This spring, I had the opportunity to visit Meigu County, the heart of the Daliang Mountains, for nearly 20 days. I stayed in the homes of the Yi people to get a closer look at the daily life of the Daliang Mountains. Previously, my understanding of the Daliang Mountains was limited to what the media conveyed about the crisis: drugs, AIDS, and poverty. On the one hand, the field visit confirmed and deepened these contents, but on the other hand, it also changed my understanding: under the crisis and fracture focused on by the outside world, Daliangshan life still has its daily roots, including labor, living, emotions, customs, and even the same rich human content as the outside world, which is often neglected, making Daliangshan a kind of “alien”. “, a “fossil” in the process of history. A more internal perspective is needed to understand the relationship between everyday life in the Dalang Mountains and the fractured crises of drugs, AIDS, and extreme poverty, which are often inseparably interdependent. Underneath the crisis lies the vitality of a community and the hope to overcome the predicament. The trust in sunlight and land, the sensitivity and self-respect preserved in the gaps of history, and a certain simplicity of human nature can create the appearance of poverty and desolation, but also contain intrinsic values worth cherishing. In addition, a change of reality is taking place. Although time is running out, I hope to get closer to the people in the Daliang Shan land and convey them more inwardly, rather than just being an outsider gauger. This article is the next part of “Life in the Daliang Mountains: Everyday and Worrying”.
“In Daliang Shan, people are always drying in the sun and hiding in the darkness of their houses. It is hard to distinguish between the everyday and the troubled, like dust and earth.”
Dust and dirt
At noon, everyone was lying on the ground in front of Qupenshibu’s house.
It was raining, and it was difficult to walk across the yard toward the door of Shibu’s house. The ground was piled up with humus and turned into thin mud that stretched all the way to the door, sourced from the two pig nests by the gate and the livestock shed across the yard, where the animals pulled down manure and trampled everything that was formed into sludge.
The situation is even more difficult in front of the house of Jin Gujiha and Ada’s mother and son, where a few skipping stones in the dung water become the only way for outsiders, and a slightly drier half of the lean-to yard is occupied by a large, hostile dog that guards the circuitous path of the sheep back home.
This has been the scene since the change. A few years ago, livestock were kept in the house, and it was a mountain tradition to use the front door of the house as a composting ground.
Nowadays, after the pigs eat in front of the house, Shibu’s mother drives them to the path behind the house leading to Jin Gu Jiha’s house to excrete manure, and the path is strewn with pig poop. There was no pig pen for composting. Sometimes, Shibu’s mother would call the piglets and pregnant sows into the house to feed them so that they would not compete for food.
People did not have toilets and went far and near to relieve themselves in the field. Young people who work and children who go to school switch back and forth between “going to the toilet” and “going to the toilet”, and young people like Gogo and Wuniu feel uncomfortable at first when they return home, “but no one is there to fix it. “.
The sun was strong at noon, and the dung in front of the door dried up a bit. People taking a midday break spread out their chalwars and lie down, or sit on the ground, and a few children sit on the woodpile next to the yard. In every village, you can see people sitting or lying on the ground, chatting idly, the topic of conversation sometimes and sometimes, gathering and scattering with the wind. A few women are sewing the chalwa in their hands, a finely crafted wool lining chalwa that takes six months of work and can only be done in the bright sunlight. Even in the city of Meigu County, the situation is the same everywhere.
Sunlight is the best thing in Daliang Mountain, far better than the darkness under the roof at this time. As soon as the sun came out, people would sit on the ground and gather in the sunlight. The sunlight and the dust together shape the color of the Yi people’s faces, and the slightly reddish earth here is so close that it is hard to separate.
In the afternoon, it rained lightly and the crowd dispersed to work, while Shi Bu’s third brother stayed on the courtyard floor, unmoving. The naked little brother beside him cried and was carried away by his ama. The oldest brother remained sitting on the courtyard floor until the drizzle passed and it was going to be twilight.
