A translation based on a 2026 Jiangsu Gaokao essay by an anonymous examinee, reproduced here as a non-commercial translation exercise.
Copyright in the original remains with its respective rights holder(s). I format this note as a translation attempt, and some cultural footnotes. Note that this essay (and my commentary surrounding it) deals with death and personal losses.
PROMPT
Words are vehicles for thoughts and emotions, and windows onto changes in social life. Today, transformations in the world, in our times, and in history are unfolding in unprecedented forms and scales. The young are always renewing themselves. As you have grown, is there a word whose meaning has changed for you? That change bears the imprint of your own growth and holds a special significance for you…
What associations and reflections does the passage above inspire? Write an essay in response.
RESPONSE
The Price of the Shirt is Nine Pounds and Fifteen Pence
The word “death” has been, to me, distant and unfamiliar. I am one who has been fortunate enough not to have experienced death close to me. I often heard such and such classmate whose grandparent had passed, such and such friend’s pet had died. I’d often wondered, what is death? Biologically, death is the ceasing of function of brain cells. I was a thoroughly materialist student, and arrogantly held that as the truth. Perhaps death is when a life exhausts its energy.
When I reached that conclusion I was reading To Live, by Yu Hua. My Grandpa lay in a rocking chair behind me, rocking back and forth. Grandpa was eighty. He liked to wear a shirt yellowed over time, and buttoned it all the way to the top. I used to quip that, Grandpa looked less like a farmer ready to jump into the fields at any moment than a government official. Grandpa was hard of hearing, and would always respond with “what did you say?” I would be annoyed and ignore him.
Later on I learned that there was indeed a story about Grandpa and his shirt. At one time the people, responding to the call of the state, dug a new coal mine. The sounds of dynamite rumbled through the village, day till night, and Grandpa was busy with an iron pickaxe, day till night. Later the county office rewarded him with a white shirt and a pair of black leather shoes; the mine with a pair of ears that could only just hear the radio on full volume.
“Grandpa, the next time I come to see you will have to be after the gaokao!” I raised my voice. Grandpa nodded with a smile — I was unsure whether he had heard me.
That was how things should be. I would return to the city, study day till night facing the exam countdown on the wall, and I would finish my gaokao, returning to the countryside and bringing a pack of Nanjing cigarettes for the old man. He had always complained the county stores’ cigarettes were inferior, “not strong”.
Many years from now, I will surely still remember vividly, the night before the most important examination in my life, and when I worked hard to briefly commune with Hesse, Marx, and Borges, I answered a video call from Grandpa. On the other end, he still wore that old shirt, and a hearing aid. The radio behind him was blaring at full volume.
Grandpa said something I couldn’t make out. The radio was so loud and annoying. Grandpa continued with “do well in the exam…”, “be a successful person”, and Grandma was wiping away tears beside him. I stood there, indifferent, and mildly confused why things were like that. Grandpa has used the same words to encourage me since the school year began, and I interrupted with an impatient “I know!”
When the call ended, father was standing behind me. He patted my shoulder, and said he was heading to the countryside — mother would drop me off at the exam — and he told me to do well.
Yes. Dad was returning to the countryside, because grandpa just said in the call, that he will soon die.
He will soon die.
What a strange phrase, something I’d never heard of in the first eighteen years of my life. What kind of person does it take to foresee one’s own death, and proceed to say that with such composure? My sorrow came rushing in, and felt my tears strike my hand. Whether father was also crying, I did not know; I couldn’t see through my tears. I only recall him later explaining, that in his advanced age, and in the absence of any established medical condition, the old man felt something was off, and made a call. I understand. At eighty-seven, this was not what one would call an untimely death.
I could not help but also recall a news article I read years ago, where a mother had told her son the day before his gaokao she would be going in for a brain surgery. The internet comments were almost uniformly critical — how can one distract the child from the exam?
How can one distract the child from the exam? At that moment, I became incredibly grateful to my family, who refused to yield to the logic of utility, and let me see my grandpa for the last time, in his shirt, with a smile.
Gaokao lasts three days. Couldn’t Grandpa have waited three days for me? Maybe not, because death is when a person, under the established rules, loses to time.
As I put down my pen, I understand death; I understand that Grandpa’s shirt was a reward from the county, and that the price of my shirt is nine pounds and fifteen pence.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
“The price of the shirt is nine pounds and fifteen pence” was a famous phrase that once appeared in the listening section of a gaokao English exam years ago. It somehow reached meme status, and has since been used by generations of Chinese students as shorthand for the occasion. I think the author uses it here not only to refer to the examination they were going through, but also to a personal transition: the gaokao shifts from being a long-standing focus and target to becoming a bygone era of their life.
The language is reserved and to the point, yet it resonates strongly with the reader, because all of us—sooner or later, willingly or unsuspectingly—have to think about and face death.
I have swiftly included this essay in my translation collection because it also struck a personal chord. Nothing as dramatic, of course. My own grandpa passed away earlier this year, not long before a manuscript of mine could reach the arXiv. When going through his collected photographs, Father sent me a picture of Grandpa taken when he was around my current age. I know remarkably little about what his life was like then, just as he could not have known that I would come into being later in his life.
I once had a dream that I was talking to him about my galaxy clusters.
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