Bejeweled to School

In a journal entry I wrote in my second year of middle school, I launched a prosecutorial assault on the prohibition of jewelry in Chinese schools. My prefrontal cortex having presumably just begun its developmental journey, I opened the piece with the sentence: “Why is it considered a bad influence for students to wear jewelry?” Fifteen years on, I can no longer accept beginning a first paragraph with a question — no one should resort to such a lazy writing technique. I then advanced my central argument: jewelry is not an evil thing, and as long as I want to wear it, I have the right to do so. How naïve I was. Evidently I hadn’t considered that some jewelry might, in fact, be genuinely evil. Certain pieces could carry ancient curses, bringing misfortune upon everyone nearby. Others, rubbed and handled in just the right way, with something murmured that sounds like a dialect doing rap, might summon forces beyond nature and plunge an otherwise peaceful campus into carnage. Then there are pieces like the brooches from Japanese fashion label #FR2 — explicit, adorable, and precisely the kind of thing that would add more color to an already restless adolescence. From there I leapt straight to my conclusion — still within the first paragraph — condemning Chinese schools for restricting students from experiences they are perfectly capable of having. “School,” I wrote, “is a place that picks fights for no reason and loses them anyway.”

In the second paragraph, I attempted to illustrate my point through an imagined scenario, arguing that the jewelry ban was nothing more than a failure of school administration — that the “disrupts learning” theory and the “prevents showing off” theory were both logically unsound. I listed a handful of luxury brands from the limited inventory of my awareness at the time, though the literary execution was far too crude. A revised version might read as follows: If I showed up to school wearing a ring on every finger like Wang Leehom, would anything happen beyond my punches landing harder? If I wore a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace and a Cartier bracelet, what exactly would go wrong? Thinking it through, perhaps what they feared was that I’d remove a ring at recess and propose to the girl in the second row, or that during Chinese class, bored out of my mind, I’d unclip my necklace and use it to whip the student sitting in front of me — discipline, after all, requires a whip. Someone once said a man who wears a Rolex isn’t wearing it to tell the time — but during exams, I needed to know exactly how many minutes I had left to write their wretched essay.

I then raised a claim about equality: if adults are allowed to wear jewelry, teenagers should be too. It seems the younger me was groping toward some language for the importance of bodily autonomy, but hadn’t yet found my own voice. Probably because within a collectivist culture, you develop the illusion that your body doesn’t quite belong to you. What followed was an example meant to reinforce the argument — regrettably dispatched in a single sentence, exposing a weakness in my ability to tell a story. (What makes this alarming is that I was particularly fond of writing fiction at the time.) The story was this: in fifth grade, my mother took me to Singapore, where we stayed with a former classmate of hers. That woman’s daughter was eight years old and had worn a pair of small earrings since she was little. I remember looking at her and thinking she was enormously cute — radiating a quality I could only describe as exotic. An eight-year-old Singaporean girl wearing earrings is not a bad influence. Which means that whatever “bad influence” means to the people who define it has become something of a riddle.

Anticipating someone playing the “different national circumstances” card, I then went somewhat off-road for several hundred words, touching on knockoff manufacturers copying the iPod and iPhone, a Chinese carmaker whose front end looked like a Honda and whose rear end looked like a Toyota, and the broader failure of industrial design and the brain drain of creative talent abroad — all things I cared about deeply at the time. Yet if we shift the angle: restricting young people from expressing themselves through appearance is, at its core, an aesthetic form of discipline. Does it ultimately contribute to the deterioration of public taste and the erosion of creativity across an entire society?

After two blank lines, the younger me abruptly decided it was time to wrap up — for a child, the preceding six hundred words had already consumed an enormous amount of energy. In the vocabulary of the token era: the context window was full. What followed was baffling: like slamming the brakes on a highway and then doing a zero-to-sixty drag race, I suddenly pivoted into a critique of teachers cracking down on silicone wristbands. I devoted considerable space to explaining the wristband’s origins, mentioning Lance Armstrong, cancer, and charitable fundraising. “A wristband always represents a spirit,” I wrote. Which isn’t wrong — more than twenty years later, LeBron is still wearing one. Even if a teenager isn’t necessarily wearing it in solidarity with the fight against cancer, the gesture can be something much simpler: a desire to seem more athletic. Nothing could be healthier than that.

I ended the whole thing with an inside joke. The standard was low. But if, all these years later, the kind of individuality that teenagers naturally develop is still being flattened under the label of “bad influence” — then clearly, our education system is the punchline. Which also happens to be the title the fourteen-year-old me gave that essay: I Want to Know Why.