In front of Sobu’s house, a dozen or so sunbathers gathered at noon, mom and the big and small children, grandmother and aunt, a few neighbors’ adults and children. Grandmother, who had been suffering from a cold, was lying on her side on a worn-out chalwa, and aunt, who was also suffering from a cold, was lying on a high woodpile. The little brother was lying on a piece of clothing laid in front of the door, his belly bulging high, and his eldest sister, who was taking care of him, was blowing into his belly button. Later, she picked him up on her back and bowed down to play a game of cutting wild artemisia on the stone slab, just like A-Ma cutting pig’s grass. The second sister climbed up and down on the pig fence at the entrance. The little sister was released from her mother’s back and lay beside her mother who was sewing the chalwar. The oldest five, still naked, and the oldest four played pokeball in the dirt.
“The little brother lay on a piece of clothing laid in front of the door, bulging his high belly, and the eldest sister who took care of him blew into his belly button.” (Photo by the author)
A moment later, the little sister with a cold cried, a moment of unattended she pooped, and no one felt that they should wipe her bottom, allowing her in open pants to rub around clean, only the family’s black dog sniffed her bottom with interest. The bare bottom of the old five began to bleed again, and the dust on his face stuck together. The second sister’s nose still hanging in the upper lip a stretch. For a while Old Six, unattended, cried loudly on the ground in front of the door until Big Sister remembered him and came back oh-so-coaxingly, picking him up and carrying him.
The big pig was taken away from the pig pen and tethered to the slope next to the gate, where it slept comfortably in the sun and returned to the gate to eat in the evening.
From here, the whole village is exposed to the sun, but it’s obviously not as clean as the area around Jue Li’s house, which is closer to the lower hills: the paths are trampled into mud by the livestock, the sun doesn’t dry them out, the manure flows, the flies buzz, and the yards are composted with manure. The road is thrown a pile of beer bottles, is the stale of the festival indulgence, no one to recycle. White pear blossoms bloom in high places, and the situation on the ground seems to be completely unrelated.
In a corner, three small girls lying in the dust, as if in natural swaddling clothes, all unsuspecting. The dust of the face and hair was nearly transparent, and the beauty of the natural clear face, like a festival of extremely flamboyant costumes, merged with the shocking dirt, difficult to decompose. In Sobhu’s mother and two sisters, there is also such a strong contrast, seemingly inherently so and disturbing.
There were no towels, laundry detergent, or anything else related to washing in the house. The water pipe clattered at the door, but no one thought to wash their faces. It used to be necessary to walk across the hillside to pick up water, but two years ago the government funded and each family contributed its own water pipe to the front door, but people who were used to living with dust and dirt mostly did not feel the need to change their habits.
Shi Bu’s young uncle had a pair of plastic slippers and would walk across the yard at night to wash his feet. Although he had never worked, he was the first person in the village to start washing his feet. Gogo and Wuniu, who had gone out to work, would wash their feet in a basin. Auntie and her younger siblings did not follow suit, although they followed suit and learned to watch TV and play mobile games.
In the afternoon, Sobu’s aunt lies next to her family’s yard lot, more debilitated than yesterday. Her cold has worsened, but she doesn’t plan to go to the hospital or take medicine. There is no health office in the village. Jyuri’s father had a sudden stomach ache that year and passed away because there was no medical treatment.
Wine was the usual way to cope, and last night’s wine and roasted eggs or sugar wine had been a carefully prepared remedy. Colds generally heal themselves, and more than half the children in the village kindergarten classrooms are often absent because of colds, and the preschool class where Jue Li and Sobhu are enrolled is not exempt.
For more serious conditions, the solution is to do bhumi. Sobhu took a day off a few days ago, and when Grandma had been having headaches for a while, Amma hired someone to do the bhumi.
