Hi there:
Belated holiday greetings to those of you celebrating Christmas. As you read this, I hope you are also sharing quality time with family and loved ones.
Please excuse the extended silence. I had to weather a bout of fatigue and depression.
For my final issue of the year, I’m taking you to Garze Prefecture in rural Sichuan, known for its significant ethnic Yi population.
Once a “stay-behind” herself who spent her childhood largely parentless due to migrant labor, Ni Xiaofeng decided that the next generation of kids deserved better. Armed with a university degree in pre-school education, Ni returned to her hometown of Sanya Township to become a kindergarten teacher. This is her story.
The source material was first published in Chinese by The Story Plan on April 22.
For those of you interested in learning more about the Yi people in Sichuan, I previously delved into the subject in No. 13.
Take care and see you soon.
—ML
I Feel Your Pain: A Former “Stay-behind” Child in Rural Sichuan Returns to Safeguard a New Generation
By Li Ze
Edited by Pu Moshi
Introduction
In Ni Xiaofeng's recollection, there's an exceptionally wide river in her hometown of Sanya Township, located in Jiulong County of Sichuan Province's mountainous Garze Prefecture. When the sun rose, as it created a glittering reflection on the river's surface, Ni and her friends could be found playing by the water. Their parents were all working out-of-town, so there was no one to warn them about the potentially dangerous currents. Having barely come of age as children, their stature only just exceeding the height of wheat, the kids walked their family's horses on the banks of the river while cradling their younger brothers or sisters. The bolder and more mischievous boys could be seen climbing over the river walls and lunging into the water. From time to time, cheers erupted when someone stumbled upon a shiny handful of gold sand.
That's also how the region of Shilorada got its name. In the dialect of the ethnic Yi minority, it means "the place that produces gold."
In 2019, after graduating from university, Ni returned to her alma mater in her hometown to become a kindergarten teacher. Whenever she studies the chubby red faces of her 30-plus students, she thinks back to her own early school days and the classmates who braved the treacherous journey to campus with her.
Mountain kids are typically quite mature, quietly enduring their poor material conditions and minimal school infrastructure. Parents of kids of Ni's generation mostly insisted on their sons and daughters completing their educations, but many of Ni's classmates also left town to work elsewhere shortly after finishing primary school. They also married early. Unable to juggle wage labor and child care, these classmates mainly leave their own offspring at home with elders.
Ten years on, these "stay-behind" children that Ni grew up with find their own kids being left behind as well. During a recent lesson, Ni had her students draw their moms. Half of her students stuttered in response: "Teacher, I don't remember what Mom looks like."
That's why it has long been Ni's aspiration to give back by becoming a teacher in her hometown.
1.
Due to a lack of guidance, Ni filled out the wrong major when she listed her top choices after finishing her university entrance exams.
She always aspired to become a primary school teacher and work at her alma mater, Sanya Township Primary School, just like her old Chinese teacher. But a series of missteps resulted in her putting down pre-school education as her first choice for college majors. When she got to university, she learned from students ahead of her that pre-school education graduates became kindergarten teachers. In reality, they took care of other people's kids, similar to babysitters.
The revelation left Ni devastated.
She considered switching majors shortly after beginning her studies, but the paperwork was too big of a hassle. Around the same time, Ni also noticed that her fellow students were also ethnic minorities. School officials had set up a dedicated class for them. This gave Ni, who was far from home, a sense of belonging. And when she thought of the children back in her hometown, they reminded her of her own younger siblings. They too needed the guidance of early childhood educators. So Ni decided to give her existing major a try.
Ni was born in 1996, but she didn't start school until the year she turned 9.
Her contemporaries also started school late, also around the age of 9. Children who were too young couldn't handle the journey to school, which entailed scaling tall mountains. Sanya Township Primary School is a boarding institution. Half of its students received their meals and lived on campus because they lived too far away.
Boarders like herself rarely went home. The talk among them after class revolved around whether the pig feed at home had been harvested and whether Grandma and Grandpa could juggle farm work and taking care of their younger siblings. Sometimes they missed their parents. Most boarders’ parents were working in faraway towns. Back then PHS mobile phones had just become the norm and air time was slightly expensive. Even a single call was a luxury. All the boarders could do was bury their feelings until Lunar New Year when their parents returned.
