On November 13, 2019, Xu Yushu, a senior high school student in Chongqing, jumped to his death. The tragedy is still not over a year later – his body is still unburied in the funeral home; his family, especially his father, never got over the loss of his son, and he cross-examines every day that he raised the Why do “gifted kids” fall from grace after leaving their families?
The year after the son’s death
After the accident of their eldest son, Xu Yushu, Mr. and Mrs. Xu Yuanxia and their youngest son moved out of the old house and rented a two-bedroom apartment of 60 to 70 square meters.
The old house, located in Chongqing’s old town, was built in the last century, with a narrow concrete staircase and old furniture and decoration style. The couple set up a small memorial hall in the living room for Xu Yushu’s portrait, and next to the portrait were two rows of books and a wall of awards that Xu Yushu had read before his death. The house is filled with traces of his son’s life, the child’s mother Hu Chunyan is not willing to come back often, the father Xu Yuanxia comes alone every week to clean the house, every first and fifteenth day to his son incense, to accompany him to talk.
On November 13, 2019, Xu Yushu, an 18-year-old senior high school student, jumped from the fifth floor of the school and died after being rescued. Nearly a year after the incident, his body remains unburied in the funeral home. In communication with the school, the school’s director repeatedly advised Xu Yuanxia to let Xu Yushu “be buried in the ground,” but Xu Yuanxia felt that “How can he be cremated if he can’t rest in peace and he doesn’t get a fair shake? ”
In the past year, Xu Yuanxia kept thinking about how a “genius boy” like Xu Yushu was going to die step by step. He stayed at home almost every day, sorting through his belongings and collecting the “evidence” that led to his son’s death. After reviewing every detail of Xu Yushu’s upbringing, Xu Yuanxia believed that the logic of his son’s death was as follows: he was jealous of his outstanding performance and was bullied in school, and he was “merit-oriented”. The educational environment of the “bullying” environment prevented his son’s “genius” from being stretched, and under the dual influence, the miserable child slowly became depressed and died.
Xu Yuanxia recorded many details to prove that “his son was bullied”: when he was in elementary school, a classmate wrote in Xu Yushu’s classmates’ notebook that “Megalomaniac” “You’re too cowardly. In the middle school, Xu Yushu’s sweatshirt was torn into strands. The. After the death of his son, he also read on the Internet that someone had reported that Xu Yuxu had been sexually assaulted in junior high school because of his feminine personality and dress. He reported the incident to the local police station, but the Chongqing Public Security Bureau, Nanan Branch, rejected the case as no crime was committed.
This was unacceptable to Xu and his wife, who needed “an explanation” and an explanation from the school for their son’s suicide. In Xu Yuanxia’s view, his son’s death was a “great injustice,” but the school did not come forward to take responsibility. It’s impossible for a living person, such a wonderful child to be handed over to a school, and now I’m asked to collect the body.
On a postcard that Xu Yueshu left to his parents before his death, a sentence was written: “I don’t have the ability to perceive good things, even though I know they exist in my life. The latter part of the sentence is more important to Yuanman Xu – he believes it proves that the family gives enough love and companionship to the child. “I created a little space for him, like a little greenhouse, and he grew up very well. Then he went back to that messy educational environment and eventually couldn’t survive. What I’m calling for is that the environment needs to be improved so that this kind of unique child can have sunshine and a breath of air,” Xu Yuanxia said. Xu Yuanxia said.
After the child’s death, Yuanxia Xu went to Beijing to visit university education researchers and contacted several university psychology professors, hoping to analyze Xu Yushu’s case and analyze his upbringing and psychological changes in detail, so as to raise people’s awareness of bullying in schools and even the education system.
