Eleven-year-old Bao Jixiang is carrying a different lunch box from other children. It is a three-layer lunch box, with rice on the bottom, soup on the second and vegetables on the top. The cook aunt was very careful, gave him three spoonfuls of food, the second layer of soup is overflowing.
Bao Jixiang was walking quickly with his lunch box in his hand. He went through jingwai street, walked along the pothole path for a while, opened a red iron gate, entered the courtyard, and walked into the wall with the iron plate of “Qujing City moral model filial Piety old love dear”. Father Bao Qiyong is waiting for him, and he brought back the lunch.
1
Bao jixiang’s Mingde Primary School is a special school that provides three meals a day free of charge. And each class of children have their own “responsibility fields.”
In the afternoon of September 22, 2016, the sky cleared slightly. Senior children rushed into the campus farm and followed a grape-and-raised-picket fence trail that ran parallel to the melon tunnel and was separated by a 20-meter-wide vegetable field. The girl picked a grape and put it in her mouth. Her mouth moved twice, then she spat it out, showing her teeth. “Too sour!” The raisins and grapes are not doing well because of the heavy rain this year.
They passed a small melon field, vine no longer than 1 meter long, open yellow flowers, bearing green fruits; They walked past a chili field where they had grown broccoli, but which no longer belonged to them. They stopped in front of an edamame field, where a sign for Class 3, Grade 5, was stuck in the ground. This was their field of responsibility. They had just joined Class 3, Grade 6, in September, becoming the oldest children on the farm at the school.
Sister of towel gourd (Figure: Zi Yu)
Because of the rain, they didn’t go into the farm during work hours for a long time. The soil is full of water, step on one foot, the sole will bring up a foot of mud. The edamame field had lost four days of work a week, and the weeds had grown so fast that the edamame was ripe when the children weren’t looking. They pulled up some grass and left it in the melon tunnel, where the workers in the garden would pick up the weeds along the way and take them to the cattle pens.
Children like to pick fruit. But the animals love it best. Girls like cute rabbits, boys like alert sika deer, and together they like peacocks with beautiful feathers. However, they always spend the longest time in front of ostriches. They are the biggest birds on the farm, with snake-like necks and sharp mouths. They cling to the young grass, and when the children are not ready to put it to their lips, they preempt and forcibly “seize” it, at which point the children run away screaming.
2
The ostrich is the patriarch of the farm. Six years ago, they arrived in Mr. Tang’s car.
Tang Conong had received the birds, which were as small as grown chickens, at one of the ostrich farms run by United Street in Kunming – they had learned online that they could buy the birds here. They spent nearly 10,000 yuan to pack the five small ostriches into a cardboard box and put them in the back of Tang’s car.
For an hour or two after leaving the farm, the young ostriches chirped incessantly, with a thin, sharp cry that Tang recognized as “nervous.” Slowly, they quieted down and crawled inside the box. However, their smell filled the entire compartment, which was “very heavy and smelly”. In just over six years, the number of ostriches has grown from five to two — some dead, some sold, tall and fast.
It is both baicao garden and sanwei bookstore
Ostrich, sika deer, peacock, rabbit, emu… The number of animals slowly increased. It is something that Tang Cong and Ningde Hu could not have imagined seven years ago.
Tang Cong and Ningde Hu are teachers at Mingde Primary School and are the ones who have truly experienced change with the school. In 2008, the school was dissolved in rural areas, and the number of students suddenly increased to more than 1,000. The school was housed in the former Government office building of Jingwai Town (in 2006, The town was merged into Xining Street of Xuanwei City).
More than 1000 mouths to eat, became a big problem. Ningde Hu spent a lot of time researching the local market. “The price of vegetables was too high to buy,” he said, going to the village to buy pigs, which cost more than 3,000 yuan for 250 kilograms. Buying vegetables lasted less than a year, and in 2009, Mingde Decided to start its own farm. We spent 300,000 yuan to acquire 16 mu of land around the school, and squeezed more than 100 pigs into three pigpens.
It is a strange thing for a group of teachers to raise pigs and farm. The cement, the bricks, the gravel, the piglets, the potatoes, the corn — they all cost money. Ningde Hu and Tang Cong are locals, and talking about credit is mostly on their shoulders. Tang Cong felt very embarrassed, every time credit, will be villagers joke: “before when I was a child farming to feed pigs did not get enough? And now to jump out and do it again!” In their eyes, to be a teacher is to jump out of the “farm door”, why do farm work?
Now, however, Tang finds it hard to see acquaintances on the street. In 2006, when Jing Wai entered Xining street, the crops in the field changed from flue-cured tobacco to potatoes and corn. Village construction and roads have not changed much, young people go out to find a way to live. Gradually, the street at the school gate emptied and their children became left-behind children — 680 of the 1,036 students at Mingde Primary School.
