When asked what some of my red flags were, Joon told my new friend, “Linh went to this insane high school and he won’t shut up about it.” We laughed it off because my friend already had an inkling of how my high school were quote unquote insane, and it was one of the few times Joon diagnosed me correctly–that high school was a very important part of my pre-collegiate personal development, whose influence on the way I think right now is overbearing.

My high school education is a topic that I am so far away from fully forgetting. It is a lifestyle, a generational affliction, that has suffused the condition of the modern Vietnamese youngster already so obsessed with academic prestige. I tell people that I am very grateful that vestiges of high school life were completely removed from my college experience, because if there were any semblance of Hanoi-Amsterdam at Yale I would have recoiled into a soullessly self-sabotaging persona that forced me to select what memories to preserve. The reality is that I could barely escape the scope of Hanoi-Amsterdam alumni network. Most Vietnamese Yalies were from my high school. Most of non-Yale people I know in New York or the Bay Area are from my high school. Every time I catch up with old friends is like binging a season of the Real Housewives franchise for students from Hanoi-Amsterdam, or Ams for short. There is a thread of connection that invariably bound us together, much as I sought to sidestep it.

Truth be told, I think I would have been strictly worse off without ever attending this high school. Ams has always been heralded as a pioneer of educational excellence, its student body united by a shared spirit of uber-competitiveness that allowed them to get in in the first place. Some are amazing test-takers; many come from the most powerful families in Vietnam. Most of the Amsers who chose to attend this public magnet school did so because of its genuine desire to be the best in every aspect. It is by far the school with the most student clubs: productions for school festivals or talent shows are organized entirely by students and fundraised from external corporate partnerships. The school frequently contributes to the Vietnam teams at international olympiads, and sends students to the best colleges around the world way more than any other peer institutions. Such a sense of invincibility is embedded in the school’s design.

How exactly did I benefit from this environment? I think the social environment played a major role, as well as some pedagogical differences. As I also attended the middle school extension of the high school (you do not gain automatic admission in high school, but you do share the teaching faculty), the people I befriended in the seven-year journey at 1 Hoang Minh Giam St all had a baseline level of book-smartness. Your school performance is encoded in your academic progression, not just through your GPA, but also from checkpoint quality exams that might put you in a lower homeroom class if you do not score high enough. Before 8th and 11th grades all the students have to take one such exam; in 9th grade and 11-12th grade, you have to take a series of exams (between 3-5 for my major) to see if you qualify for the school’s team to go compete in regional, national, and international competitions. Your scores are posted in a table printout on the bulletin: there is always a leaderboard, and you are told since day one to get to the top of it. Students learn that this competitiveness is their fuel, both to improve themselves but also to determine who they are and what they are best at.

When I entered the middle school, I was the fourth overall highest scorer. I was placed in the A class (from A to E), which trended to include better scorers but was not exclusive to the top quintile. I enjoyed math in elementary school and the kind of problems that were asked in our entrance exams: there were some light proofs that would appear on the first problem set of a college number theory course. After I got in, things moved fast. My new classmates were starting extra school with college math teachers that were both unaffordable and hard to contact. They learned proofs by induction and combinatorics; the most competitive students in my 7th grade had to start memorizing lemmas and inequalities. My dad would confront my inability to be on par with my friends on their math capabilities. I instead grew a visceral reaction to competition-type math, as now the entirety of its fun had been replaced by the onus of how extra schools would belabor me. I was not that good at English yet, and only decided to hard pivot after I barely made it into the A class again after the competency checkpoint reshuffling. I felt like I was still good at math, but would hate every second of doing math.

High school was a bit different, now that I had got into the English class. The English 1 class of Hanoi-Amsterdam always has the highest minimum score required, is the most competitive to get in by number of students registered, and performs in the top 3 in the national round of competitions. They always make up 90% of the Hanoi team, and wins between a quarter to half of the first prizes. Yet the irony is that the team is the most lax when it comes to preparation. If the Chemistry team had to study upward of 10 hours every day for two months of preparation, the English team meets for two hours daily at most, and half of the students do not even show up to the two-hour classes. If you show up to a random English 1 class in the middle of the day, you are more likely to see people study for the SAT than pay attention to the blackboard–yet they still have the highest GPAs in the school. High school was an academic heaven, in the sense that once you get in, you spend most times studying by yourself and exploring your own interests. Perhaps that is why so many of my classmates are now enrolled in PhD programs, from computer science to astrophysics to plant biology.

For our major, besides doing more English competitions that became redundant quickly, we were given the opportunity to study actual English literature. In the second semester of 10th grade, we wrote about Virginia Woolf using the theory of the duality of time by Henri Bergson, as well as discussed frameworks of queerness in Trumpet (I even quoted Butler). We spent 11th grade musing about the main ideals of Western philosophical thought from Aristotle to Nietzsche. This sort of writing simply does not exist elsewhere in public schools in Vietnam, and was perhaps only possible among a group of students that became more comfortable speaking English than Vietnamese to each other at some point in high school.

