An old classmate from university showed up at my place a few days ago to get glasses made for his kid. His daughter takes the high school entrance exam this year, two years behind mine. The whole business has him rubbing his temples — the homeroom teacher messages him daily, warning that his daughter's scores are hovering right around the cutoff line, and that without intervention she might not even clear the minimum for a public high school. He and his wife gritted their teeth and spent around thirty thousand yuan on one-on-one tutoring.
After the glasses were done, we grabbed a meal. Somewhere in the middle of it he sighed and said he envied me. Envied how little trouble my daughter gives me, how I never had to tear my hair out over her schooling, how few after-school classes we signed her up for, how she isn't half as rebellious as his kid. There was no performance in his face when he said it — just plain, tired resignation.
I held my teacup and thought for a moment. Then I said: you've been busy building a career, so of course you've had less to give on the kid front. With my daughter, I've been there the whole way — twelve-odd years of wind and rain, watching every step she took. I sat beside her while she did her homework; you were out drinking with other people. We both laughed at that. Then I added: honestly, though, I envy what you've accomplished. And I meant it, not as politeness.
He and his wife are both civil servants, and among our cohort they've done remarkably well for themselves — stable work, respectable income, the kind of standing that makes people take them seriously. Which of us, in our generation, doesn't want to amount to something? Who doesn't want to stand up at a reunion and say, with a straight back, "can't complain"? The trouble is, energy is a finite thing. While you're raising glasses across a dinner table, your kid's essay notebook is lying open on the desk with nobody reading it. While you're working late drafting reports, your kid's math problem sits there stuck, waiting for someone to nudge her through it. You land a project, you hit your KPI — and your kid is growing up the whole time. You just weren't in the room for it.
What I didn't say out loud was this: I envy your career, you envy my presence. But each of us made a choice, and each of us pays for it. I don't earn much these days; my shop isn't big; there's no social status worth boasting about. But I haven't missed a single day of my daughter's growing up. I was there the first time she fell off her bike. Mine was the signature on her first perfect score. The first time she cried over a fight with a classmate, I sat with her in the living room the whole evening. None of that is much to brag about. It's just solid ground under my feet.
On the drive home I kept thinking: there really is no standard answer to this question. Some people throw themselves into work, some put their time into their kids, and some try to grab both ends and end up worn out at both. Nobody's approach is wiser than anybody else's. We're all just working out the best solution we can with the limited resources we have — time, energy, patience. The one thing I'm sure of is that once you've chosen, you don't turn around. Choose the hustle, and don't lie awake at night feeling guilty about the kid. Choose the kid, and don't go green-eyed at reunions over what other people have built. You can't get sweetness from both ends of the sugarcane — everyone knows that. But when you're actually standing at the fork, it's still hard.
As my classmate put it, he can afford the thirty thousand for tutoring. What money can't buy back is the distance that has opened up in his daughter's heart. And me? Looking at where he's gotten, I sometimes wonder what things would look like if I'd pushed harder back then. But the thought comes and goes. Tonight's homework, after all, still hasn't been signed.