For the people of Daliang Mountain, being a bima is a condition for getting your life together. All kinds of things, big and small, can be done Bimo: from the flu to bedridden to light and serious illness, bad luck, weather anomalies, rushing against evil spirits, praying for abundant cattle and sheep, wedding and funeral, or just the annual routine prayer for peace and sacrifice to ancestors. Distinguished by the size and grandeur of the matter, the time and pay required for the Bimo also varies greatly, from a few hours to cure headaches and brain fever to exorcise ghosts three through the night, from killing a chicken for a guest to slaughtering a sheep and sending several hundred dollars. Grandma Sobhu’s price for being a bima was a chicken.
Shibu and Asa’s grandfather, who was herding in the mountains, was the oldest Bimo master in the village and also taught Shibu’s father and uncle to do Bimo. Relying on the ability of the Bimo, grandfather does not lack meat to eat and drink, often have pocket money, but also to earn food to help the family, the prestige in the village is also high. So far he was asked to come down from the mountain four or five times a month to be a Bimo.
Grandmother Sobhu is paid cheaply for doing bhumi, also because the one who comes to do bhumi is one of Sobhu’s family uncles and grandfather. Both lived in the lower part of the village. The uncle had a line of clothes that hung in the house, a bucket hat and floral-trimmed blouse with a chalwar, and most importantly a long set of wild boar tusks that he got from hunting on the rocky hills behind the village, polished to a shine. Wearing the tusks on his lips, as if he had gained some kind of divine power from the boar, the uncle began to ring the bell in his hand, chanting ancient scriptures, and then pulling out the sticks from the wooden tube in his hand to divine fortune. A yellowed volume of handwritten scriptures is still kept in my uncle’s house for the most difficult spells of exorcism, handed down from my grandfather.
In the uncle’s and grandfather’s displays to outsiders, Bimo seems less sacred and takes on a certain performative quality. But its authority over the locals is still unquestionable. The more senior grandfather, despite having eight children at home, was still able to eat two mixed steamed buns with white flour and bun flour, clearly better than the less senior uncle. His yard was more in line with an old-fashioned Yi tradition: dung overflowed, black to the eye, and there seemed to be no fear of germs breeding.
No one thinks that people’s frequent colds and children’s pot bellies have anything to do with dust or manure. At the Firewool Primary School on top of the mountain, the teachers prepared toothbrushes and toothpaste and asked the children to brush their teeth after eating and wash their hands before entering the classroom. But between the school and the village, a deep rift separates them.
The prettiest and cleanest things in the house are the photos hanging on the lintel or prominently on the door of each house. The people in the frames, dressed in bright costumes, were photographed in front of the flowering pavilions arranged by the photo studio, all clean and beautiful, seemingly stored away in another world that could not be easily touched.
Aizi
Youse lives in a high place in the village, like a hermit.
His dwelling was a stack used by his sister’s family to store cereals, with four wooden posts supporting a wooden closet with a roof to keep out the rain. The roof of the one where Tomose was staying was neatly built and covered with a wide stone slab, which looked like it had been specially renovated. Youse’s bedding was laid on a bale of cereals piled up in a wooden closet, with a chalwa as a pillow. Another towel quilt, wet from last night’s storm, was hung out to dry on the wooden fence.
Youse was found to be carrying the virus during the first HIV test in the village more than a decade ago, when he had a history of drug addiction for many years. Since then, drug addiction and everything other than the virus have gradually left Youse.
Because of his drug addiction, Youse was rehabilitated twice and went to jail several times; the family house was sold. His wife began to drink heavily in her sorrow and hanged herself a few years ago, and people in the village suspected that she was infected with AIDS; his eldest son died at the age of 19, his eldest daughter was married, his second daughter was taken away by relatives, and his youngest son attended the county love class and never came back. Youse became a complete bachelor. His sister provided him with a place to stay, and he relied on his sisters for food and odd jobs.