Ni’s home was relatively close to school, so she was more fortunate than her classmates. As the eldest, she could head home after classes to take care of her younger sister and brother. She rarely saw her father. To ensure that all his children could attend school, Dad needed to make money in the city. Sometimes he went digging for Chinese caterpillar fungus—a rare herb that fetched high prices—in the mountains with fellow villagers and was gone for months at a time.
Ni’s parents’ generation wasn’t very well-educated.
Mom and Dad’s expectations for Ni and her younger brother and sister were to study hard and become a doctor, police officer or teacher. Their understanding was that these professions would guarantee your living for life.
Fast forward to university and Ni wasn’t sure if she could become a good kindergarten teacher. She also wondered if she had let her parents down. During her university years, she was assigned to intern at a kindergarten in Mount Emei, coming into contact with students for the first time. She taught drawing and music. Gradually, Ni began to appreciate her own ability.
In 2015, the Sichuan provincial government launched a “one kindergarten per village” campaign in the Daliangshan and Xiaoliangshan regions with an eye toward promoting bilingual pre-school education (Chinese and Yi). Ni’s alma mater, Sanyaxiang Primary School, also added a kindergarten section that was open to all children ages 3 to 6 in the region for free. Ni took advantage of the timing and landed a job in her hometown after graduating from university.
On the day she started her job at Sanya Township Primary School, Ni was a bit dazed. Ten-plus years and passed and setting foot on her old campus presented a new sight. What used to a shoddy two-story main building had been revamped and several new buildings had been added. The tiny playground that used to be overwhelmed by weeds had now been paved with cement and a new basketball court was in place.
It only dawned on Ni then that the space where she fooled around with classmates when she was a child was so small.
At a welcome party for new staffers, Ni was greeted by her old teachers, who lined up in single file, beaming. About a dozen years had passed and creases had formed on their faces and their hair had grayed significantly. Soon Ni was near tears.
Yet it was only during her first lesson when she realized she had underestimated her new gig.
That’s because her kids couldn’t understand her at all.
2.
Armed with a lesson plan, Ni appeared before the lectern that day and wrote her name on the blackboard. Then she asked her students to raise their hands and introduce themselves. The 30-odd children stared at her as if she were a cow or goat meandering in the mountains. They didn’t understand Ni at all because she was speaking Mandarin.
The elders of Sanya Township mainly speak Yi. Most of her students’ parents were away working, leaving their grandparents to take care of them. That generation never spoke Mandarin to begin with. When Ni was in primary school, the language of instruction was also Yi. It wasn’t until junior high when she managed to become relatively fluent in Mandarin.
Thinking back to when she first started school, Ni herself struggled with Chinese class because the characters in her textbook were a mystery. Luckily, her Chinese teacher was an exceptionally patient person who made a point of bilingual instruction. The teacher served as inspiration for Ni to become a teacher herself.
Her students unable to decipher her lecture, Ni had no choice but to repeat her message in Yi.
With Ni’s encouragement, some of the kids stood up, but they too stumbled through their delivery. Many of them didn’t even know what their full names were in Chinese because their grandparents referred to them by their nicknames.
The lesson ended in silence.
Chinese became Ni’s biggest challenge. Despite using a bilingual approach, such as naming an item in Chinese and then identifying it in Yi, her children were perplexed. So Ni had to tackle each phrase meticulously. For example, in a lesson to teach her students how to say “stool,” she explained the term in both Chinese and Yi, then raised an actual stool in the classroom. The process would be repeated until she kids could identify the stool in Chinese when she raised it without prompting in Yi.
Ni drafted a list of 200 phrases used in daily kindergarten conversation, with a goal of teaching the students one or two per day. The nouns included real-life objects she could point to, like desk, cow, sheep, bowl, chopsticks and stone. These were everyday items that could be easily remembered.
