The Grid and Its Prisoners

“I’m exhausted,” Wem told me.

To me, Wem should be a carefree kid. She keeps several birds, and there’s even a TV in her bedroom. When she’s not at school, she can lie in bed watching Gintama and Jujutsu Kaisen. When I first met Wem, she was still in sixth grade — she was into Genshin Impact, would boot it up on her slightly battered iPhone 8, and walk me through how the game worked. That was barely any time ago. Now she’s in middle school. Middle school was its own kind of ordeal for me, and I imagine it’s the same for Wem — ever since she started, her mood has rarely been anything better than grim.

“Our Chinese teacher is out of her mind,” she complained over chat.

Homework until ten, eleven at night. And the Chinese teacher still wants them to turn in two thousand characters of handwriting practice by the end of the month.

Handwriting practice. My first thought: what era do these people think we’re living in?

Around the same time, an app called Typeless started going viral. Unlike conventional voice-to-text, it uses AI recognition and auto-editing to filter out all the ums and uhs, the repetitions, the pauses — cleaning speech up into fluent written text, with automatic formatting, and support for mixing English, Chinese, and Japanese mid-sentence. The concept isn’t new. A similar product, Wispr Flow, has already raised over eighty million dollars. Domestic players like Zhipu AI’s keyboard and ByteDance’s Doubao input method are following suit. Typing, however you look at it, seems to be on its way out.

“Typing’s practically obsolete already — what’s the point of handwriting?” I said to Wem.

And for most people born after 2000, typing itself is already a stretch. They grew up with two thumbs on a touchscreen. Touch-typing on a physical keyboard is basically a superpower to them.

I think back to university, where I barely used a pen at all. If a professor said something worth keeping, I’d just point my phone at the projector and take a photo. Every essay, every assignment, was typed out word by word on a laptop. By finals, most professors would let you copy their hideously ugly PowerPoints directly off a USB drive. Most of the time, if you came to our dorm asking to borrow a pen, you’d leave empty-handed.

Someone will say this is an aggressively utilitarian way of looking at things. But what they call hard-pen calligraphy — an aesthetic downgrade born of compromise with the wrong tool — is itself the more thorough form of utilitarianism, one that guts Chinese calligraphy of everything that makes it alive. The soul of calligraphy lies in a classical saying: only the soft brush gives birth to the strange and wondrous. The brush’s flexible, yielding tip can press and lift, pause and thrust, producing infinite variation in a single line. Calligraphy is a practice of self-cultivation, a medium for feeling. To write is to express the self. But handwriting practice done with a 0.5mm gel pen exists purely to satisfy an assignment. You pick up the pen in resignation; what gets expressed is a teenager’s exhausted contempt for repetitive labor. This isn’t passing down calligraphy. This is burning through children under calligraphy’s name.

Critics of mandatory handwriting practice have long pointed to the same things: the false claim to cultural inheritance, the tone-deaf irrelevance in a digital age. But we’re not even in a digital age anymore — we’ve entered the age of agents. The age of tokens. AI can produce poetry, fiction, news copy, even academic papers in the time it takes to snap your fingers, while kids in school are being forced to practice handwriting, recite classical memorials, and write character analyses of writers who have been dead for decades. Nobody hates the humanities because they’re the humanities. What people hate is the humanities standing still, recycling the same tired formulas.

In my first year of university, I wrote this: I don’t really understand Chinese class. What I hear is always literature’s past. I can’t see literature’s future. If I can’t see the future, the class is meaningless.

Recently, while tidying my room, I found a notebook from my first year of high school. The last dozen or so pages — I had filled them with tens of thousands of words of a novel. The handwriting is terrible. Much of it I can no longer decipher. But I can tell one thing from reading between those illegible lines: my thinking was completely fluid. Fluid in a way that makes me a little envious of my younger self. I’m certain that if I had taken care to make every character look neat, that rhythm couldn’t have existed.

That’s the cost of handwriting practice: it sacrifices the speed and freedom of thought. It asks you to slow down, to line yourself up with a grid that doesn’t actually exist. It shifts your attention from what you want to say to how it’s going to look. For a mind that’s still growing, that’s an expensive trade-off. For any given cervical spine, it’s also doing real damage.

“Honestly, it’s only like sixty characters a day — easy enough to fake your way through.”

I almost said this to Wem. I thought about it, then didn’t.

I know those two thousand characters take up a lot more than time.