Written by Hairong 2022 Cohort
Before writing this journal entry, I read an “adult fable” posted on
Douban. The story is about a man who suffers from a disease requiring 16 hours of sleep. The protagonist is stuck in a dilemma about balancing his work life and is eventually fired from his company because he cannot work overtime. After his dismissal, he sleeps for 50 hours, and in his dreams, he becomes a mouse living under the dirt.
In the story, the protagonist compares himself to a mouse. I have seen similar analogies in many Chinese social media, where they compare themselves to “inferior status,” “powerless to resist,” “nobody cares,” and so on. As a Beijing City University student, I always felt that way.
To illustrate, If you do not arrive ten minutes earlier for class, you will be stopped by the attendance checker, and the teachers will write down the student number and give a school-wide notice. Furthermore, flip-flops are not allowed in the classroom, and absence from any activity in school is not permitted. In particular, a pass can only be granted with a standard form issued by a doctor. If the university is so strict about the daily behaviours of its students, what about academics? The answer is the opposite; no one will be punished for plagiarism. I searched the entire school website and found no penalties for plagiarism. I recalled a school lesson in which a student submitted an image from the internet as part of an assignment.
The teacher knew it was plagiarised work but complimented the student anyway. Everyone’s creative motivation was dampened after that. It is a wrong thing, but there was no punishment for it.
We even falsified data during a summer research assignment. Downloading a questionnaire from the internet, we started ticking off random answers from the 200 printed copies. Ultimately, it was up to me to submit these questionnaires and the weird results to the teacher. I was confused; before the assignment started, I imagined that I might be able to do some interesting social research, but no one seemed to care about that; completing the project was all that mattered.
Most of the time, these assignments are not that interesting; perhaps that’s one of the reasons for plagiarism. More than anything else, it may be a slight resistance from students to assignments that are “meaningless,” “impossible to reject,” and “nobody cares.” When our school puts students in a position of distrust and harsh management, not spending time on homework but instead choosing to plagiarize becomes the only way for students to rebel. In particular, it still doesn’t need to be punished, although most things at school, like being back in the dormitory later than 9 pm, are punishable.
At the end of the ‘adult fable,’ the mouse transformed into the protagonist of the dream aspires to be human but is ridiculed and disrespected by humans. Ultimately, he chooses to leap from a high place and embrace the New Year’s fireworks. The author concludes by writing that the dream does not wake him up, and he discovers that he is a mouse. I was going to put some data on psychological suicide among university students here but found that I couldn’t find any data for the last few years on the internet. It’s as if students’ psychological problems have never been cared for.