But one day Ni hit a wall again when she was trying to explain the difference between dig and run—both terms pronounced pao, but in different tones. So she used the phrase digging furiously (pao guang) instead and mimicked the action on the ground. When it came to explaining run, Ni literally began running in the tiny classroom. The children got a big kick out of watching Ni’s limbs flailing. Gradually, the children got used to Ni’s methodology and Ni found her groove.
Soon enough on one occasion, when Ni said “jump” in Chinese, the entire class leapt.
Class time like that was a pleasure, but there were also times after work when Ni would fall into a depression. Her small classroom provided little in the way of hardware. Compared to kindergartens in cities, Sanya Township Primary School’s infrastructure was primitive. In urban kindergartens, teachers could even touch on astronomy, talk about Mars and Pluto, with a weekend trip to the local space museum to boot. That way the lesson was highly impressionable. But for the children of Sanya Township, visiting a space museum was a pipe dream. Still, what Ni had in mind for these mountain children went far beyond breakthroughs in language instruction.
3.
By the time her children could more or less understand her, Ni moved onto other subjects. Even though Sanya Township Primary School had already launched multimedia instruction, its affiliated kindergarten was still confined to blackboards due to limited funds.
The kindergarten comprised two class for a total of nearly 80 children. Two teachers were assigned to each class. During Ni’s first year, due to a lack of experience in pre-school education, management allocated the kindergarten two primary school classrooms. The teachers decorated the two classrooms themselves, painting the walls a mellow yellow and the ceilings ocean blue. They placed about six or seven long tables in each classroom, with six children assigned to each table.
The teachers adorned the back of the classroom with simple drawings that framed a pin-up area.
Apart from that, the teachers had few props, not even basic toys.
Within the whole school, even the primary section had a limited number of teaching props and couldn’t spare any for the kindergarten. When it came to math class, Ni and her colleagues had to make their own props after class. As for arts and crafts class, Ni was initially at a loss.
But mountain kids are extremely handy, having learned how to cook and harvest pig feed at a young age. Making teaching props with them was a fun exercise.
Even though the toys and the props the school did have on hand were crude, they still offered an element of surprise to the children.
For one arts and crafts lesson, Ni brought in plasticine. Her kids responded with a thunderous cheer. It was the first time they had seen clay like that. Each student carefully tore off a small bit and cupped the portion in their hands, lest they drop the clay by accident. The students proceeded to make tiny caterpillars, pigs and birds, proudly showing off their creations to their teachers. Ni was delighted and felt pain at the same time. Something that urban children could take for granted was treasured by mountain kids.
The material gap often baffled Ni. Like her university classmates, she also contemplated applying to graduate school and returning to the city when she encountered difficulties at work, but there was so much she couldn’t bear parting with.
The children were also healing her. Deprived of material goods, Ni’s children were normally reluctant to share what they had to eat. On the rare occasion they had a snack in their possession, it was immediately gobbled down. Ni remember one day during class when a female student shared a piece of candy with her. “Teacher, yesterday was my birthday. This is my birthday candy. I saved a piece for you,” the student said. Ni was deeply moved. Apart from a teacher, her students also treated her as a mother.
Luckily, the central government poured resources into rural education in recent years. In 2020, the second year Ni was on the job, the principal bought TV screens and toys for the kindergarten section. With the help of computer illustration, Ni felt her children had become more attentive.
4.
During a drawing session, Ni assigned the topic “My Mother.”
Shortly after the lesson started, Ni could sense the heaviness in the air. Even the few students who were her liveliest lowered their heads. The children whose mothers were at home shouted: “My mom has long hair,” “My mom has really big eyes” and “My mom has a birthmark on her face.” But amid the fanfare, half of the children went silent. They also averted their eyes, as if they had done something wrong.
“Teacher Ni, I don’t know what my mom looks like,” one child whispered.
“Teacher, my mom hasn’t been back in a long time,” another said, and a third: “Teacher, I can’t do it.”
It was extremely hard for Ni to keep her emotions in check when she faced scenes like that. “Then let’s use the template on the blackboard and draw the mother in your imagination,” she managed to say. Many kids ended up turning in blank sheets of paper.