However, the parents of the 680 left-behind children no longer have to worry about their children’s life at school. On this farm, the school provides the children with free meals. In the morning, you can choose rice noodles, steamed buns or steamed buns. For lunch and dinner, there are three dishes and one soup with meat. Pork and chicken are all from the farm. Every day 120 jin of melons, 150 jin of yams, 120 jin of melons and other kinds of vegetables, as well as 60 jin of pork, are shipped to the canteen, and the farm has more than enough to provide these ingredients.
At the beginning of 2016, Mingde Primary School spent 700,000 yuan to transfer more than 30 mu of land from 3 kilometers away, and the school farm area has reached 80 mu when connected with the 40 mu behind the school. On Sept. 21, Tang cong took a trip to Shui Shui Town and returned 20 “reserve” sows — now the Mingde primary School farm is not just a vegetable garden in Mingde. Every week, 7, 500 pounds of fat pigs are sent to the canteens of eight primary schools in Xining Street to serve as fresh meat for the children.
3
Because of the campus farm, children like Bao Jixiang have a secure life. At 11:36 am every day, the bell rings for the end of class. Less than five seconds later, the children appear in the corner of the canteen. One minute later, Bao Jixiang also went to the canteen for freshly baked food and returned home to deliver food to his dependent father.
It is both baicao garden and sanwei bookstore
Father Bao Qiyong’s world is small. He lives in a 30-square-meter room with little — a TV, a dining table, a sofa, a wardrobe and the bunk bed he shares with his son. The room is empty and deserted.
Bao’s only contact with the outside world is a glass window on his right, half a square meter in size, welded with iron railings. When he was awake, he looked out of the window. Outside the window is a 5-square-meter courtyard, where the clothes of father and son are drying in front of them. Looking out, the line of sight is cut off by grey hollow bricks and red iron gates. A large Wolf dog tied to the next yard barked at the sight of a stranger. Bao Qiyong always hears the barking of the dog before he hears the sound of footsteps coming through the door.
In 2007, bao Qiyong, 24, was struck by a boulder in a mine, leaving him incapacitated from the waist down and unable to turn over. His wife, feeling hopeless, left, leaving bao Jixiang, then only 2 years old. Bao’s parents assumed the responsibility of taking care of him and his child.
In 2014, two of them died — his mother in a car accident and his father from cancer. Bao moved to the opposite of Mingde Primary School, seven miles from home, and rented the room for nearly 2,000 yuan a year.
He counted the days, year after year, and the minutes, waiting for Bao jixiang. Even when Bao jixiang came back, the room was quiet. The sound of a toothbrush rubbing against the teeth, the sound of water rolling in the mouth, and then the sound of eating. The father and son ate quickly and sparingly.
Bao qiyong has been sick in bed for years and “his legs hurt 24 hours a day”. The unbearable pain, coupled with a sense of powerlessness to life — with a monthly subsistence allowance of more than 200 yuan, even a drink of water needs to be carried to the mouth of his son. He couldn’t help losing his temper at Bao Jixiang. Bao Jixiang also does not speak, just help Bao Qiyong pinch leg. To Bao qiyong, this is actually no use, “this is neuralgia, hammers will not relieve”.
Bao jixiang speaks little and does not like to smile. Even when he does smile, he only keeps it on his face for a short time. Bao qiyong thinks this may be a habit, “not that his heart is very depressed.” But he had not lost the curiosity of a child of that age. He was constantly bombarding himself with questions about bacteria in his biology class at the time. He began to read about The Three Kingdoms, especially liked Zhuge Liang, because he was “smart, brave and loyal”.
He enjoys writing novels. The first story concerns a 15-year-old boy. He crossed over to another world, where he met a boy who looked exactly like himself. The boy was wronged and killed his father, then jumped off a cliff and killed himself. So he began to fight for justice for the boy. The novel is written on five sheets of paper, nearly 10,000 words.
The story that Bao Jixiang is writing is from the 25th century. The end of the world is near when a planet breaks off its orbit and hurtles toward earth. A boy is selected for a planetary expedition to find a solution: either find another planet suitable for human habitation or change the orbit of that planet. He has not yet written down one way to save humanity. He plans to use the first — to send humans to another planet and start a new life.
On September 24, Bao jixiang was taken to Beijing by Ningde Hu. Bao jixiang was honored as a model of filial piety. Before leaving, he was very excited, repeatedly asked Bao Qiyong: “When is the raising of the national flag in Beijing? He was also worried that others would not be able to take care of his father. He knew that his father was dependent on him in this family.
On the wall of the room was one of his paintings, “A Simple and sweet home”. In the picture, the dining table, sofa, wardrobe and wheelchair are arranged in a very clean way. Bao Qiyong, the father, is lying in front of the window with a big smile on his face, while he himself is facing away from the picture, showing no expression. The door to his left was painted in eight colors, the same colors that had once appeared in the strange tunnel at The Middlebury Elementary School farm.
The tunnel with laughter, eggplant flying man, green pepper wolverine, pumpkin sisters, melon Superman, small melon aunt…… The children created various nicknames for each other, and the dark green-filled passageway lit up. Gourds, gourds, colorful pumpkins hung all over the 70-meter passage vines and vines, the sun hit the fruit, colorful.
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