Final term at Oxford

Truth-seeking

To summarise the whole degree, it’s about truth-seeking. Mathematics is perhaps the closest to absoloute truth that is accumulative and irretractable. Obviously one can never truly escape from subjectivity such as a matter of taste, and perhaps we have been excessively reducing mathematics to symbol manipulation or pure logic, yet that criticism can be applied to really all subjects, and even if mathematics is particularly prone to that disease, I digress that one of the most significant appeals of mathematics is indeed its relative objectivity and accumulative nature compared to so many others.

At the same time, having been interacting with so many ambassadors, presidents and professors across a dizzying spectrum of studies has made me question whether mathematics deserve my exclusive focus.

And yet, it’s painfully clear that doing any meaningful work requires focus. This worries me. Tolstoy wrote:

Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of society, they saw everything upside down, and all they did for the common good turned out to be useless and foolish”.

In a way, that’s what I’ve come away with from all those talks—a general grasp of the general course of events.

Personally, I blame the Hong Kong secondary school educational system for never really teaching me anything and thus I had to specialise into something without looking sufficiently at the grass on the other side. Yet one has always been able to lob criticisms like this at educational institutions. Mihajlo Pupin over 100 years ago wrote:

Long before the end of the academic year, I finished Routh’s preliminary tripos course in dynamics and much of the auxiliary mathematics demanded by it, and became quite skilled in solving dynamical problems. I had much difficulty in keeping pace with Routh’s classes, but I succeeded, and Niven was pleased. But I was not pleased; I did not think that I had found there what I had expected to find. In the course of time I discovered that I was not alone in my opinion; many Cambridge men failed to find in tripos drills the stimulating elements of that scientific spirit which leads to original research. I was a goose which groped around in a fog when I came to Cambridge; but, if I had come from an English college as a promising tripos candidate, with my work cut out for me by my superiors and in accordance with old customs and traditions of Cambridge, I should not have discovered that there was in Cambridge at that time an epoch-making movement, the significance of which cannot be overestimated. I shall return to this point later.

This tension is perhaps best encapsulated by the following (translated) passage by Wang Huning:

A student came to see me in the evening, saying they wanted to “have a talk.” Nowadays, students have some rather unusual ideas. In this ever-changing society and with the increasingly loose social structure, students are entirely on their own when it comes to choosing their path in life. Many of them, as soon as they leave high school, are faced with a series of major life decisions. In the past, parents and teachers were the ones in charge. But now, with changes in culture and society, it’s up to the students themselves to decide.

Indeed, many students are confused and don’t know how to face a world full of choices and contradictions. Quite a few of them miss out on important development opportunities simply because they can’t make a choice, while others lose out because they make choices too early. Truly, sometimes making a choice isn’t good, and not making one isn’t good either. Sometimes it’s better to choose, and sometimes it’s better not to. Asking a young person to make such decisions really isn’t easy.

Indeed perhaps what is the most intimidating is the diversity of the choices, Thomas Paine wrote

I believe I should never have been known in the world as an author on any subject whatever, had it not been for the affairs of America.

That logic applies to nearly every institution and influence that shaped me. I owe a debt to them all. Perhaps that debt implies a moral obligation: to give something back. I could devote my life to China, to Hong Kong, to my alma maters, the hospitals that cared for me—the list goes on.

And speaking of that logic, there’s always this tension between leaving and staying when it comes to social mobility. More often than not, upward mobility means permanently moving away from the (relatively) deprived areas one comes from. The rhetoric often centers on the appealing idea of leaving temporarily to gain education or resources, with the ultimate goal of returning to uplift the community you came from. Yet fundamentally the narrative persists largely because it sounds good. There’s no inherent reason why that must necessarily be the best course of action. In fact, it is entirely possible that to fulfil one’s greatest potential - or moral obligation - might mean staying among the “elite” and leaving behind the place you came from.

In some ways, I’m leaving this degree more confused than when I began—and that’s something I did not expect.

Telling the tale

How should I tell the tale of having studied here? While I have touched on this a few years ago, reading Joseph Torigian @ Foreign Affairs has made my thoughts even more acute:

Even Xi Jinping has admitted that the torment he endured as a young person led to doubts about the state and the party. Indeed, he was convinced that his ordeal was worse than what many others suffered during the Cultural Revolution, since he was the son of a leader who had been purged earlier than most senior revolutionaries. Nevertheless, he has spoken with great pride of the toughness these horrific experiences inculcated in him. And he has asserted that his ideals and convictions are unshakable precisely because he went through a period of confusion before recognizing that only the party’s path was the right one.

Instead of turning him away from the party, these experiences seem to have led Xi to subscribe to a cause for which his father suffered so much and to seek to regain pride and legacy for a family that had been humiliated so many times. With that in mind, he followed his father into politics. But will future generations feel the same way as their parents? Xi believes that China’s Western adversaries want to instigate young people today to demand radical political change. To combat this danger, Xi hopes to inspire China’s youth with a mission of national rejuvenation, of sacrifice, of “eating bitterness” for the greater good.

Some will inevitably be proud to accept that task. But others may hear Xi Jinping’s call not as a rallying cry but as a weary echo of the past. Many young Chinese people might be more interested in living less ardent lives than what Xi demands of them. The Xi family story raises questions about just how these young people can be won over. A message of suffering and struggle can indeed be meaningful for some—but for others, it may only lead to alienation.

Every few years my secondary school sends 1-2 students to Oxford. I’ve been lucky to learn from those who came before me—people who helped guide me through my time here and retold their struggles under academic pressure or COVID. Thanks to their guidance, I felt I had the chance—and the responsibility—to live an even fuller life here than they could, and to pass on those lessons so future students can do the same.

Yet as my tale ends and I begin retelling it to generations to come, it’s irresitable to also present my experiences as a struggle. The truth is, even if Oxford somehow isn’t academically challenging to some, there’s almost always something else—finding friends, fitting in, or just the process of growing up—that makes it tough. Leaving that out wouldn’t just be dishonest—it’d make the reality hit even harder. While I believe these trials and tribulations are what shape our deepest convictions—just as confusion often precedes clarity—I still wonder: to those who I recommend the Oxford experience, will I win them over or simply alienate them?

Reading

On a less serious note, I’ve read around 4 times as much as I did in previous years, and I can recount a few but significant conversations in which if I read as much the conversation would’ve been far more dull and one-sided and my conversant would’ve come away with a far lower opinion of me.

This interest in reading was very much driven by the bookworms around me who I admired. Perhaps even if one could not choose the five people you surround with, you can choose which five people you admire and imitate.

Gallery

Four years of Life@Oxford …