Youse carried with him free government-issued drugs for the treatment of AIDS, which he took on time for nearly five years, perhaps because of this, he never had any symptoms. But the addiction didn’t let him go, often attacking him in the late afternoon, driving him down from his perch on the pallet and down the hill to the street to find a chance to take a puff. Having lost his financial resources, his drug use could only be borrowed and scraped, and the price of a hit of heroin was as high as 300 – 400 yuan, and that was already half the price after the big drop.
This is due to the fact that drug addicts have died of mass morbidity. Youse is not the only AIDS bachelor in the village, one of his companions did not sell his house, but also lost his family and property, his wife committed suicide, the remaining children were picked up by relatives, the house was empty except for a pile of pine needles for lying down. The house of his own brother next door was empty, two children died one after another, his wife died, and the man jumped into the river below the mountain in despair, and his body was found more than ten days later.
There is a group photo on the wall of Tomosai’s sister’s house, in which Tomosai and two other young men are standing together, with the street scene of Guangzhou, where they work, behind them, but the word funeral home appears unintentionally. The cousin standing in the middle with sunglasses and baggy pant legs has been dead for six years, and he was the partner with whom Youse first tried heroin and shared syringes. Being in a foreign country, the three young men’s big grin posture looks like they are hiding something and rejecting it.
“People who use drugs seem to be rich and have face, especially when they invite people to smoke. Also, for example, if a cousin gets hooked on drugs, let the cousin get hooked too, so it’s not shy compared to just yourself.” An old man in the village described. It seems that after the smoke of the white powder, one can temporarily hide the self-esteem that was hurt by the foreign country that was out of place. It was not until I was held hostage by my addiction to the present day, and became a foreigner living in the place where I was born, that
It was only after the vertical lines on the photo were dispersed between the eyebrows of the friendly color, that the transparent eyes were empty of any trace of the life and death of a loved one.
My cousin left behind a wife and five children, living in a dirt house on the lower slope of the village. The eldest daughter, Ajar, remembers the circumstances of her father’s illness to his death. Before he died, he looked very bad, his lips were peeling, his hair was falling out, and the veins in his arms were bulging. He often coughed, had no energy to work, and always took money from his mother’s corn sales to buy drugs, or borrowed money, “The family suffered the most during that time, mom and we could only eat corn.”
When the drug addiction attacked, Dad was trembling and had a temper, Mom was also beaten several times because she refused to pay, Ajar and his siblings were very afraid. “He wanted to stop smoking, but he couldn’t quit.” Sometimes Dad cried again saying he was sorry for his family, and the family cried.
On the day of his death, when his mother was asleep and Ajar and his sister had gone to bed, his father said to them you must listen to your mother. Sleepy Ajakarta was confused when dad picked up the pesticide for planting corn and drank it. By the time he woke up mom to prepare to take him to the hospital, dad had already died.
When Dad died without being sent up the mountain, he was burned in the woods in front of the door, leaving only two stones for piles of firewood, and no trace of the ashes thrown. Fortunately, Mom had been tested several times and was not infected with HIV. Usually Ajar and her sister like to sit on a wooden chair left by her father, a sturdy chair with a carved back made by Dad himself, and the bed the two sisters sleep on was also made by Dad when he was alive, with four pillars for hanging the tent.
The little girl climbed a ladder to pass a lighter to a drug addicted AIDS patient who lives high up in the village bale. (Photo by the author)
Several of the people who used drugs with their father have developed the disease, and two have died. Ajak’s uncle said that at its peak, two or three AIDS patients used to die in the village a year. There are still five or six drug addicts left in the village, mostly middle-aged people in their forties, who sold the family’s pigs, sheep and cattle to buy drugs to smoke. Under the shadow of AIDS, young people are afraid to try drugs, and when they get married, they have to go to the hospital to check that there is no AIDS and other diseases before they get married. A teenager from Ajar’s neighborhood got married last year and went through this process.