During our first 40-minute phone conversation, Yuanxia Xu mentioned the “Qian Xuesen Question” five times. “Why don’t our schools always produce exceptional people? This is a question that Ch’ien Xuesen raised more than once on various occasions during his lifetime, and is considered to be the famous scientist’s criticism and cross-examination of the Chinese education system. Xu Yuanxia believes that this question is also applicable to his own child’s case: “Xu Yushu should have been a monument to Chinese education. Isn’t it a huge contrast that such an outstanding and good seedling was taught to death? He warns us if there is a solution to Ch’ien Hsueh-Sen’s question or not. ”
The “gifted boy” of parents
Xu Yuanxia, 53 years old, is not tall and already has a lot of white hair, climbing up to the fourth floor will gasp for breath, but as long as we talk about his son, there are endless words. He called his son “baby,” and carefully put children’s drawings, postcards, weekly notebooks, pens and other items left by Xu Yushu from his childhood in a file bag. He talks in detail about the story behind it. He refers to Seo as “a gift from God” and is “The one piece of work that you are most satisfied with”.
Xu Yuanxia is confident in his own educational approach. He told me that he had taken an exam in a small village in his hometown of Tongnan District, Chongqing, where “more than a thousand people competed for four or five places” and got into a teacher training school. He has been an elementary school teacher for two years. What impressed him the most was that in a 45-minute class, he “cut out the unnecessary preamble and repetition of other teachers” and got straight to the point, spending 10 minutes on After teaching the addition and subtraction of decimals, the teachers in the teaching and research group thought that they could not arrange the classroom properly because the time was too short. At that time, Yuanxia Xu was “disappointed with the school education” and thought that under the unified model, the classroom could not be organized properly. “Education became rigid, and you can’t teach according to your ability.” Later, he left the education system to do business in Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hubei, before settling down in Chongqing in 2009 to start a small agricultural technology company.
His son, Xu Yushu, was born in 2002, and his father was almost entirely responsible for his education at an early age. His mother, Chunyan Hu, is a tall, thin, housewife. She wakes up at 6:00 a.m. every morning to prepare the family’s three meals a day. Yuanxia Xu describes the division of labor in the family as, “My mother mainly takes care of life, and I educate the children. He repeatedly stressed that he did not value education and diplomas, and that the education he gave his son was lenient and in tune with his nature. When his son was more than a year old, he took him to the river to play with sand and small rocks, “and let him gain knowledge and skills in the play”.
Xu Yuanxia said, Xu Yushu has shown strong perception of the outside world since he was a child, and he would greet animals and trees when he saw them at the age of one. He started to recognize characters when he was one year and eight months old, and his first word was “door” and his second word was “door”. “Knife.” Yuanman Xu wrote the words on the note cards, repeated them for her son to read several times and then remembered them. When the mother takes her son out of the house, she also carries homemade literacy sticky notes with her, and when her son is interested in something, she takes out the words on the cards along with him. After six months, Xu Yushu had accumulated about 300 characters and could read young children’s books. 3.5 years old, Yuanxia Xu asked him to read Farewell to Kangqiao Bridge with his relatives’ children and found that Xu Yushu’s reading ability was similar to that of a 10-year-old. Before Xu Yushu went to elementary school, he wrote a 200-word letter to an elementary school principal, “There was not a single wrong word in the 200 words. Talking about these words, Xu Yuanxia was full of pride.
Xu Yushu briefly went to kindergarten for a few days, but then he didn’t want to go to school because he was unhappy in kindergarten. He believes that his son understands everything that is taught in kindergarten, so he doesn’t have to sit around in the classroom, “like everyone else, and become a mold. He agreed with his son’s decision not to go to kindergarten and to educate him himself. He often sat in a bookstore for an afternoon, reading fairy tales, history, classics, all kinds of books. His mother, Chunyan Hu, recalled that one day, mother and son bumped into a neighbor in a bookstore, and the neighbor didn’t believe that he could read the big book in his hands, so she “thought he was just doing a show, so she asked him a few questions on purpose, and he answered them all like he was supposed to! The old house has been a great success.
Today, the most preserved books in the old house are those Xu Yushu read as a child. On the bookshelf by his bedside, there are 50 to 60 books of different types, such as “Zhou Yi”, “History of Japan”, “Faust”, etc. Xu Yuanxia opened the drawer in the living room of the old house, and there are still many books that cannot be placed on the shelf. Xu Yuanxia opened a drawer in the living room of his old house, and there were many books that could not be placed on the bookshelf.
