Living in a Tree

"Living in a Tree" is the title name from a Chinese writing question in Zhejiang Province's National College Entrance Examination paper in the year of 2020. It became popular because of an essay written by a high school student. The content of the essay included a lot of rarely-used Chinese characters and quotes by famous people. The grading team gave such an essay the highest score, 60/60, even though the first grader gave it a 39/60, and the second and third graders gave it 55/60.

A journal editing group hosted by Zhejiang International Studies University published that essay along with a comment from the leader of the grading team, Chen Jianxin, through their official WeChat account on August 2, 2020, but the WeChat post was soon being deleted.

Fan Yiying of Sixth Tone wrote that the contents included "abstruse European philosophy, from Nietzsche and MacIntyre to Heidegger and Wittgenstein".

When users on social media in that country learned about the paper, according to Fan, the conversation became "heated". After the publication the Zhejiang Education Examinations Authority began investigating one of the graders for having a conflict of interest in also writing test preparation guides.

Content
"All practical traditions have collapsed". Modern society has taken the Heidegger's phrase as its guiding principle. Expectations, perpetuated by family and social traditions, are losing their relevance. But in the face of the seemingly endless sky of the future, I think it is better to live the life of Calvino's "the baron in the trees" than to soar prematurely into prosperity.

--The beginning of this article 现代社会以海德格尔的一句“一切实践传统都已经瓦解完了”为嚆矢. 滥觞于家庭与社会传统的期望正失去它们的借鉴意义. 但面对看似无垠的未来天空，我想循卡尔维诺“树上的男爵”的生活好过过早地振翮.