During my work distributing aid for the Baby Shower Program in Bijie, Guizhou, I got to know Jiangxia. My wife and I were visiting her twin cousins when we saw the girl who had a mole on her forehead the size of a soybean. Jiangxia is ten years old, a fourth-grade student of a rural elementary school. Since the day she stepped foot in a classroom, she had the best grades of the class. When I met her she was fretting about a “lackluster” score in reading, which was actually excellent at 88 out of 100. Her scores in Math and English were almost perfect. JIangxia also won an award for calligraphy, a rare achievement for a girl her age.
Jiangxia’s family had considerable difficulties to send her to school. Her parents had four children, two girls and two boys. The oldest, a girl, is thirteen. Jiangxia was the second. Because of the “illegal” births above quota, the family had been fined for more than 2000 yuan. When Jiangxia was born, the family was fined twice. One of the fines, paid in June, 2000, left nothing more than a wrinkled and torn piece of white paper slip. The official who gave the slip said that he would give them a more formal receipt. Eventually, the family was told that the official transferred to some other locale and the formal receipt vanished forever.
Jiangxia’s grandparents both suffered serious chronic illnesses. It was impossible to treat her grandmother’s heart disease locally. The family accumulated heavy debts sending her to treatment in other cities. The farming family had little land and few prospects of ever paying off the debt. Teachers in the city had heard of Jiangxia and urged her parents to send her to a city school. But a public school in the city, although officially free, would still charge hundreds a month for books and other fees. The parents could barely provide for the education for all four children in the village when Jiangxia and her sister helped around the house by tending the stove and feeding livestock. During busy times of the season, Jiangxia also had to help in the fields. Her teachers said that she would have great chances to go to first-rate universities in the future if she could escape the chores at home and concentrate on her studies.
Her grandparents and parents had made great sacrifices to send the children to school, Jiangxia said. Her biggest dream is to study hard, get into a good university and be able to help her siblings through school so her parents could have some days of rest in the future.
