“I want to be a pig farmer.”
I wasn’t sure at first whether he was pulling my leg or not. My second-year engineering students were discussing their career goals, and this was one guy’s response.
“You want to be a pig farmer? OK…” I replied, giving him a quizzical look.
“Yes. I want to go back to my hometown and raise big, fat, healthy pigs.”
“OK... Why?” I still wasn’t sure if he was being serious. We’ve officially started the new semester, although we haven’t had the winter break yet, so we have new classes and I don’t really know this student yet.
“The old generation of farmers is dying out,” he said seriously. “They’re going to need young people to take their place. China needs a lot of pork.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But you’re studying engineering. How will that help you in pig farming?”
“I think my bachelor’s in Civil and Environmental Engineering will help me, because I can build my own factory. And after I graduate I can study a Master’s in Agriculture.”
“OK. That’s a lot of theoretical knowledge. What about practical experience?” I asked.
He thought for a minute. “I can ask my grandfather.”
As I think about that conversation, I think about how the grandfather — who presumably is in the countryside somewhere keeping some pigs — probably worked hard for his children to go to university and away from the hardships of small-scale farming life. The parents probably then worked hard to climb into the urban middle classes and send their son to study a reliable money-making degree at an expensive, prestigious university. And now the son wants to take it back to the countryside.
There has been something of a movement in recent years of young people rejecting the fast-paced high-pressure “996”1 rat-race and sky-high property prices in the Tier 1 cities and choosing a lower-pressure lifestyle in smaller cities or in the countryside. When I lived in Beijing there were a few trendy eco-farms in the mountains outside the city, where urbanites could rent a plot to tend at weekends. At Longquan Temple, a Buddhist temple and monastery on the outskirts of Beijing, many of the monks are graduates of China’s top universities2. There’s a sense that chasing after more degrees, more possessions, more money, hasn’t really brought fulfilment.
I saw that in some of the responses others students gave too. In the same group as the aspiring pig farmer was a very articulate young man who said he wanted to become a spiritual healer and help people through yoga.
“That’s interesting,” I said. “Do you have a teacher?”
“No,” he said. “Not yet. I just follow some videos online. But I would really like to learn how to help people recover from inner hurts.”
Other students were less ambitious or less lofty-minded. “I want to get a job where I can sit in an office doing nothing all day and get money for it,” said one girl, half-joking. “Not a big company, just a small or medium-sized company. I want a house, not too big, near a river where I can just walk up and down and enjoy life.” She seems to me to exemplify a recent buzzword in China - 躺平 (tǎng píng), “lie flat”. It has similar connotations to “quiet quitting” and is a reaction to the rat-race culture.
Many students were planning to follow their expected path, though. One lad, overhearing the girl who just wants a not-too-big house in a quiet place, retorted with a loud “No! More money is better. You need more money to enjoy life.” He wants to get a job with a big company like Intel. Others are more interested in academia, in getting into research in robotics or AI or electric vehicles, and have already planned where they want to apply for graduate school and what they’ll need to do to get there. Others have no idea yet what they want to do, which is what you might expect for twenty-year-olds with another two years of their undgrad degree ahead of them.
Another lad was daydreaming about the path not taken. Part of their task was to read and summarise information from several different engineering internship ads. Ads for companies like Tesla and Lockheed Martin. On his page, I saw he had instead written “Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.”
“Is that your dream job?” I asked.
He nodded with a wistful smile. He plays piano, and would have loved to study music and learn to be a conductor, but felt a career in music was too difficult to achieve. He doesn’t mind studying engineering, and music is still a very important part of his life, but I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sad. I tried to encourage him by reminding him that many famous scientists and engineers were also musicians.
“Yes,” he said. “Einstein played the violin.”
Even engineering may not be a totally safe bet. A few days later, I was chatting with “John”, one of my former students, now in his final year of Mechanical Engineering. He’s been accepted for postgraduate study in the US, though he’s switching to Data Science for that. “It’s too hard to find a job in mechanical engineering,” he said. He told me the vast majority of his cohort were choosing further study rather than going straight into the workplace, and of those, he thought over 70% were going to study abroad, mostly in the US. I asked how his parents felt about him going abroad, and he said this had been the family plan since he was in primary school.3
John seems very happy to follow his parents’ plan, but I wonder how the parents of the would-be pig farmer will react if he really does try and go that way. China probably does need future farmers more than future engineers, and the government is actively trying to encourage more young people into farming. (Aside from food security, which is a concern, youth unemployment has risen so much in the last couple of years that the government stopped publishing statistics, until this month when they re-started using a different metric.) Farming is a noble vocation, and life as a well-funded middle-class farmer would probably be a far cry from the discomfort and hardship of an older generation. If it were me, I wouldn’t want to discourage him. But I can understand how for hard-working families who have invested everything in their only child, it can be challenging to see them turn away from the plan to become a farmer or a yoga teacher.
I hope each of them do find fulfilment, whatever their path. Perhaps I’ll be able to keep up with a few of them and hear, sometime in the future, how it’s all worked out for them.
To read about the ambitions and life paths of an earlier generation of Chinese students, check out Peter Hessler’s wonderful New Yorker article from a couple of years ago.
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“996” refers to working from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m., 6 days a week
It is normal in China for parents to be deeply involved in their childrens’ lives, including their choice of study, work, and spouse.
A lot of what your students say reminds me of what I hear people say in graduate school. Nobody wants to be rich nobody wants to be successful in the traditional sense. People want to feel fulfilled and comfortable. It feels hard to do that in the modern day I suppose.
I also want to note that the young man who wants to be a pig farmer and his parents potential aspirations reminded me of an old philosophical concept on identity. I can't remember the exact quote but it was something like "the son tries to remember what the father wants to forget" or something along those lines. It's supposed to be in relation to immigrants, race, and family tradition but I think it applies to family heritage and identity generally too. I felt it here in a sense!
Thanks for sharing!
This is so interesting! So much of what they say sounds like what I hear from the high school students I work with at our church, as well as my husband’s university students. And even as a millennial (I don’t feel old, but the high schoolers think I’m old 😅), I resonate with that desire to have work be the activity that enables you to support your family rather than being an end in itself.