There was an article from the Jingmen Evening News: “Xu Yushu – A Child Who Didn’t Go to Kindergarten” on it. At that time, Xu Yushu was living in Hubei with businessman Xu Yuanxia. The article told about how 5-year-old Xu Yushu was a regular customer at the bookstore and his philosophy of education, with the picture “Little Yushu is concentrating on reading in the bookstore. Yuanxia Xu said that the journalist approached her for the interview because she had a “reputation” for the child’s excellence, and that among her neighbors, she was “very well known”. Word of mouth”.
When I asked what the couple had based their judgment of their son’s “genius” on, my mother, Chunyan Hu, told me with some hesitation. “Prodigy” “Genius These comments come mainly from people around me, and I’ve been told many times that I feel “like a true genius! “When Xu Yushu was young, she brought her child home to Henan Province, where she lived in the same compound. When Xu Yushu was young, she brought her child home to Henan province, and all her neighbors in the same compound were eager to hold him. We didn’t enroll him in any classes, but when he was little he was much better than other children. He was cute and happy, and he knew a lot of words. ”
Xu Yuanxia gives a slightly more abstract but firm answer: “He has curiosity, perception, and a desire to know the world. “Under his own leadership, these qualities were formed before his son’s elementary school years,” said Yuanman Xu. “As a child, his nature was fully developed. In the bookstore he flipped through his own books and could read different books. Not many children at such a young age are able to read in peace. The fact that he can connect the words to the thought symbols inside his head and directly into his own mind is genius. ”
“Are there any other aspects? “I asked.
“Isn’t that enough? What else should there be? ” Xu Yuanxia asked rhetorically.
That was the most satisfying time Xu Yuanxia could remember spending with his son. After entering elementary school, Xu Yushu’s grades were excellent, and he was sent to Chongqing No. 2 Foreign Language School with the top score in his class upon graduation. He was not sufficiently focused on his son’s excellence outside of the classroom, but the rest of his junior and senior high school education not only did not give him room to shine, but also obliterated his talent. “He reads a lot of books, has the ability to learn on his own, is curious, and has a wide range of knowledge. Originally they were vastly different children, but in the test education, they just did what they were taught and were homogenized. ”
But as for the judgment of “genius”, Xu Yushu’s teachers and classmates and his father obviously felt differently. The child is not a boy genius. A former junior high school teacher who taught Xu Yushu said to me, today’s students have strong learning ability, memorization, learning things are fast, kindergarten and elementary school learning situation is very different from junior high school. “You can’t use the fact that a child is a genius just because he or she is a fast learner. The teacher had a good impression of Xu Yushu, and remembered that he would come back often to visit her every year on Teacher’s Day. “But the child was not very popular when he entered middle school, and only later became more and more cheerful, but his personality was a bit radical. ”
Xu Yushu’s middle school grades were good, and he won the first prize in a national mathematics competition shortly after entering school. This award, which made his father proud, was quite ordinary in the eyes of his classmates. One of Xu Yushu’s junior high school classmates, Ding Quan, told me that the prize was not as high as people thought, because almost everyone in his class had won it. However, in Ding’s impression, Xu Yushu is indeed a “very educated” person. Some of the network segments buried deeper, such as ‘Soviet jokes’, need to understand the history to taste out, Xu Yushu always Be able to read and then actively explain it to your students. ”
Depression and Gender Cognition
The mountainous city of Chongqing has a complicated terrain, and the old house where Xu Yuanxia’s family lived is located on low ground, requiring a walk of nearly one kilometer to get to the bus stop. The road was filled with the sound of vendors’ horns, car engines and the music of shopping mall advertisements, so that two people walking side by side could only talk at the top of their lungs if they wanted to. After Xu Yushu went to junior high school and lived there, Yuanxia often walked with her son, asking him about his life at school and implying that he should “stick to his own personality and judgment. “. This 12-minute journey is one of the few opportunities for father and son to chat.
