Whenever I tell people I lived and went to school in China for eight years, they assume that I attended an English-speaking international school in some gated expat community, with American college degree-yielding teachers, state-of-the-art auditorium acoustics, and tenderly green golf courses right across the schoolyard fence.

Anyone taking a hard look at expats in Asia can appreciate that the situation looks like a neo-colonial reenactment of Empire of the Sun these days, but that’s a whole other story. Let’s just bluntly clarify one thing: a lot of expat kids in a city like Shanghai consider, explicitly or implicitly, local Chinese students to be uncool, uncosmopolitan, ill-mannered, and slightly alien second-rate citizens of the up-and-coming metropolis. Expat boys plan nights out to ‘local clubs’ where they think ‘local Chinese girls’ will surround them in swarms, desperate to have a fling with a white man.

Well, these so-called locals are the peers I grew up with until ninth grade, and yes, I can confirm that they come from a different world — a cut-throat, hard-working, incredibly paradoxical, yet astoundingly character-forming world that outsiders cannot even begin to imagine. It’s hard to describe the ridiculous factories of tragi-comedy that are Chinese schools, but here’s my attempt to shed some light on the life of a Chinese student after attending six different schools that ranged from poverty-stricken public institutions in northern China to sea-side boarding schools lost in the mountains. Here are, to me, the quintessential ingredients of a Chinese education:

Element 1: Mandatory Communism

Since my very first day of first-grade in China, I had to wear a bright red triangular scarf that symbolized a corner of the Chinese flag dyed-red-by-the-blood-of-ardent-revolutionaries-who-sacrificed-their-splendid-youths-for-the-People’s-Republic (such was more or less the lingo). Forgetting your scarf was sacrilegious, and incurred harsh verbal reprimands and sometimes the order to instantly purchase a new one, since not sporting it was a lack of respect for the communist ideology. The scarf represented our membership in the Young Pioneers division of the Chinese Communist Party, which automatically applies to all schoolchildren from first to eighth grade. It serves as a stepping-stone to the Chinese Communist Youth Corp, which accepts new members in ninth grade and in turn facilitates future entry into the Chinese Communist Party itself.

In elementary school, entire classes were dedicated to learning the proper knot for the scarf (think scout neckerchief) and the proportions of how much red fabric should emerge from the collar. We were also tested on the memorization of a set of Communist anthems that we would regularly sing during school gatherings (“we are those who shall relay the spirit of communism,” etc.) P.E. classes were used to train us to perform military marches, with an emphasis on unison of movement, straightness of lines/columns in the marching formation, exactness of cadence and angles, crispness of turns and overall vigor..

And yet, for all of the painstaking efforts that were put into perfecting our adherence to a militaristic communism in form, we were never really asked to profess our loyalty to the content of those oaths and anthems we were forced to learn—perhaps because it was not necessary. Adherence to rituals mattered more than adherence to ideology, and in any case, I cannot remember a single instance of someone questioning the validity of these ceaseless ceremonials. We just stood day after day under the scorching sun in the middle of a dirt field, spines straight and fingers rigid under the scrutiny of the teachers, singing. The East is red and the sun is rising, China produced a Mao Zedong, he fights for the happiness of the people…

Element 2: Emotional, Iron-fisted Teachers

If you think that tiger mom, Amy Chua, was draconian with her daughters, then you haven’t met a Chinese public school teacher. The term ‘investment’ has never been better embodied, sometimes to the extreme. Some teachers—they scream, they cry, they (depending on the school) hit and punch; their emotional well-being seems to fluctuate in direct correlation with their students’ academic and disciplinary performances. The Chinese school system is a highly meritocratic one, and teachers are closely evaluated based on how well their classes do on standardized tests. In turn, the school is ranked on a district or municipal level based on the average results of its student body.

And yet, I honestly don’t think Chinese teachers are invested solely because of salary and reputation—the system conditions them in such a way that they actually develop a mindset where every student’s trial and tribulation matters immensely. I’ve witnessed touching moments when a teacher shed tears of joy because a struggling student finally passed a test, but also terrifying moments such as an instance in third grade where a teacher shoved a boy into a desk in a fit of rage—the corner of the desk went straight into the boy’s temple and blood started flowing everywhere. The teacher was never disciplined, and overall, he was indeed a good, caring man. The way a teacher handled his or her students remained, ultimately, a private matter, enclosed within a particular classroom.

The relationships between teachers and students were therefore extremely intense: often teachers became more of a parental figure than parents themselves, and it was sheer fear as well as a desire to please that fueled much of the students’ hard work.

Element 3: Academic Purgatory

And I wish I were exaggerating. After my stint in China, I went on to Phillips Academy Andover and Yale University, both reputed for being tough academically—but they felt like an extended spring break after surviving Chinese grade school. Sure enough, the level of intellectual maturity and critical thinking (neither much-emphasized qualities in Chinese education) expected in the U.S. is on a radically higher level, but in terms of sheer workload and difficulty of material, I have yet to witness anything that can even remotely rival schoolwork in China.

First of all, only three subjects actually matter in Chinese schools: Chinese, math, and English. This leads to a fascinating power hierarchy amongst teachers: those who teach the three main subjects are the unchallenged top dogs, and can waltz into any other class with a pile of practice exams in their arms and take over. The plot thickens when, say, the Chinese and math teachers both walk in during art class and stare each other down to work out who can claim that time slot (the losers were always us students—the teacher who didn’t get the class would simply make us stay a couple hours after school to do extra exercises).

Furthermore, all grades were public and each student knew exactly where he/she ranked: results from every exam were posted in order of performance in the hallway for the world to see. Interestingly, the social hierarchy of cliques within the student body largely corresponded to that billboard of academic rankings, and the best-performing students were usually also the most popular ones. As students rose through the grades, however, the competition got much uglier: in a rat-race to keep up, students attended an inhumane amount of after-school and weekend classes where they learned extra material to get ahead. It wasn’t about the brains anymore, but about whether you’d be willing to spend eighteen out of twenty-four hours studying. I’ve had friends tell me stories about competitors who covertly attended extra after-school classes and lied about it so that other students would not try to keep up. I had the chance of getting out of the system early, but for those who start bracing themselves for the notorious gaokao (a standardized test that is the sole determinant for college-entry) years in advance, memories of those dark times can summon real nightmares of –at the risk of sounding too sentimental—a stolen adolescence.

There is no way to sum up the ridiculous eccentricities I’ve experienced in Chinese schools in one article. I haven’t even touched upon the Campaign Against Physical Attractiveness (dating—or, for that matter, looking good—was prohibited), or the multiple-choice on a history exam about why the allies won WWII (answer: the unwavering will of the Chinese people). What I’d like you to take away is simply that school in China is much more than the stereotype of the studious Asian—it is a difficult but defining experience that deserves sympathy, awe and understanding.

A work of Soviet literature that is buried in complete obscurity in the West but a mandatory read for all Chinese students is Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. As more and more fear-mongering surfaces about Chinese students taking over the American college-applicant pool, hopefully you now understand a little better that this is how the steel was tempered.

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Originally published in Medium’s Culture Club collection