For a time in my first-grade classroom at Xingqiao Elementary School, in Chongqing, in the late nineteen-eighties, there was an initiative called “the Stars of Xingqiao.” One of the school’s co-principals had come up with the idea to instill in our seven-year-old hearts the ambition to be “better students, citizens, and stars.” So on a large white chart pasted to the back of the classroom wall, the teacher had printed our names in rows and, in each column along the top, an attribute such as punctuality, classroom manner, and orderliness, the successful embodiment of which earned a red star. Whoever got the most red stars at the end of the week would be publicly pronounced the brightest star of Xingqiao; the student with the fewest stars was punished with Friday-afternoon janitorial duties.
The exercise had unravelled slowly—and then spectacularly—by the time we got midway through the semester. The students hotly debated who actually deserved stars and who most emphatically did not. Because the home room with the most aggregate stars would receive a special treat at the end of the semester—not to mention a bonus for the teacher—it seemed to some of us that certain teachers exercised mass star inflation.
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