However, it was mainly Xu Yuanxia who chatted, and Xu Yushu occasionally responded. After he entered middle school, Xu Yushu’s words gradually became less frequent. He spent most of his time in boarding school, and only came home during holidays and summer and winter vacations. When he came back, he either stayed in his room or played on the computer with headphones on. In Xu Yuanxia’s opinion, this is a sign that Xu Yushu’s communication skills have become weaker under the influence of his schooling. When his son was young, he could talk to himself on the phone for half an hour. I’ve been in school for so many years, but I can’t even speak clearly anymore, so what is the school teaching? ”
What worries Xu Yuanxia even more is that since junior high school, Xu Yushu has shown a love for anime. “His curiosity has weakened. He used to be able to play with little rocks and flowers, and he was also interested in history, philosophy and other books. Leaving the free and easy environment I had with him, the school is more homogeneous, and the other kids may only watch anime, only at this level. ”
This is how Yuanman Xu analyzed his son’s change. When he took his son to a bookstore, he deliberately switched to other shelves to attract his son’s attention, but he didn’t see any effect. He was heartbroken: “How does a father feel when such an excellent seed, such a good seedling, is slowly assimilated into the masses? But what can be done about it? You can’t change the world.
His junior high school classmate, Ding Quan, remembers him showing a preference for the clothes of female characters in anime, “telling everyone that he wanted to buy these things to wear, and that some of them might not be able to accept them and might talk about them.
It was also in middle school that Xu Yushu began to exhibit problems with clashing school rules and emotional control. Students were forbidden to use cell phones during school hours at Chongqing Erwai, but Xu Yushu often seemed to violate this rule. In the second year of junior high school, the class teacher sent a text message to Xu Yuanxia, telling him that Xu Yushu had “extreme misanthropic thoughts” after his dormitory teacher took away his tablet computer from him. After his death, Yuanman got seven or eight cell phones and two or three tablets, which his son re-purchased after they were confiscated several times.
Ding Quan recalled that after one phone was confiscated, Xu Yushu tried to jump off a building, but was fortunately discovered by fellow teachers and classmates. In his weekly journal, Xu wrote: “When I was pulled back from the window, I just howled and cried hysterically. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could escape all this? “He once cried to his mother, “No one at school understands me, no one understands me,” he said. On that occasion, Hu Chunyan did not have an in-depth conversation with his son, but told him that he could try to find the cause in himself. Looking back on this conversation, Hu Chunyan is heartbroken that he didn’t grasp the distress signals his son was sending. “He’s been so good since he was little, he gets along with everyone, and the people around him have such a high opinion of him, so how could we worry about him? ”
The inner conflict became even more intense when Xu Yushu was in high school, and soon after he entered the senior high school at Chongqing No. 2 Foreign Language School in September 2017, he told his father that he was depressed and needed to see a psychiatrist at a professional hospital. It was only then that he realized that his son had sought help from the school’s psychological counselor several times for his psychological problems, and the teacher suggested that he go to a professional hospital for treatment.
On the way to the hospital with his father, Xu Yushu took the initiative to bring up his gender awareness. He told Xu Yuanxia that he had read a Japanese doctoral dissertation, which introduced that there are many types of people, not just male and female, and that he should be a girl psychologically. The causes of OCD, anxiety, and depression are no longer limited to those that were previously common.”
A middle school counseling teacher told me that in the ten years I have been working as a psychology teacher, I have seen an increase in the number of students seeking counseling, and that obsessive-compulsive, anxious, and depressed states are becoming more and more common among students, and the causes are no longer limited to the usual grade anxiety and interpersonal relationship problems. In the Internet age, teenagers receive far more information than ever before, and the complexity of their psychological state goes beyond the traditional schooling and home education experience – this is a new issue for schools and families to face.
Yuanxia Xu tries his best to understand his son’s seemingly unusual awareness and decisions. He studied psychology in teacher’s training school, and on his living room table today sits a copy of his psychology textbook, published in 1980 and somewhat tattered, with Xu Yuanxia’s signature in blue ink on the title page. He flipped through the book and pointed out the references to “abnormal psychology, transvestism and transsexualism,” saying that he had already been exposed to these concepts.