The impact of drug addiction on this village near Zhaoge County is still evident in the present: the two men sitting on the ground in the sun at the head of the village have taken drugs, one was drunk, one used to open a store, others took drugs to him in exchange for credit, the store collapsed a year ago, I became addicted but could not afford to take drugs; the village clerk standing next to him is also suspected of having taken drugs. According to the clerk, since the introduction of drugs into the village more than a decade ago, reached a peak around 2005, a total of more than 30 people have been smoking, more than 10 people died. Together with the various deaths caused by collateral, almost no family is spared.
In addition to drug addiction, alcoholism and smoking are alternatives. A young man in the village said that when drinking without food, a couple of pounds of alcohol is rare. When working outside friends drinking and singing k, the average amount of alcohol he had to drink five or six bottles of beer, the number of people, each night to spend more than 1,000 yuan. The New Year’s Eve back-to-back, and the usual wedding and funeral banquet, more to get drunk, where drunk where to sleep, piles of bottles can be seen everywhere in the village. The “bed” of Youse is indispensable for the five packets of cigarettes, which are smoked more than two packs a day. Dry tobacco sticks are often held in the mouths of women, and Sobu’s second sister is already swallowing like an adult.
Sitting in the sun, lighting a cigarette, you can’t see the sadness and happiness on your face, like the face of this village, after so much death and sadness, still living plainly, receiving the breeze, sunshine and produce, but also reproduce a large number of children.
The two sisters, Amu and Alu, who live in Niu Niu Dam, lost their mother and father one after another in a few years because their father contracted AIDS from drugs while doing business abroad and passed it on to their mother who went out together. In the past, the family was well off, grandfather’s generation handed down a lot of land on the street, the father needs money because of drug addiction, are sold cheap, along with the family’s adobe house.
The two sisters have been living in a temporary rental house or in their grandmother’s house since they were born. Their father was in reeducation through labor when their mother died, and the family had nothing. Aki and Aru “felt they were different from other children and were not fed or clothed the same way.” The consequences of short stature due to malnutrition are still evident in the two sisters today.
Dad came home from the reformatory, already in poor health, and died two years later. During this time Dad finally gave up drugs for good, starting with a direct conflict between Aru and Dad. A friend that Dad used to do drugs with approached him and asked him to smoke powder. To appease Aru even took five dollars and gave it to her. Aru knocked down the five dollars along with the white powder on the table, pushed down the dad who was ready to smoke the powder, and scolded him saying, “Do you still want to go to jail?” While scolding her dad, Aru cried out in pain, and her friend left, embarrassed, saying “It’s okay, it’s okay”.
Dad never took drugs again. Dad was so distressed by his two sisters that he stopped sleeping with Aru after she got sick, and wouldn’t even let his daughters touch his face. Once Aru insisted on sleeping with her father, but he firmly refused.
Shortly before his death, Aru accompanied him to the county hospital alone and looked after him for a week. Dad’s symptoms were already very serious, coughing up blood, peeling skin, stomach pain, and a dark face that was a bit creepy. “Dad said he couldn’t get better, was dying, and told me to study hard. I kind of didn’t believe it, just like Mom did before she died.”
After Dad died, he was burned in the mountains according to custom, right on the ground where Mom used to be burned. The children were not allowed to be present during the burning and cremation, but the sisters would visit from time to time afterwards.
From their grandmother’s earthen house on the back slope of Niu Niu Dam, they walked through a dry stream covered with silt and garbage, past paths covered with bamboo leaves and flowering alfalfa fields, to a collective grove of trees surrounded by barbed wire, where the sisters skillfully lifted a slit and went underneath. A short walk up through the somewhat barren poplar forest brought them to the place where their parents’ ashes had been burned. There was a small patch of uncovered ground in the barren grass, marked only by a nearby poplar tree that appeared to have had half of its bark scorched in the cremation.
