I walked into Gualiang Primary School in Puba Township and saw seven or eight children squatting on their heels in the yard, reciting multiplication table while writing on the earth with a twig. Ms. Ding had been teaching thirty years here. She took me into one classroom and told me that it was the classroom for Grade One. Eighteen students could only share six desks and six chairs with each other. Even if two students shared one, it was still not enough. Those students who had no chair to sit on could only stand in the back of classroom to listen to lessons. Grade Two and Grade Three shared one classroom with merely three desks. When students of Grade Three were having class, students of Grade Two could only learn in the yard.
Xiaoma, the member of the County Communist Youth League Committee told me such a story: one middle school student couldn't sit still in class and stood up from time to time. The teacher criticized him for lack of discipline. He said he spent five years in the primary school in his village. There was no desk or chair. So he had to stand while listening to the teacher and he had been used to that. When he came into the middle school, he could sit in class but he felt quite uncomfortable and he would unconsciously stand up by accident.
In the Daojia Village in Kangfeng Town, a girl called Ma Laiye was leading two goats back from the mountain.
I asked about her age. She answered me that she was ten years old. I continued to ask whether or not she had ever been to school. She shook her head.
Walking into Ma Laiye's home, half of the dilapidated wall had fallen down and several crevices were on the wall of the two mud houses.
Ma Laiye's mother told me her family had five people and they were short of grains about 2000 jin a year. Every February in the spring, they had to borrow grains from others. Her husband had no choice but to take his fifteen-year-old older son to do odd jobs in other parts of the country. The father and the son had been out for more than one month without any news. Since they were both illiterate people, they couldn't write a letter. The youngest daughter was in Grade One of primary school. If one day she had dropped out, this family of five people would be reduced to a complete illiterate family.
Not far away from Ma Laiye's home was Ma Chunyan's home.
Ma Chunyan's father died of traffic accident and her grandparents were both nearly seventy years old. The living burden of the whole family was on the shoulders of her mother. In order to have enough money to pay for tuition fees, Ma Chunyan went to the county town five li away to take care of children for others on holidays. Every day she went out early and came back late like a little adult. However, she was only an eleven-year-old child.
Her family couldn't afford the tuition fees for her younger brother Ma Jianmin so her grandfather sent her brother to the mosque.
I asked, "Isn't there a rule that the mosque cannot accept primary school students?"
Ma Chunyan's grandfather said, "I begged them for many times. They know we are very poor and finally the kind Imam agreed."
In the mosque in the Xiangquan Village of Dingxi County, I also saw several children learning the Koran as Imam candidates.
Thirteen-year-old Ma Weicheng was in Grade Three last year, however, suddenly his father passed away. His family couldn't survive any more. Therefore, his mother had no choice but to send him to the mosque.
I asked him which was better, learning the Koran or studying in school. He answered that staying in the mosque was better because he could have enough to eat and would never be in hunger.
In the villages in Kangle County, such slogans can be seen everywhere, "If Kangle wants to be rich, then raise less but educate more" .
From the slogans, we can see great importance has been attached to education. But from a slogan to practices and finally to the realization of the goal, it is a long and arduous journey…
Interview Notes III
The Yanhe River Flowing Silently from Our Feet
This was a story about a Shaanxi girl's fate told by Liu Feng, a college student of China Youth University for Political Sciences who had just come back from an investigation in the impoverished areas. I heard this in a forum.
The first village I went to was called Yinggou Village, which was located in the shady slope at an altitude of 1,650 meters. Looking up from the mountain foot to the top, several houses might be seen indistinctly, like matchboxes hanging in the cloud. After a three-hour climb, we reached the top of the mountain. Villagers here lived in scatters. One family lived at one spot. A small village of over thirty families was actually distributed over a ridge of more than twenty li.
We came to a girl's home. More exactly, it was not a house but a cave. Her father passed away and her mother alone had to raise her and her younger sister. The grass house they previously lived in collapsed and the three could only move into this cave.
The girl was sitting at the entrance to the cave, picking a pile of beans. Her work-hardened hands were bloodily chapped.
The head of the village told me that she hadn't gone to school for nearly one semester.
I asked her, "Do you still want to go to school?"
She nodded.
"Then why don't you go to school?"
"My father was gone and no one can work to support my family and we don't have money."
The teacher in the village primary school told me later, after dropping out, she still kept her textbooks and as soon as she was available, she would take the book out and read. One day she heard from her classmates that they would take final examinations on that day. She quickly finished her work and ran to school. She seriously finished the paper in the left half class and wrote four big Chinese characters which meant "I want to go to school" in the end of the paper.
This girl who yelled "I want to go to school" was Qin Yuanxiang…