Xu Yuanxia has his own judgment about his son’s condition, and he does not believe that his son really has a gender awareness problem. It’s a biological concept for the sake of genetic inheritance, so what’s the point of talking about sex if there’s no object? After reviewing his son’s development, he analyzed that there was never “anything unusual” about his son at home. There was no “need to wear women’s clothes and wigs” just because of bullying at school. I want to be a woman who gets attention and protection from others, “just like you girls always want to find a strong boyfriend to protect you”.
According to the doctor’s advice, Xu Yuanxia doesn’t emphasize this issue in his life and “plays it down”. In an interview with the journalist, he picked up an A4 paper with pictures of his son printed on it, pointed to some of the pictures and said, “No matter if you are playing with your brother or holding a gun, where can you tell it’s a girl? ”
However, in high school, Xu Yushu already showed a very obvious love for women’s clothing in school. A high school classmate, Chen Tao, who had more interaction with Xu Yushu, told me that Xu Yushu did not deliberately hide himself in school, and even “wanted everyone to know”. He once uploaded many photos of himself in his class photo album wearing a woman’s dress and wig, and Chen Tao was surprised when he saw it in the group, but he didn’t reply. Chen Tao jokingly asked him: “Do you want to be more restrained in the dormitory? “Xu Yushu laughed along with her, patted Chen Tao’s shoulder, and didn’t say anything.
Although he did not argue too much with his classmates, Xu Yushu’s feelings about his gender were clearly serious. When his feelings were not professionally recognized, he would show extraordinary anger. When he first went to see a professional psychiatrist, the doctor did not think that Xu Yushu’s self-reported “transsexualism” was a real problem, and Xu Yushu had a heated discussion with the doctor. Debate, who wrote in his weekly journal about this very unpleasant counseling session: “She kept repeating the phrase ‘You’re still a 15-year-old kid’ during my counseling session. ‘”; “Argued with a psychiatrist who thought my experience would influence my judgment. …… In the end, all she said was “I don’t care about the mental disorder,” and I almost punched her in the face, which was no longer so young and pretty.
In the second semester of high school, at Xu Yushu’s request, Yuanxia took him to a different psychiatrist. This time, it was an associate director, and Xu Yushu again mentioned that he was depressed and transsexual and wanted to be hospitalized. Eventually, the doctor wrote “depressive state” on his admission diagnosis, and also acknowledged in the conversation that Xu Yushu’s request was “depression”. Transsexualism”. This verbal recognition had already excited him, and in his weekly journal, Xu describes himself as “weeping like a straw when he heard the initial report of depression and transvestism. “.
He had even researched how to become transgender. “I went and asked,” he told his father, “at the In China, it’s very difficult to change the gender of a doctor until a doctor at the level of deputy director or above shows proof that the public security bureau can change the gender. “In his weekly journal, he analyzed the reality of the dilemma facing his gender perception in more detail: “After using his contacts to inquire about the local situation in Chongqing, he was again ruthlessly Reality knocks. The 5% approval rate for certifying an application without a doctor’s order alone is enough to make me frazzled, and the application processing period of 1 month to 5 years and up makes me so angry I want to throw a punch, as well as the five-figure plus upfront costs of preparing the application and treatment in conjunction with the start-up phase. “He also purchased hormones and wigs and women’s clothing online. “The whole heart was tied to a few tiny boxes that were about to arrive via SF Express, and that was the last straw I could grasp. That was the last straw I could grab,” he wrote in his weekly journal.
Aside from these weekly notes, there is no way to know what happened to Xu Yueshu in his life as a self-confessed sexual minority. Although what Xu Yuanxia believes to be sexual assault has not been recognized by the police, in the QQ chat records he showed to this reporter, Xu Yushu once complained to a female classmate during his sophomore year of high school: “There is a woman who explicitly wants to meet me, and I am afraid. “The female classmate replied: “exciting”. You really are a showman, Chen Duxiu”.