The two sisters sit facing this small patch of dirt, heads bowed, letting the silence pass, sometimes speaking softly to their parents for a moment or two, and as if no sound had been made in their hearts. There is no lily incense, wine or paper money in their hands, nor a bunch of wild flowers, only silence. This is the way the Yi people in Daliang Mountain mourn their loved ones.
The shocking and painful past fades away in the breeze, leaving only a vague scent. On the path behind the house of Shayi and Ajayi, the sunlight was almost transparent after the rain, and the opposite slope seemed to turn dark green in the course of the day. My mother was mending the tiles nearby, the two youngest siblings nestled beside her. Shayi and Ajar climbed up a tsubaki tree to pick the first sprouts. The gentle breeze and the smell of growth soothe the memories of last night.
Colorful Gift
Gogo’s phone saved a picture of a young man with angry hair, a boyfriend he met in a part-time job, and is now in Zhejiang. But after returning home she deleted the young man’s qq number, the two have not been in contact for two months, “Mom did not agree.
The direct reason for the mother’s disapproval is that the young man’s family is two towns away from each other, and it is not convenient for Gogo to go home and help after the marriage.
Gogo obeyed her mother’s wishes, “If really her mother does not agree, forget it”. In Daliang Mountain, even if some young people in the work abroad began to fall in love freely, still have to be included in the matchmaking and parental order procedures. Otherwise, it is “abduction”, which can cause great family conflicts and crises. In reality, few young people make their own decisions, because it is difficult for Yi people to take root in other countries where they work, and they must rely on their hometown roots.
Another reason is the heavy weight attached to marriage: the return to the mother’s family and the bride price.
Qupen Asa’s young uncle has been married for a year, but is living a single life. Daughter-in-law previously unknown, only met at the wedding, the same day back to his mother’s house, not with the room. Only this side of the work and the end of the year Bima and other important things, can invite people to call. But the daughter-in-law does not want to come, and the young uncle does not want to call, “do not like her”, usually the two can not call once a month.
According to tradition, the couple may not even have a chance to see each other at the wedding. After the daughter-in-law returns to the door, she needs to stay in her mother’s house for three or four years, and her husband only occasionally meet, and although the couple is married, there is still a serious physical taboo. If the husband never seizes the opportunity to make a breakthrough, most notably to make the woman pregnant, the marriage is in danger of becoming a pie in the sky. Sandy neighbor’s family a girl, married four years still stay in the mother’s house, right now 22 years old, to wait until 25 years old to really pass the door.
When the marriage is generally not for the marriage certificate, the protection is that the woman repent of the marriage need to pay several times the bride price paid by the man. For example, the oldest girl in Sha Yi’s neighborhood repented of her marriage, and the 40,000 bride price she received paid 160,000.
The bride price is an alarmingly high figure. Nowadays, the bride price for a girl like Wogo reaches more than 200,000 yuan, and those who are slightly educated or have a job are close to 300,000. Every year, the price of the bride price is rising, like a building a year, the year before last was 130,000, last year rose to 170,000. In places close to Xichang, the bride price is even higher. Five years ago, the price ranged from 30,000 to 70,000, and 16 years ago when Ajakarta’s parents got married, the bride price figure was $5,000. It’s hard to imagine how these unattainable figures are associated with a smoky, poor dirt house.
Few young men are able to earn enough money for the bride price by working on their own, and the source of the bride price usually depends on the income from the sisters’ marriages to swap. The mother’s family in the village of Firewoo Shaogo older brother married a few years ago, spending more than 70,000 bride price half of the bride price of Shaogo’s marriage, the younger brother married 130,000 yuan is half by the family, half by their own earnings. Shi Bu young uncle married 130,000 yuan bride money, together with the wedding expenses of more than 200,000, but from the accumulation of the bride price of the two sisters married at home. His new room bed with a picture of the four sisters, daughter-in-law Quek.
