“So you've decided to take next year off?” Professor Wolf asked me.

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

“Become a barber.”

“I thought that required considerable skill.”

“I can begin as a shampoo boy.”

Professor Wolf did not appear to understand the term, so I explained. A shampoo boy was an apprentice, but first he had to wash customers' hair and ask, “Is the water too hot?” and “Would you like the premium shampoo?” A low-grade service industry like America's would never offer service so complete.

The professor said good, he supported me. Naturally, I knew he would. Hearing him say it merely gave me more confidence. I also knew Professor Wolf was an entirely different kind of person. He taught my history of Christianity class. Apart from marriage, he was meticulous in everything, as though his life had been arranged in advance. He studied at Stanford from undergraduate through doctorate, came to Pomona to teach immediately after graduating, and this year was his thirtieth. He said he intended to teach here until he died.

“But why a barber?” he asked.

I said it did not necessarily have to be a barber. I wanted to farm in autumn, cut hair in winter, then perhaps learn cooking or carry bricks in spring. A barber, I said, because barbering jobs were easy to find. They lacked people. And barbers were young and lost.

Actually, I said, working in a salon was good. Relatively leisurely, not so exhausting. Though sometimes fat men with tattoos came to smash the shop, or women wrapped in red bath towels cursed in the street. Once you entered the rivers and lakes, you inevitably became entangled in the grievances of gangs.

Professor Wolf sipped his coffee. That sounded good too, he said. At worst, I would go to prison and acquire another new experience. That would also be precious.

Once I become a barber, I said, you must visit me in China. Haircuts are cheap there: one dollar a head. Unimaginable here.

The professor said he would gladly make the trip for a haircut, provided he was not my experimental subject.

Though, I said, you may not make it. I mean to stop and go, northbound all the way. You may not find me.

I decided to leave college for a year last winter. The decision came as a flash but was not a whim. I had grown tired of life in the ivory tower. I wanted to return to China and become a barber, dye my hair blue in the shampoo-cut-blow-dry style, make every strand stand upright. When there were no customers, I would smoke with Little Hei outside the shop and discuss his ideals and the woman of his dreams.

“I know this is ridiculous,” I told Professor Seery. “It resembles a self-imposed victim mentality. You presume in advance that someone belongs to a disadvantaged group, sympathize from a condescending vantage point, then perhaps end up reinforcing a difference that never existed.

“Even so, I still believe this narrative is absent but necessary in China today. The few well-known accounts all come from foreigners, and many carry an uncomfortable compassion for the suffering world. I want to offer another narrative.”

Professor Seery was my adviser, a professor of politics. Unlike Wolf, he loved to laugh, and when he did, it ignored every convention. In truth, faced with him, I had no need to answer so comprehensively and ambiguously. But that was me: forever taking the middle road, always trying to smooth things over, criticizing myself before doing anything, becoming a frog at the bottom of a well so that when criticism came afterward, I could cover my ears and steal the bell.

Professor Seery's answer was unexpectedly simple. “I think it is excellent. Go do it!”

When he was an undergraduate at Amherst, he said, a classmate had also taken his junior year off. During that year, the classmate became a hobo—something like a homeless migrant worker—jumped trains everywhere, then wrote a book. Afterward, every so often, the classmate went to experience the life of a disadvantaged group. At fifty, he even spent a year in prison. His life was exceptionally colorful.

He also mentioned a student from ten years earlier who spent a year after sophomore year running for mayor of Portland and came astonishingly close to winning.

Students today, he said, were always missing something. When he sat on the admissions committee, he met more and more “perfect students”: perfect grades, perfect research backgrounds. But ask, “For whom do you study? What do you study? What is study for?” and they knew nothing. You eat three meals a day for four years beneath the dining hall's mural of Prometheus, he said, and never once ask yourselves these questions?

“Don't romanticize it. I don't approve,” Dad told me. “You'll change your mind. We won't discuss it again.”

To him, I was making trouble, sick of studying. You still need graduate school and a doctorate, he said. There are so many winter and summer holidays in between. Aren't they enough for your experiences?

