Maslow's needs
The psychology department's teaching building has four floors. The first floor contains classrooms and laboratory spaces, and the hallways often smell of coffee and printing paper. The third floor houses the faculty's offices, each with a door, window, and nameplate. The fourth floor is quite unique. One half is a southwest-facing terrace with smooth, warm floorboards, furnished with several sets of tables and chairs where students and faculty gather for lunch or coffee on sunny days. The other half is divided into several functional rooms, including an interview room, an equipment room, and three meeting rooms. Pan Qiu first visited last year at the doctoral student orientation dinner.
The second floor is the space Pan Qiu is most familiar with, mainly the office area for doctoral students. The outer ring consists of private offices with doors: secretaries, IT staff, HR personnel, and course assistants. The central section is an open area, regularly divided into groups of six shared office units.
Each group is like an "island". There are two rows of desks parallel to each other, three desks in each row, for a total of six people; the two rows of chairs are also standard, back to back, so you often bump into each other by accident.
The six-person tables were surrounded by large, waist-high square cubicles, with an opening on one side for easy access. Light gray partitions separated the tables, offering neither soundproofing nor obstructing the view, barely carving out a semi-public "private" territory. The open area was further divided into two sections by the elevator lobby, each containing about eight to ten such "islands," numbered and arranged like a chessboard—neat, yet somewhat oppressive. Printers, cardboard boxes, recycling bins, and spare chairs were scattered haphazardly in the corners, like stranded boats. Doctoral students from different years sat interspersed, familiar with each other, but not intimately connected.
Since passing the qualifying exam last semester, Panqiu was finally assigned a fixed seat. Although it was just a small cubicle less than a meter and a half in size, she still felt a faint sense of belonging. Her arrangement was simple: a small white desk lamp, a large external monitor, a kettle, a potted green plant that was slowly growing taller, and a mug. The mug was printed with a row of light gray hearts, which would reveal the words "Quiet hearts hear more" when heated. This was a Christmas gift from Lin Yue last year.
Panqiu's "island" is usually very quiet. To her left is Jason, a third-year student doing social neuroscience, who almost always wears noise-canceling headphones when she sees him; to her right is Barbara, who studies traumatic memory and habitually uses aromatherapy to "neutralize" the emotional burden from her experiments, with a small plate of dried flowers always on her table. Behind them sit three people in their cubicle: a girl doing child language development, a boy researching cross-cultural depression diagnosis, and a model first-year student who always arrives earliest and leaves latest.
Everyone seemed to be constantly busy: assignments, research projects, or, like Panqiu's teaching assistant duties this semester. Although they didn't chat often, they got along well. During lunch breaks, they would occasionally pass each other a bag of raisins or a box of cookies. Sometimes they didn't even need to say anything; they would just pass it over, as if their understanding of each other had already been achieved in silence.
This semester, she became Ethan's teaching assistant for his graduate course. He would often bring the assignments and quizzes up from the first floor and leave them on her desk. Occasionally, he would stop and ask, "How have you been lately?" But more often, he would hurry upstairs to his next meeting.
Every Wednesday afternoon, she would take her laptop to his office on the third floor to discuss research—those were the two most concentrated hours of her week: sometimes organizing data, sometimes analyzing literature, and occasionally just discussing a "formulation." Each time she left, she felt as if her mind had just run five kilometers—tired, but clear-headed.
Friday afternoons are usually the quietest time of the week on the second floor. Most doctoral students don't have classes on Fridays, and many pack up and leave at noon, making the entire office area seem to be emptied out in advance.
Friday afternoons are also Panqiu's Q&A time. As the teaching assistant for PSY 610 this semester, she spends two hours a week in her cubicle—ostensibly answering students' questions, but usually only one or two students come, and the questions are mostly trivial, like "Do we need to memorize this terminology?" or "Can we write it more subjectively?" But Panqiu is still fully prepared: printing lecture notes, marking references, and compiling flashcards for frequently asked questions.
As a first-time teaching assistant, she was a bit overzealous and inevitably too concerned. She was constantly worried that her answers might not be clear enough or that she might seem impatient, which would affect students' evaluations of Ethan's course. Therefore, she answered all students' questions to the best of her ability, almost to the point of being "buy one get one free."
It's even quieter today—it's Halloween.
This time last year, she was still swamped with her first semester, juggling all her classes, and didn't even notice what holiday it was. This year is different. She's more familiar with the holiday atmosphere in America and more aware of it. The students have already started discussing their costumes: some want to wear dinosaur costumes, some complain about the cold, and others have asked her what she plans to wear.
She was taken aback by the question, but later seriously considered it: dressing up as Mulan—heroic, Eastern, yet not eccentric; or a Qing Dynasty zombie palace maid—ancient with a touch of dark humor. She even checked the overseas shipping costs for a certain wig and shoes.
