Most parents want the best for their kids, especially if they come from a difficult background themselves. But it’s all too easy to push kids too hard toward certain goals, particularly ones that have more to do with the parents’ desires than the kids’.
A former child prodigy in China says this is precisely the situation he was thrust into as a little boy — and he intends to spend the rest of his life making his parents pay for it.
Former child prodigy Zhang Xinyang blames his parents for why he’s jobless and has no intention of changing.
Twenty-eight-year-old Zhang Xinyang has had the kind of life that is unconventional, to say the least. As the youngest person to ever attend college in China, he seemed destined for greatness. But that’s not at all how his life turned out.
Now pushing 30, the man who skipped five grades to become a fifth grader at age six now holds no job other than the odd freelancing gig, lives off of his parents, says he prefers doing nothing and has no intentions of changing.
So what happened?
Under his parents’ tutelage, Xinyang entered college at 10 and got a Ph.D. at 16.
The son of a gifted man from very modest means, Xinyang was the kind of whiz kid we typically see in movies. By just two-and-a-half, he’d already learned how to read and write over 1,000 Chinese characters, learning them all in just three months.
He entered primary school at 4, and by 6 his father’s careful instruction at home resulted in him skipping five entire grades. He finished high school at the age of 9, and the following year at age 10 became the youngest person to ever attend college in China when he enrolled at Tianjin University of Technology and Education.
Graduate school came at 13, and by 16 — the age when most of us are just starting to consider where we might want to go to college in a few years — he was pursuing a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA).
But it’s at this point that this inspiring story began to take quite a hard turn. Shortly after enrolling at BUAA, Xinyang made headlines in China after he gave his parents an ultimatum that if they didn’t buy him an apartment in Beijing he would drop out.
That’s when the cracks began to appear in Xinyang’s life, which in some ways feel like they predicted the situation he now lives in.
Now unemployed and living off his parents, Xinyang blames them for pushing him too hard and imposing their dreams on him.
Xinyang’s demands that his parents buy him an apartment caused a media furor in China. Many were outraged at how supposedly spoiled and disrespectful he was and how much turmoil he was causing his parents.
But Xinyang’s comments at the time in response are very telling. “My parents gave birth to me and imposed their dream on me, hoping that one day I would achieve what they wanted to gain in the past,” he said. “They planned my life for me, trying to make me think that what they were leading me to do was what I wanted to do.”
That’s a story that will be instantly familiar to many “gifted” children or people whose parents pushed them too hard. You may have achieved big things as a child, but it often feels like none of it was your idea — or even that it was all against your will. That, combined with burnout, is surely part of why so many “gifted” or “prodigy” children do not, in fact, go on to do great things with their adult lives.
Many ‘prodigies’ and ‘gifted children’ go on to underachieve due to burnout, mental health issues, and other problems.
Much like children who are parentified — thrust into adult roles as kids they are not equipped to handle — when a child isn’t allowed to appropriately develop into a person instead of a human achievement machine, they often end up an adult saddled with the kind of emotional, social and mental health baggage that makes success elusive or even impossible.
It’s tempting to call Xinyang spoiled, but he seems to be a perfect example of the heartbreaking trajectory many gifted children follow. Now 28, jobless, financially reliant on his parents’ monthly allowance, and with no intentions of changing, Xinyang seems obviously — and perhaps rightfully — furious with his parents.
“They owe me this,” Xinyang told Chinese media, especially, he said because they lied to him about buying that Beijing apartment, which would be his nest egg by now if he owned it — and which, reading between the lines, he seems to view as a trade-off for having his childhood taken from him by his parents’ ambitions.
He also seems to believe that remaining jobless and isolated is his only path to happiness. “There is no financial freedom when working for someone else; that’s a joke,” he said. “At least now I don’t need to deal with the attitudes of others.”
That may sound like a nihilistic, petulant, antisocial attitude, and maybe it is. But he has it for a reason and for a man traumatized by having had no childhood, who likely never learned to make friends, who was thrust into an adult’s life at the age of 10 he never asked for or wanted — well, it’s not exactly surprising.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.
