, because in my past experiences of participating in society as a vocational school student, what I encountered most was rejection and avoidance.”

Shedding the notion of inferiority

Before his parents divorced, Meng Bing had been class president in middle school. The trauma of his family breaking apart caused his grades to plummet; he became irritable and angry, often venting his frustration by smashing trash cans at an abandoned amusement park.

What echoed in his mind were his grandparents’ words: “As an only child, only you can help your parents make peace.” Yet, he had failed.

When it eventually came time to take the high school entrance exam, he scored less than 400, well below the passing grade of around 500. Rather than repeat a year, he chose the vocational route, believing it would offer him a fresh start.

Going on the advice of his uncle, who worked at a car dealership, Meng Bing decided to study automotive testing and maintenance, and enrolled at a vocational high school with a student population of 20,000 to 30,000.

During class times, more than half of the students would often be asleep, “but that doesn’t mean they were slacking off; they just weren’t studying,” he says, explaining that without the pressure of the gaokao, many use such vocational programs to explore part-time opportunities, start businesses, or even make music.

Uninspired by lessons in theory, Meng Bing instead pursued his education through skills competitions, which focused on real-world tasks such as paint spraying and bodywork, as well as service scenarios. He amassed a collection of awards, certificates, and trophies, and even won a city-level event that led to him being recommended for admission to a vocational college.

Like many vocational students, he also has years of part-time work experience, including sorting packages from 7 p.m. until the next morning, hauling beer crates, building stages and working the lights at weddings, and as a server in a milk tea shop.

He doesn’t mind dirty or tiring work — what bothers him is when the wages aren’t paid. The first time he encountered this, he called a lawyer, but they simply hung up as soon as they heard that Meng Bing was a minor without a signed contract.

Though his parents were divorced, they still gave him solid emotional support, and never pressured him about getting good grades.

He even joined the school’s psychology support program, which allowed students to talk to peers about their struggles. Meng Bing recalls how many said they felt out of place, abandoned, and underestimated. Drawing from his experience, he would tell them: “Just because one field doesn’t suit you doesn’t mean you belong nowhere. Your existence absolutely has meaning.”

He understood how being a vocational student came with a lingering sense of inferiority. Students are funneled into different schools in their early teens mainly based on whether they are good at taking tests. But this distinction often gets unfairly stretched to judgments about their character, upbringing, or even their value as humans.

“I admit I failed to get into high school because my academic scores were too low, but I don’t accept the idea that that makes me inferior. We are all equal. The meaning of life lies in realizing our own value, not in the labels we’re given,” he says.

He recalls one time chatting with a fellow participant at a national entrepreneurship competition who casually asked which school he was from. When he told him, the participant went silent and turned to strike up a conversation with a student from a prestigious university.

“If someone can’t see beyond labels and isn’t mindful of others’ feelings, they’re not worth talking to,” Meng Bing says. “They may know a lot about theoretical concepts, but they probably don’t know as much as I do about putting them into practice. Life is made up of many aspects — book knowledge isn’t the only kind of knowledge, and school isn’t the only place where learning happens.”

(Xiao Tan, Tu Mama, and Meng Bing are pen names.)

Reported by Sun Xiaoye.

A version of this article originally appeared in Jiemian News. It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Carrie Davies; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header image: Vocational school students at a job fair in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, March 2024. Yang Di/CNS/VCG)