Failure of the “Breakout”
Among the relics that Xu Yuanxia kept, there is a postcard that Xu Yueshu left to his parents. It is an unstamped postcard from the National Palace Museum, on which it is written in black water-based pen: “I’m muddling through life, I’m going on the road to find something. Choose death and maybe I’ll come back, and then I’ll be the happiest man on earth. ”
At the time of writing these words, Xu Yuxu was on the eve of the start of the second semester of his sophomore year of high school. One morning Xu Yuanxia woke up to find that his son had left a postcard without saying goodbye and gone to Qiqihar with a boy from the northeast whom he had met in an online game. He later told Xu Yuanxia through QQ that he and his friend were in Qiqihar for Comic-Con planning: “Comic-Con isn’t much in a small city like Qiqihar, and I can use my writing skills to take charge of the copywriting. ”
This trip to Northeast China was seen by Yuanxia as a “breakout” for his son, an attempt to gain recognition for his son’s strong desire to be recognized by others. In the video, Xu Yushu looks enthusiastic and excited, and Yuanxia is understanding of his son’s “truancy”. “Although he was avoiding school, he hoped to find fulfillment elsewhere. But this “breakout” didn’t work. When Xu Yuanxia videoed his son in Qiqihar, he found that he was often lying in bed or playing games in an Internet cafe, losing the excitement and confidence he had when he first left home. After missing more than two months of school, Xu Yushu returned to school “reluctantly” at the urging of his parents and teachers.
Perhaps due to these twists and turns in trying to “break through,” or as Xu Yuanxia said “He wasn’t comfortable with the boring, rigid question-and-answer tactics.” By his senior year, Xu Yushu’s grades had slipped to the bottom of the class, but he had high expectations for himself. “Becoming Your True Self” and “A Good Future “The two ideals are intertwined in his life, and in his weekly journal, he analyzes his life after completing sexual fluidity: “There is a part of me that I cannot part with, that is even so precious that many others would beg for it, and that is my future…. …Some arrogantly say that it is no problem to get into a top domestic top university, and that if I study hard, I may even be able to make it to Tsinghua University and Peking University,” Xu Yushu told his father. “Xu Yushu told his father that his goal was to study Chinese at Peking University, or at least at the Beijing Normal University. Although he fell behind on many courses during his hospitalization for depression and his trip to Qiqihar, he is still confident in his academic abilities: “It’s only a 200-page book, and if I get serious, I’ll soon catch up. ”
But his classmates didn’t see it that way. Chen Tao said to me that he thought Xu Yushu’s grades in his senior year of high school had made it difficult for him to get into a “211 school”. However, he still described Xu as “a person with humanistic qualities,” who could often speak freely in language and history classes. Some people would talk about his vanity because he wanted to express himself so much, and he would even mention his achievements in elementary and junior high school. It was also reported in the media that Xu Yushu’s quotes from language class were appreciated by his classmates the first time, but laughed out loud the second time. Xu Yuanxia printed out this part of the report as another evidence of his son’s bullying: “He wants to be recognized so much! But individuality is erased, marginalized, and envied! ”
On November 12, 2019, the day before the fall, Xu Yushu was confiscated by the invigilator in the monthly exam room. Afterwards, he appeared to be very anxious, explaining to Chen Tao that he did not cheat, but did not have time to turn in his cell phone, which slipped out of his pants pocket, and Chen Tao comforted him: “These words to tell the teacher well will be fine. ”
The next morning at 7:00 a.m., Xu Yushu fell from the fifth floor of the school building. In his suicide note, which was made public, he completely denied himself, referring to himself as a “wretched, despicable wretch. I’m sorry, I tried my best. The next time I let myself down like this, I’d better get it over with. …… Faced with an increasingly heavy past, a complicated present, a misty future – I’m not entitled to carry them. I love them, the people who are qualified and brave enough to carry them. I’m too fragile to be so crushed. ”
(Chen Tao and Ding Quan are pseudonyms in this article. Intern reporter Dai Wen also contributed to this article)
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