I was most locked in during the summer of 2014. It was my eighth grade; my family was preoccupied with moving to our new house, but I was not involved in the process. I had a special excuse: I needed to focus on preparing myself for the different forms of academic competitions the upcoming academic year. Even if I were not to be selected, I still needed to get into a good high school, and the preparation journeys for the two goals are collinear.

I knew I had to work harder than I was at that time since the beginning of the summer. At some point I had committed myself to the English major, whose training did not overlap with any other field. My training had been exclusive to taking classes at Roadmap, an extra class following the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages that I was permanently in second place. In contrast, my friends were embroiled in specific extra classes infamous for their great placements into top high schools in Hanoi. Some were hiring tutors who had been partially designing the tests. I was good at English, but good only for a math-focused class. Among those not focused on English, I had placed first; including those in English, I was closer to rank 30. Not to mention, there was competition from other middle schools in the city, though ours had a higher density of highly competitive, highly intelligent overachievers.

If you bear with me and believe in the primacy of these exams as I did, and you also have some competitive blood yourself, then you will agree with me that something had to change. I could join these classes (which I ended up doing), but that would only level the learning rate; I needed to accelerate beyond others to catch up. At the same time, there was not a clear strategy as to how exactly I could accelerate. There is an art to constructing better sentences or reading faster, but those skills had diminished in importance in how the tests were designed. If I were to guess, harder reading or listening tasks involved a significantly higher level of comprehension that was beyond what was expected of ninth-graders, so focusing too much on passage-level comprehension might lead to lower differentiability between students. Instead, the exams involved a lot more of word use in isolated contexts, and did away with speaking completely for my cohort.

Faced with this dual pressure of doing well for myself and doing better than others, I took to the Internet as my best friend. People in my year were not exactly hiding studying materials from each other (well, that is another story), but it was not clear what I could have done beyond paying a teacher with purported backdoor access to advanced preparation materials. As my father would say, “Just read more books,” I tried to locate what kind of books I could have studied to score better. It is important to note that it was not simply about having a better command of English, though that certainly helped. It was about knowing the collocations that most frequently showed up in the kind of tests that we would take, so as to have an educated guess about the right answer. It was a game of chances. If the multiple-choice questions had four options, you could either know exactly what was right, giving your odds 100% to get that question assuredly correct, or you could know to eliminate a few clearly erroneous options and leave the rest to guesswork. You need to train yourself to intuit better, pushing beyond that theoretical limit of 50:50. You also need to increase your chances of running into something you know by simply studying more things, such that you could average out your guesses. You need to put yourself into the position of being lucky.

English-major hopefuls in Hanoi could tell you about the horrors of this one book series called Ba Mươi Tháng Tư (literally, April 30th). Funnily enough, the book is simply a compilation of tests submitted from specialized high schools south of Da Nang to a central test administration body, which would then quasi-randomly select each part from all submitted versions to produce one test for all of them to take (the test is named in honor of the Liberation of Saigon, hence the name April 30th). The stakes are similarly high for students in the South, but they are catered to tenth- and eleventh-graders. Because the caliber of students increased over the years, we surmised that, as to-be ninth-graders, we should study from the tests that were composed two years prior. For me, that would be the book published in 2013. The books were always formatted the same, with roughly 300 pages of actual materials and 100 of answer keys, distinguishable by the color for each year. The 2013 one was light green; I remember the 2014 was cerulean blue and 2015 was flaming red.

I think the reason why this book series took off among us was that we ended up seeing the same questions asked in other extra classes, and people started tracing the questions to their sources. The test designers, mostly non-native speakers asking for near-native proficiency, would also have to cultivate questions from somewhere, and the Hanoi teachers drew heavy inspiration from what the collective teaching body of the South was similarly working with. There were other compilation series: Vĩnh Bá, which is fairly easier and similarly color-coordinated, is another paragon of English-major self-torture in the name of odds-pushing. I was luckily not the identifier of this trend; I had gathered from Facebook threads and random online forums that this was a good source to study. At this point, there were only two known bookstores in Hanoi that sold Ba Mươi Tháng Tư, which also specialized in foreign materials like the Wordsworth novels or SAT prepbooks. I got my 2013 copy early in the summer and started cramming.

Different people had different strategies to effectively studying these books. I know one of my classmates who were probably in the 99th percentile of pure memorization capabilities, so she would just do everything once and remembered all the correct answers. I was trying to train my memory, but I also knew that studying was not as straightforward. In the spirit of later reusing the book, I would use pencils to circle or write what I thought was correct, and writing the correct answer on the edge where I could conveniently cover up. I would just crank out about four tests in a row (each about ten pages, but I would skip all the reading parts), and then looked up the mistakes I made that I felt were worthy of a new entry in my notebook. Memorizing entries was an entirely separate problem; I tried flashcards, making up sentences, or also similarly covering up half the of notebook. I learned that my best bet was repeated exposure: if I see a question enough times, and forget to learn the right answer enough times, I would consciously make a better effort to get the right answer. Heuristically, I should also be rewarded more often, because increased frequency of individual questions also means that more teachers consider them to be appropriately challenging. If I had accepted that this set of preparation questions would be reflective of what I would be quizzed on, then there would be an increased likelihood of encountering the same questions.

There was no real way of gauging if I had learned enough materials, so I just whiled away doing these tests over and over. Soon enough I finished the junior-league section, so I went back to the beginning and redid the exams in a lightning round fashion. I looked at it, thought of an immediate answer, and checked with my sidebar pencil markings (or the lack thereof). I did not reward myself with anything beyond instantaneous gratification of “getting something I obviously would not know correct because I have somehow internalized that knowledge.” The senior-league questions were a step up in difficulty, but at this point I had convinced myself that harder was better.