On the girls’ end, the money earned by Gogo and Wuniu working part-time, in addition to the usual help for the family, the savings can be taken away as a dowry when they get married, but also depends on the wishes of the parents. The mother to the five fruit to build the wedding, is a pair of red agate charm worth more than 10,000 yuan, another pair of Miao silver bracelet.
If a family lacks girls and has many boys, getting a daughter-in-law becomes an almost impossible task. Qupenshibu and his younger siblings face this dilemma in the future: only one girl among five children, and the situation in Sobu’s family is reversed. Paradoxically, it is precisely the girl’s demand for heavy gifts to secure the boy’s marriage that creates the dilemma.
For the poorer families, in order to eliminate the burden of bride price, to ensure that the boy to get a daughter-in-law, the transfer of marriage and child marriage is a cheap scheme, and even the deployment of the three families will appear. The future marriage of Shayi and Sandi was arranged by her father in the year of his death, and the family of her second aunt in Xichang: Sandi married a girl from her second aunt’s family, while Shayi married a boy from her second aunt’s brother. This way all three families did not have to pay the bride price. This child marriage apparently makes the first year of Sha Yi is under great pressure, mentioning the face floating cloud, but more problematic aunt cousin marriage, no one seems to mind.
As the marriage is not really implemented until the child is conceived, each family here has a large number of children, almost all have paid birth control fines, and many children do not have an account. The four over-born children of Sobu’s family were fined more than 10,000 yuan, with the one-year-old brother paying the most, and the family is still in debt. Asa’s youngest brother and sister were over-born and fined 3,000 yuan.
The youngest child of Shibu’s great uncle’s family was not registered. And Ajaya, Sha Yi sisters together with the sheep herding Aniu, mother has been living in the grandmother’s house, only occasionally come over, his family a total of six sisters, including older siblings working outside the home, only two brothers on the family register. Ten-year-old Aniu watched the sheep for other families, not knowing that, in addition to poverty, he lacked a credential to survive.
Going to school
Firewoo Primary School is built on top of a high slope and is called “School on the Cloud” by the teachers.
The children who climb up the slope to school are also temporarily separated from the dirt ground at home, living a “day on the clouds”. For this mountainous region, the school was like a flying saucer that landed in their lives.
Several young teachers from the early childhood education, engineering and accounting industries taught the relatively relaxed preschool curriculum with a fresh breath of fresh air from the outside world. With the sound of coughing and coughing, the children, who range in age, learn together from recognizing words and counting, doing crafts to singing and dancing, staring at the teacher in a shy and spontaneous manner, with a kind of devotion not often seen in the outside world.
A year ago there was no school here, and except for a very few wealthy families who sent their children to the countryside, most of the children were illiterate. Six months after he started school, Jue Li could already write down his family’s names neatly, and although he had to break his fingers to count the numbers, for him and for many children, crossing the threshold of the classroom was meaningful in itself.
Everything at school is new, beyond the textbooks, there are colorful blocks, handmade basketball ping pong balls, public toilets and toothbrushes, pictures on the fence, and songs on the speakers. Many children still come to school on Saturdays and Sundays to play ball or find teachers to play with, bringing with them the red and white wildflowers that clump on the hillside, so much so that it is hard to stop the Soma flowers that venture to climb from the steep slopes.
From time to time, young people returning from their part-time jobs come to look at the school. Shaogo, who has returned to her mother’s home, stands on the school playground, watching the students dance “Little Apple” in a collective circle, standing from morning until the noon meal, the breeze blowing her figure wrapped in a green challah. At a similar age, she never had the chance to see the school, and the playground she stepped on underfoot was the grass where she grazed her sheep back then.
The school also brought benefits, national nutritional meal subsidies and public welfare organizations cooperate to provide free lunch to preschools and kindergartens, snow-white rice and meals with meat at all times, which children can not often enjoy at home, which has become a motivation for parents to send their children, large and small, to school, many of whom are already laborers helping their families.