But to me, this was absolutely not so simple as trying an experience. It was urgent. I was not tired of learning. Quite the opposite: I cherished my time studying at Pomona so much that when texts no longer brought the thrill of sudden enlightenment, I felt I was wasting my life. Certainly, I could continue this way: graduate with decent grades, attend a good university for graduate school, then, if I wanted money and a respectable life, go to law school. But what meaning would such an orderly life have for me? Was the core of a liberal-arts education to make me a conventionally successful person, a guardian of order, deceiving himself generation after generation?

Unfortunately, this was precisely the trend in education: worship success, worship winners, avoid possible failure and destitution like a contagion. The finest universities were filled with the most outstanding and mediocre people. In one sense, they were the group who needed success least of all. Their families were already sufficiently privileged; they themselves were beyond reproach. Yet a single phrase—“forced by reality”—turned every ideal and meaning into a nostalgic thought posted on WeChat Moments. Rather than constructing a staircase toward intellectual life, education had become a moat around privilege.

My leave, I told Dad, was not romanticization but a process of deromanticizing. Precisely because I had experienced setbacks, I understood how greatly a person's experience affected reading, learning, and living. We both ought to understand that very well.

I offered John Stuart Mill as an example. He collapsed at twenty and later became a great thinker, didn't he? And Liu Bei was still dependent upon others at forty. So there was nothing wrong with being confused while young. After thinking for so long, I said, I still did not know what kind of person I would become. Only one thing was clear: I did not want to become someone in a hurry to succeed, someone who sneered at failures.

“Fine. Go make your way in the world,” he finally conceded. “I don't want yours to be a successful life either. I only hope it can be a happy one.”

I was tremendously happy. Nothing is more precious than a family's blessing. I thought of little Billy's father in Billy Elliot, a miner who, upon finally discovering his son's genius for dance, wept uncontrollably. During the miners' strike, bearing abuse and shame, he went down into the mine to earn Billy's fare to ballet school. Making one's family pay for an ideal is selfish. I had no way to repay them. I could only be grateful.

“Hello, Morris. My hair has gone white. Are you free to cut it off this afternoon?”

Every time I entered Professor Erikson's office, he asked me this. He was my philosophy professor and had taught here for fifty years. Ever since I told him about my plan to become a barber, he repeated the not particularly funny opening. At all other times, naturally, he was extremely serious. The distance between the ivory tower and life saddened him. But facts were facts, he said. Scholarship was scholarship. Life was life. Most of the time they appeared indifferent to each other.

He, too, asked why it had to be a barber. Were there no other professions that could involve me in the feuds of the rivers and lakes?

I said it probably had something to do with memory. Unlike philosophy, it had no universality and varied from person to person. Barbers were especially important to me. I was curious about them because, in my memory, they were young and conflicted. Of course, it did not necessarily need to be barbering. It could be cooking, farming, domestic work, even selling performing bears from an overpass.

In truth, I was not clear about my choice. Perhaps it came from a Kantian pure motivation, or unknowingly agreed with Hegel, the vast spirit of history lying behind the choice… Then I began to stammer. Searching for a noble excuse made me feel guilty. In fact, I had no definite rationale. I simply wanted to do it. Like desire, it was uncontrollable and made me impatient.

Would I regret the choice? Would it become a blank year in my life? I often felt uneasy. But I knew that I did not want to resemble Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, wasting seven years inside an intellectual prison. In the sanatorium on the mountain, they discussed life and death every day, illness and health, vanished humanism and the extreme ideologies beginning to stir. Only after seven years did Hans Castorp discover that he had forgotten the taste of the world.

I also imagined myself on a roaring motorcycle, northbound like Peter Fonda. Trying different lives in different cities, reconsidering my past among crowds. From Shenzhen to Harbin. Perhaps falling in love with Little Red, girlfriend of the salon's big brother, or meeting a fascinating swindler on a train. Finally, when the destination remained infinitely far and I was besieged on every side, drinking a bottle of expired beer.

In the end, a fool talking of dreams is still better than foolish talk inside a dream.