The competitive spirit bled out into other facets of student life, especially for such a group of ambitious over-achievers that are told that people in the previous English 1 class were getting into Ivies in batches. I was not just doing Model UN: I was talking to high school alumni who had been working at UNICEF Vietnam and participating in volunteering opportunities. My classmates were plastered over Hanoi building food rescue networks, hosting photography exhibitions, or offering free city tour guides to backpackers. People were trying to outdo each other: in their own way, but also constantly on the hunt for more prestigious opportunities in and outside of school. To get into any projects even as a team member, you have to fill out a form that asks quirky college-application-type questions, conduct an interview, and sometimes go through a “job trial” third round. People then quickly form cliques; club presidency is always a topic of hot gossip, as your work portfolio is considered alongside your personality and community vision. From what I have heard of boarding schools, this is not so different. Perhaps that was why Phillips Exeter Academy visited my school in 2014 and socialized with the 11 English 1 class of that year.

Let me be clear: these phenomena nothing short of insanity are not the norm in Vietnam. Even in the gifted system, which represents no more than 0.1% of all Vietnamese youths, the competitive academic teams and customized curricula and larger-than-life activities are only a thing for a 5% subgroup of that population. I often think about how skewed my perception of reality is because of my involvement in this system. It allowed me to be completely unfazed by the reality of competitive student clubs at my alma mater while so many others rightfully took issue with it. It led me to assume that math proofs are something you learn starting in 6th grade, even though you might never be that good at it. Both Ams and Yale let me believe that six-figure starting salaries are trivial, given how many people from my high school who were not the most academically competitive are at FAANG and Bulge Brackets companies.

I don’t agree with the pedagogical underwritings of my high school. There is a constant need to stratify, either with actual test results that rank people’s individual scores by units of 0.01, or thankless applications that are reviewed by people who barely know more than you do in the grand scheme of things. I think it is unfortunate that I became so inured to being evaluated by others, that I became so used to dry heaving before sitting three-hour exams in which I was going to do well anyways. I have barely met anyone who is not already smart, but normal testing metrics are no longer applicably useful in my classes. Once the previous generation has mastered a level of proficiency, whether it is IELTS scores, how early you start preparing for the SAT, or even self-registering for multiple AP exams in other Southeast Asian countries, it is the latter generation’s duty to exceed it, even though any differences are marginal. Behind the glamor of being the most competitive class in the most competitive school is this acute awareness that our accomplishments are not really that impressive. For more than a decade now, the English class slogan has been “We are not that talented up close.”

Recently my friend posted a note on his Instagram story about the nature of this prodigy-grooming has left the so-called “academic one percent” in an quarter-life existential void that now calls for us to heal ourselves and our inner child. He said we were so obsessed with an inability to be complacent–which I do agree with–and that we should enjoy our failures–which I don’t necessarily disagree with, but just find it funny. I find it funny because none of us has had real failures, especially the people within his friend group who had had at least one parent dedicated full-time to every exam their child was taking to qualify for the next step of the competition. I find it funny that he wanted us to become part of the flow, even though the flow might be raising the second round of funding for a $3M Scandinavian stealth startup on web3-based matchmaking (I just made this up). I find it funny that the need to excel above ourselves is so fundamentally imprinted in how our minds were operationalized that, after surviving the system (for some, thriving in it for others), our conclusions are to forgive our pasts for being so ravenous towards success. I, too, am guilty of this; in fact, I might consider myself one of the system’s worst offenders. But it is important to come to terms with the reality that we have enjoyed unconscionable privileges from Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted. Had we not all graduated from elite universities across the world and acquired the fanciest of jobs of the status quo, we would have had life-long regrets for not attending our high school.

In all honesty, I don’t know if the answer is to abolish the system, to abolish the school, or to actually further harness its meritocracy across other institutions in Vietnam. I think it is not a bad idea that so many youths were told to do well in school and work towards a level of knowledge that is somewhat achieveable without money or family background. I thank the school for what it has allowed me to do, all unimaginable even in my parents’ generation. But I struggle to compromise with the fact that trauma was necessary for me to grow. My memories of Ams are all blurred together; the external pressures are endless and there is hardly time to reflect. In one of the first few FroCo group sessions, I told everyone that I never thought I would be able to overcome my jadedness, the emotional baggage that I had trudged with on my way to college, a place that I once again might have not ended up in had I not been a good student at Ams. I found new company who knew nothing of my past in an environment that empowered me to take on identities I was never courageous enough to embrace. And so I offer no solution. Perhaps the best I can do is accept the part that it plays within the trajectory of my life, using the opportunities that I now have to do a hard reset and inquire myself about the other possibilities I want to become in this world.