I’m off: Short resignation inspires restless
A 33-year-old school teacher bitten by wanderlust may have changed forever the shape of Chinese resignation letters.
‘‘The world is big and I want to see it.’’ With this one, short sentence, Gu Shaoqiang has become a heroine to a restless, adventurehungry generation of working Chinese.
Her succinct, handwritten note, which went viral on social media after being posted by a former colleague, has been both celebrated and lambasted for its gall and passion.
Most are astonished that a type of letter that might normally run into long, tortured paragraphs of explanatory prose has been boiled down to just a handful of Chinese characters.
It was sent to the head teacher of the middle school in Henan province where Gu had worked – perfectly happily – for 11 years. Pictures have since emerged showing her on her travels in Sichuan province.
Some have attacked Gu for setting a poor example to children by ditching the sort of secure, respectable job that plenty of Chinese still long for. She has since told Chinese reporters that her decision was not made ‘‘on a whim’’, and that she would find ways to support herself.
Overwhelmingly, however, there has been admiration. Hun- dreds of alternative versions of the letter have been posted online as Chinese seek to encapsulate their own frustrations and desires in as short a sentence as possible.
The blunt romanticism of the letter has struck a chord with tens of thousands of Chinese who feel bitterly constrained by their working lives and would love to follow Gu’s example.
‘‘This is the kind of life I wanted to have, but I don’t have the courage to pursue it. All I can do is be jealous,’’ wrote one user on China’s equivalent of Twitter.
‘‘The world is big and I want to see it too,’’ read another widely reposted tweet. ‘‘Unfortunately, my wallet is shallow and I can’t go anywhere.’’
Others, including an unusually high number of civil servants, expressed solidarity with Gu and said that they too had recently quit their jobs.
Wu Yiming, a professor of sociology at Nanjing Normal University, said the letter had gone viral precisely because it felt so authentic and familiar to many Chinese. ‘‘Under the enormous pressures of modern society, everyone has a Gu Shaoqiang living inside their heart.’’