Doing Ba Mươi Tháng Tư was never something I could fully reconcile with on my own. A lot of idiomatic expressions in English that I had to learn came about because of certain historical contexts that Vietnamese culture would never intersect with. Why does someone have a chip on their shoulder? What is a highway shoulder? Some of my friends chose not to study these books, and were only doing well in eighth-grade tests because they found their way into modern American culture through young adult fiction, though such methods would be insufficient for the ninth-grade tests (only one of the ten people who got into the final round for the competition was in the no-cram camp, and she actually just transferred to my school after spending her whole life in Australia until eighth grade). From a knowledge acquisition standpoint, it was reactionary; from an efficiency standpoint, it was unsystemic. There were a few parts of the exams that were more intellectually stimulating than others, but I could not do etymological word formation exercises all day.

The second discovery that the Internet blessed me with was Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, or OALD. It is a pretty comprehensive dictionary that, I later learned, contained example usage for idioms and phrasal verbs that these exam-makers just copied verbatim from. I convinced my parents to invest in purchasing an official copy of the book without the CD attached, and ported it somewhere myself. I also found access to an APK file of OALD 8th edition that I could only use with the WiFi off.

With this newfound weapon, I started taking notes more systematically. Let’s say that I learned about the phrase “sizing up (somebody/something).” I would go to the dictionary entry for “size,” and read the different definitions for it. I would first make a new entry in my notebook, and then while I am on “size,” look at all phrases or idioms related to the verb. The noun would have to be a separate notebook entry, but I would also do it. This meant that everytime I was learning one word, I was sweeping the suite of all other probable occurrences of the word size. This includes idioms that were invented in the 16th century, but the exams did not discriminate against antiquity. This tripled my rate of going through physical notebooks, and probably accelerated my cycle of iterating through mistakes by an unknown positive factor.

Learning the dictionary was probably one of the most inefficient ways of improving my performance, especially when I did not have good enough memorization skills. I was amplifying what I could learn from study books, but in doing so lowering the average helpfulness of each new tidbit of information. Internet was still my best friend: this bottomless pit of largely unfiltered information wherein an adept incorporation of prompt engineering and resilient link-checking will unveil uncharted waters–in this case, wealths of knowledge some dedicated geniuses had amalgamated for posterity. Again, I was glad not to be old enough that I had nothing to reference, but young enough that treasurable knowledge was not yet canonized.

What I meant was that my third discovery was probably what actually allowed me to distinguish myself from others: a website called blogchuyenanh. The website was hosted on Wordpress, which meant that Vietnamese were not supposed to have access to it if they had not customized their IP address, though most of us should have done so at that point in order to access Facebook. I never knew exactly who the owner was, but they seemed both interested in the variety of exam questions that had been put forth in recent memory and inventing new questions themselves. My impression was that they thought there were more difficult questions that could be asked, and that better questions could be designed–almost as if they wished they had been desiging these exams. I cannot remember how I found the website: I was probably so frustrated with the answer key to some problems that I had tried looking up where else it would show up, and sufficient Internet scrubbing landed me in a blogchuyenanh link. The website design was in progress, but neatly organizied enough that I could download all interesting files (a vestigial habit of the pre-post-scarcity society) and asked my dad to print them. There were competitions that I did not know, designed by another board of teachers, as much as there were original materials of the website owner’s.

With these three discoveries, I spent this summer on proverbial Adderall. I was sitting in front of my laptop, with OALD open, earmarking pages that I finished checking but had not translated to notebook entries, and printing new tests. I was chronically online, but untethered from what people were studying; rather, I was enjoying my administrative role on my school’s Confessions page. At night when the commotion from downstairs compelled me to move from my usual study spot, I would gather enough printouts, a pencil, a mat, and a foldable desk, and go to the top floor of my house reserved only for my mom and aunt manually washing our clothes. The only audiovisual stimulants were the crickets and the baseline noise level for the capital city of Vietnam.

That summer was really repetitive, to a point where a solid half of it escaped my memory. All I could conjure is a still image of me sitting content at a place designated for one single laborious household chore, near some potted plants with a historic survival rate of less than 25%. I was so dedicated to the singular goal of being better at the English language with the narrowly constructed criteria broadly suggested by unknown educators that it felt like I was wired to do one thing. I was a simple machine that needed to take naps, be fed, and occassionally change locations.

The reason why I brought this whole story up is that I truly felt like this was the most dedicated I ever was, and to this day I still do not think I was ever singularly focused on making something true. It could be that I had a clearly defined goal, but so was my high-school self and I was actually a pretty bad student given how much people believed in me. It could be that I had external pressures, but no one really imposed that on me, and certainly not as much as when I was younger. It could be that my competitiveness had run dry after accomplishing what I wanted in ninth grade. But then how do I get it back?

My story in ninth grade was, for all intents and purposes, positive. The first test that the English team took in ninth grade, I ranked first even among those in the English class. I was the second highest scorer in the district competition (there was only one first prize, given to the other person who got into Yale from Vietnam my year), and one of the two highest scorers in the city round (the other person went to MIT). I always felt like I was more hardworking than smart, and even if that was not true I intended to keep that mentality so as not to become complacent. But even then my conscientiousness had dwindled signifiantly since that summer. Maybe I realized that things would kind of work out for me regardless, that I never had real failures, so I subsconsciously could never try as hard as when I was 30th in the rankings? Or maybe I am a Gen Z netizen whose attention span is irreversibly ruined by overexposure to short-form content and digital entertainment. Maybe that is how life is. But how do other people stay dogmatically committed to their cause, even as adults?

How do I recover from here?