How my friend became a doctor without even attending high school. (It has to do with living under Chinese anti-capitalist, communist rule under Mao.) As told to me by my friend: Her mom was an ob-gyn and her father a university professor. They had fled China, but returned in the late 50s because the government was promising big perks to attract intellectuals back to China. Once the family returned to China under Mao, it was understood that they were not permitted to leave. Things were okay for awhile until someone decided that the father, a professor, was not fully behind the Chinese communist ideology. He was imprisoned. After a few years, the father convinced the communists that he had changed his thinking to the right side, and he was released from prison. Under the communists, bands of people who seemed kind of like soldiers and wore bands on their arms, would come to the family’s private home and take whatever they wanted. The family’s property was no longer their own. The mom, a doctor, used to get small gifts of jewelry from parents when she would deliver a baby. She began burying these items in the back yard so the government wouldn’t steal them. Government agents found and dug up some of the jewelry and took it. Ultimately, the family’s private home was confiscated for the state’s use, except a portion of the second floor where the family was allowed to live. When she was about 12, someone decided that her parents weren’t fully on board with the communist ideology, and both of her parents were taken away to a labor camp. She and her siblings were left behind. The parents were allowed to visit them once a month. Meantime, she was sent to some type of education camp— but there was no real schooling or education. The children just learned from a red book of Mao quotations. She said she memorized the whole red book word for word. She says this is generally termed to be a lost generation, because education collapsed; there wasn’t any school in the normal sense. Ultimately, when Mao died, her parents were released from work camp. But the country didn’t know how to get back on track from the decades of collapse under Mao, which also included 30 million deaths from a communist-instigated famine. The society needed doctors and other professionals, but how to get them? For years, people hadn’t attended any real school or gotten any normal education. So the government allowed people to apply to medical school without even having attended high school. They just had to pass an entrance exam. My friend studied for the exam and passed it, and got into medical school, and became a doctor —with no high schooling or undergraduate education. She eventually got sponsored to come to the US, where she practiced her medical career until retiring a couple of years ago. She can't believe there are people in the US who support socialism and/or communism. Recently, she gave my daughter something very special: a necklace that had been buried in her back yard all those years ago—that the communists didn’t find. It was one of the gifts given to her mother, the doctor, by a family after a baby delivery. She believes the jewelry that survived the communists in her family’s possession has a memory and is alive, and is good luck.