At school, at least the children had teachers to keep them company. On occasion, they would unload on the teachers, sobbing quietly as they confided that they missed their mom or dad. But at home, before their grandparents, the children often stayed mum.
One of Ni’s students was a girl called Qin Youxuan. Youxuan’s parents were away working and she lived with her paternal grandmother. Her parents sent her new clothes from time to time, so Grandma always dressed her up smartly. Among Ni’s students, Youxuan was one of the outgoing ones. She loved to smile, always coming off as happy-go-lucky. Youxuan’s happiest times were when her youngest aunt on her mom’s side came to visit. Auntie always brought snacks and took her for a haircut.
On one such occasion, Youxuan got up bright and early, washed up and had Grandma braid her hair. She donned her favorite hair pin and had her friends pick out a pretty dress. When Auntie arrived, aunt and niece wandered in the village. Because she was in such a good mood, Youxuan gave away most of the snacks Auntie had bought for her. But come dawn, it was time for Auntie to leave and on that particular day Auntie told Youxuan that she too was moving to another city for work the next day. Auntie told Youxuan to defer to Grandma. The news devastated Youxuan, who broke down in tears.
There was also the boy called Li Jiaxin. Ni could see herself as a child in him. Jiaxin was the firstborn, followed by a younger brother and sister, and was mature well beyond his years. He wasn’t much of a talker but knew when to step up, always holding his own when carrying loads of pig manure.
Whatever his teachers said, Jiaxin paid close attention and frequently offered his help. At home, he helped out with farm chores. His father gone most of the time, Jiaxin behaved like an adult, able to cook independently and look after his young siblings.
5.
There were plenty of children like Qin Youxuan and Li Jiaxin in Ni’s class. Ni was witness to their gradual progress to a point where they could speak Mandarin fluently. As far as dreams were concerned, some kids said they wanted to become teachers, others doctors and police officers. This was deja vu for Ni. She had the same childhood aspirations.
But there was also an outlier that said: “I want to become Ultraman.”
Another child said he wanted to become Superman and save the world.
These ideas were inspired by movies.
In 2021, the kindergarten received a donation of 800 picture books and a batch of toys from the early childhood education content producer Nicomama. Ni added two picture book reading sessions to her weekly schedule.
Among the picture books Ni used, one of the children’s favorites was Mother Hen Rose Takes a Walk. When Rose leaves her chicken coop for a walk, a fox follows furtively. As Rose makes her way through the courtyard of her farm, the fox leaps, only to accidentally land on a rake. The fox mounts another attack as Rose walks along a pond. The fox falls into the pond. The fox launches a third attempt when Rose passes a haystack. The fox plunges into the haystack. In the end, Rose returns to the chicken coop just in time for dinner. The story never failed to leave Ni’s students bellowing in laughter.
There were also stories that the children struggled to comprehend, such as Furious Soup. The kids asked: “What’s a bowl of angry soup? How come soup gets angry?” After finishing the story, Ni told her students to voice their emotions if they are sad. The children nodded obediently. They will come around, Ni thought to herself.
The worlds depicted in the picture books filled Ni’s students with a sense of wonder. When they came across an animal they didn’t recognize, they asked Ni what it was and where it typically lived. Ni answered patiently. When it came to fruits they didn’t recognize, the children asked where they were normally grown and whether they were tasty. If it was a fruit that Ni herself had never had, she would look it up online and explain what it tasted like. That usually sent the foodies in the class salivating.
The children fantasized about life beyond the mountains. When they saw an amusement park on TV or in a picture book, they would say they want to visit it when they grow up. In times like this, Ni would offer words of encouragement.
As long as you dream big and work hard, you’ll realize your dreams, Ni said.
In June 2022, Ni’s second batch of students graduated from kindergarten. When Jiaxin, who reminded Ni so much of her background, entered first grade, he was still a bit shy but maintained solid grades and good behavior.
By April 2023, the flowers were blooming on the mountains. The strong UV exposure at the higher altitude makes for exceptionally pretty flowers. After marrying her boyfriend, who is also a teacher, Ni gave birth to a baby. She’s counting the days until she can relay to her child the story behind the name of their hometown Shilorada, the “place that produces gold.”