The Firewool Elementary School was built by a public charity and has public status, but all the teachers are paraprofessionals and relayed on an annual basis. This institutional informality actually brings a fresh air, with close attention from the outside world, such as the children having uniforms provided by the charity. This is something that Shibu and his classmates at Darrow Elementary School do not have the opportunity to enjoy. The contrast between the stark colors and the gray and black of the two schools is clear.
The native Daluo Primary School, the central school of the township, has only four teachers, with two grade breaks due to a lack of teachers and classrooms. In the classroom, a few good students in the first two rows were able to respond to the teacher’s questions, while the last few rows had blank expressions. Like Firewool Elementary School, there is no Yi language instruction here, but teachers use Yi interchangeably in their lessons.
The school is planning to enroll a new first grade in the second half of the year, and the director says he plans to relax the age range to include children who are past school age. Since the classes are held in a temporary classroom in the teachers’ dormitory, only 20 students can be enrolled.
Qupen Shibu is the lucky one among the over-age children. Last year, he was still feeding horses and cutting firewood at home, carrying his younger siblings on his back, but this year he got the chance to go to school with his younger brother Asa. Compared to the higher Asa, Shi Bu’s language lags behind, but can also memorize a few lines of Tang poetry taught in his brother’s class, such as “see the mountains from afar”, and learn math faster. The four-hour round trip to the mountains every day and the flash floods that broke the road on rainy days did not dampen his enthusiasm for lessons.
From the vicinity of the school to the distant mountains, there were children out of school driving sheep everywhere. Ada and the two young girls who herd the sheep next door can only learn Chinese on TV, and like their parents, the best Chinese they can say is “I don’t understand”.
The efforts of foreign teachers are extremely important to this area, as exemplified by the charity schools in Huowu Primary School and Sha Yi. The charity school that Sha Yi attends caters to single-parent children, providing three meals a day and seasonal clothing and bedding, and is extremely strict in its management. In Liangshan, missionaries are generally respected, receive transportation and discounts at hotels, and the sense of “you are here to help us” has permeated the hearts and minds of ordinary people, and the government of Huowu Township takes great care of several missionary teachers.
However, the “saddest essay” incident that happened a while ago led to the difficulties of Somahua’s teaching organization, which also reflects the complex sensitivity of public welfare and public opinion when they interface with the local system and public sentiment. A Chengdu-based contributor to Somahua revealed that they are now gradually repairing the damage caused by the “saddest essay” incident.
For the children’s generation, the change in education is much more substantial than the previous generation or even the older siblings who were just a few years older not long ago. Ajakarta always remembered her father’s dying instructions, and she and the best students in her class agreed to go to university together in the future. Without her sister’s “baby brother”, she had one less burden on her life’s prospects and could dream of being a “singer”, idolizing the TFboys and talent show kids on TV.
She was the top student in her school’s annual examination and received a certificate of “Outstanding Student” and a 300 yuan bonus from the county government of Meigu. The prize money was given to her mother in exchange for two bags of rice and fertilizer for the family. On weekends, she and her sister spread out their homework on the two bags of rice in the sunlight coming in through the front door.
This was quite a bit luckier than Dad was back then: Dad had always done well in elementary school, but did not have the tuition to attend junior high school and dropped out in fifth grade. Sha Yi was also at the top of her class in her studies.
Education brings about a tacit change of concept. When it comes to the family’s New Year’s Eve “bima”, Ajar says it is a “superstition”. She and her sister don’t like the Chalwa costumes and find it easy to wear the winter clothes and sportswear they buy. Jeli and Sobhu also preferred the school uniform.
But when they put on their green or black chalwars, their tall “hero buns” or cocked hats, they, like their parents, would show a certain difference, different from the ones they had in the fields or in the dust by the fire. It seems that the ancient breath of this land, through frustration, ready to be confined, but not completely lost, seeking their own place in time.
(Youse, Aja, Aru, Aki and Shayi are pseudonyms in this article)
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