However, this idea was like tea brewed at night; it cooled down by the time I woke up. Courses, research, and teaching assistant duties filled my life to the brim, and the enthusiasm for the holiday hadn't even had a chance to ferment before being crushed into sunk costs by the schedule.
It wasn't until this afternoon that she remembered it. Sitting at her desk, looking at the deserted open area, the soft lighting and sparse keyboard sounds, she suddenly felt a little glad that she hadn't dressed up as Mulan or a zombie to come to work—just thinking about it made the image seem a bit ridiculously self-amusing.
She had just finished writing comments on an assignment on the screen and hadn't even clicked "submit" when a rhythmic tapping sound suddenly came from behind her—
"Knock knock! Trick or treat!"
Pan Qiu turned around and saw several familiar faces crowding at the entrance to her cubicle: a cat-eared witch, a cloaked vampire, a girl with a ghost face, and two others who weren't dressed up and just joining in the fun. A small bucket of pumpkin candy dangled in front of her classmate.
The girl wearing cat ears said with a grin:
"This was a formal 'Q&A surprise'."
The cloaked vampire continues:
“We feel morally obliged to attend your Halloween Q&A session. It would be a shame not to come—especially since you’re so generous every week.”
The girl with the funny face nodded:
“You’ve always followed the policy of ‘ask one, get three free.’ To be honest, we’d feel a little bad if we didn’t bring candy.”
Pan Qiu was both amused and exasperated, and shrugged: "I didn't even know I had 'member points'."
The cat-eared witch was all serious:
"Yes. I feel like you're scoring our souls every week."
The girl with the funny face added insult to injury:
"Then send the feedback to God—in APA format."
The group burst into laughter.
Pan Qiu smiled and casually took out some candy from the drawer: "Alright. Since you've prepared everything—here's some candy for you."
The vampire said while grabbing the candy:
"That's why we love your Q&A time. You help us revise quotations and even feed us chocolates. That's basically 'heartwarming care'."
Another classmate chimed in:
"She even corrected the punctuation in my comments on the teaching platform."
The cat-eared witch muttered to herself:
"I bet she takes attendance when she tells ghost stories."
The girl with the funny face laughed:
“She once asked us if ‘emotional tone’ could be operationalized—for example, how anxious does ‘a little anxious’ mean?”
"I plead guilty, Your Honor," Pan Qiu said with a smile, raising her hands in surrender.
"Case closed!" The vampire raised the sugar bucket and brought it down like a gavel.
They turned and left, laughing and joking, scattering candy wrappers down the hallway. She looked at the shiny wrappers, savoring the laughter, and suddenly remembered that sentence...
"It feels like you're scoring our souls...and then sending the feedback to God."
She smiled gently. Indeed, she would send Ethan the graded quiz sheets every Friday, sometimes with a few notes.
That is indeed a kind of "feedback".
She turned off the screen, leaned back in her chair to catch her breath, and looked out the window at the autumn leaves on the rooftop being gently stirred by the wind.
—I wonder if Ethan will dress up as any character today?
She tried to imagine him in a vampire cloak and witch's hat; it would be hilarious if he dressed as Jesus. She tried to suppress her laughter—most likely not. But if he actually appeared like that… she wasn't sure she could hold back her laughter in person.
She unwrapped a chocolate and popped it into her mouth. The sweetness slowly melted on her tongue, like being gently coaxed. Her mouth was filled with the sweetness of chocolate, and a soft warmth subtly rose in her heart—slowly emerging from the depths of her body, like sunlight on a blade of grass.
She suddenly realized that she seemed to have really come to enjoy being a teaching assistant.
This liking doesn't come from the vague respect others have for the "teaching assistant" role, but from the fact that people are willing to listen to her explanations, that her efforts are seen, and that her dedication has paid off.
She thought of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: after physiological and safety needs, there are belonging, respect, and self-actualization needs.
For the past year, she had been struggling at the very bottom: moving, language barriers, adaptation, assignments, and exams. But today, those brief fifteen minutes of jokes and sweets seemed to suddenly illuminate a higher level. She felt a sense of being needed and a confirmation of being liked. This was a genuine connection she had built with her students as a person—with seriousness, patience, and sincerity.
She knew that the students' praise contained exaggeration, jokes, and improvisation. But that was precisely what made it all the more touching.
She rarely admitted so frankly that she actually craved this kind of response.
That kind of affirmation that "you did a great job".
That kind of expression that means "you are helpful to me".
That kind of thing that quietly takes root in a foreign land, as subtle yet resilient as interpersonal bonds.
Sunlight streamed in obliquely through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the distance. She felt a sense of perfect satisfaction. She took off her glasses, leaned back in her chair to catch her breath, then put them back on, composed herself, and gently typed a line on the screen: "Preparing the rating scale—mid-next cycle."
Little did she know that soon, because of another student, she would for the first time question whether this "sense of value" truly existed.
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