Chinese Children Can't Get What They Want by Committing Suicide

May 30, 2025

CW: Suicide is discussed with blunt wording in this article in order to remind people what suicide is. There may be a lack of nuance compared to other pieces in the series.

A Chinese student’s suicide on April 26 appeared on my social media feed again today. It’s the usual stuff - a high school student writes a suicide note, they jumps off a building, the parents post a lengthy quasi-eulogy.

Don’t be mistaken, things with similar natures happen all the time with all-too-similar attitudes from the parents, at least according to my confirmation bias-raddled convenience sample that is me simply noticing things happening online. It is definitely sad that this happens so frequently, but at the same time extremely confusing that no one takes the slightest hint, despite how utterly identical and (both metaphorically and literally) echolalic most of these cases are.

T (pseudonym) killed themself at 5 a.m. in Shandong, I can’t stress enough how ironic this is, after leaving a suicide note on an answer sheet for a twelfth grade monthly exam. The note is incredibly well written, in a style extremely typical of Gaokao essays (hey, did I mention how ironic this is?) spanning two pages and mixing childhood nostalgia with guilt and anger. The most piercing complaint is that of overwhelming academic pressure, which led to family conflicts and severe somatization. T is clearly good at writing, but the style reflects that of traditional Chinese instruction, which, wow, is so incredibly and totally ironic!

It is worth discussing the typical narrative of a distinctively Chinese suicide note. It is typical that the child spends a portion of the note expressing gratitude and love that has been poorly, if ever, responded to. In my very personal opinion, this may be partly due to Confucianist indoctrination and partly due to how parenting is indeed extremely difficult. However, the presence of a note represents a particular purpose of suicide typical to children, apart from the obvious goal of ending the may-as-well-be-never-ending pain, of hoping their parents would do some much-needed introspection and express some postmortem love of the child’s phantom self. This is a borderline type of revenge, the specifics of which is both worth discussing and under-discussed. It is also a futile type of revenge, the effects of which cannot be felt or even seen by the child, unless you believe in a heaven with transparent flooring. This desire for revenge can be seen as reasonable and even natural, especially when it is almost always not the sole reason for suicide, but as an additional perk of dying. It is hard to not read T’s suicide note as coming from an avenger of bad parenting.

But Chinese children don’t get what they want even after they die.

Parents need to cope and keep things running. They write eulogies praising how hardworking and brilliant and good at school their child is. They post things online for whatever reason. They don’t realize the gravity of their past actions. Children don’t get what they want.

This is all well and good for their own process of mourning; it is simply unrealistic to expect reparative justice from someone, who likely already fought with their parents one way or another, killing themselves. However, parents missing the mark causes more parents to miss the mark, as people who are alive can literally just talk to people and post online, overshadowing a static but final piece of note. This happens again and again; T’s father writes about how he never “deprived T of their mobile phone”, tries to explain everything by diagnosing T of “smiling depression”, and as self-described, “moving on” to take care of T’s little sister who unfortunately doesn’t get to change parents.

Hey, kids, please don’t kill yourself. Dead people can’t talk.

This is a short-short article in a series of short-short opinion pieces. Ideas are of my own except when they are not.