An Wei's Educational Journey:​Post #2: An Wei in Junior High School, Fufeng, China

An Wei in 1956, the first year of junior high school.

An Wei, his thick hair combed back, set off for Fufeng Junior High School in the middle of rural China. It was August 1956. For the first time, he would be attending a school without a village classmate. But at age thirteen, he told himself, he was ready for new adventures. In elementary school, he had excelled on exams and now was the first in his village to go on to higher education. His parents were proud of him, but his dour grandfather just scowled, dubious that schooling would ever be useful.


Since An Shang was the village farthest from the school, his eldest brother went with him on this first trip so he would know which dirt tracks to follow. There were no roads in their area, and no one owned a bicycle.


An Wei threw the required sack of wheat flour weighing twenty-five kilos over his shoulder, and they headed for the paths that led across fields, through villages and down into the valley where the town of Fufeng lay ten kilometers away. As the sack got heavier, his brother took turns carrying it. Next time, An Wei realized, he would have to carry it himself.


Once in Fufeng, An Wei said good-bye to his brother and joined the other students to register, get his food coupons in exchange for the sack of grain, and learn about his classes that would start the next day. The school was bigger than any An Wei had seen. The school gate, set in a high brick wall that extended around the periphery of the school, stood higher than three grown men. Several hundred students from all over the county were housed here for both junior and senior high, with a cafeteria, classrooms, dormitories, teachers’ offices, and a large sports area.

The staff and students standing against the school gate and wall, July 1957.

Excited and exhausted, he spent that first night in the dormitory sandwiched together with fifteen boys on a slatted wooden sleeping platform. Their talking, noises and smells were hard to deal with, and when he tried to turn over, he found he was wedged between the two on either side of him. What he wouldn’t give to feel the warmth of his brothers on the familiar family sleeping platform, giggling and poking each other.


Classes carried An Wei into worlds he did not know existed, and his love of studying increased. The teachers urged them to excel. They soon learned the strong and weak points of each student. Although most of the teachers in Fufeng had only attended a teacher training high school, they all took their work seriously. They planned lessons together and practiced delivering the most information effectively for each class period. The teachers demanded that the students study much harder than before and talked of how to negotiate life in the world beyond their villages.

Students doing practical jobs for their school. No date.

The tradition continues today. Students at junior high school near
Baoji, Shaanxi, are responsible for cleaning their classroom floor, 2006.

An Wei dove into the new lessons with his usual determination, making himself learn difficult characters and memorize increasingly complex texts and mathematical algorithms. When other boys horsed around in the yard or slept, An Wei sat in the low brick classroom building or paced back and forth on the sports ground trying to understand and memorize texts.


He liked to read stories and tried his hand at writing some. He and some other students admired the short stories of one of the teachers, and An Wei dreamed of becoming a writer. But then, they were shocked to learn that the teacher was labeled a “bourgeois writer” in a campaign launched by Mao Zedong and sent to the countryside to do manual labor. An Wei realized it was dangerous to become a writer. He needed to bury his dream.


Learning was not easy for him. He needed to go over material again and again before he understood and remembered it, but he loved it. He became a top student and was selected the class study monitor, taking on responsibilities assigned by the teachers such as collecting and distributing the students’ homework notebooks.


With great enthusiasm, he joined the school propaganda singing troupe, learning songs about their new country. One of his favorite songs was “The March of the Volunteers.”


Arise, we who refuse to be slaves;
With our very flesh and blood
Let us build our new Great Wall!
The peoples of China are at their most critical time,
Everybody must roar defiance.
Arise! Arise! Arise!i


During one school vacation, they toured different townships, staying in people’s homes and teaching songs to the villagers to encourage them to adopt new ways. It was the best way he could think of to help China.


Classes were held six days a week. Then on Saturday afternoons the students returned home for the weekend. An Wei trekked out of the valley toward An Shang. When it was raining, they walked barefoot to protect their shoes. He walked past farmers bent to the soil, the fields turning from green to gold with the passing seasons.

As he trudged up the final hill of the long walk, the low earth-colored buildings of An Shang came into view. Home.


Chores awaited him. Now a teenager, An Wei’s father expected him to help his brothers plow, thresh and grind flour. Although he hoped his future would take him far from these grueling demands, he knew it was important to learn in case he failed in school.


Since early elementary school land reform had been progressing in the rural areas of China. Increasing numbers of families were grouped together to share their oxen, tools and labor. These cooperatives took ownership of the land and distributed food on the basis of a family’s labor.


Part way through An Wei’s second year of junior high school China began a Five-Year Plan, called The Great Leap Forward. Lacking modern amenities such as tractors and fertilizer, Mao Zedong relied on revolutionary zeal and the energy of farmers to improve the country. The initiative included forming large communes, increasing grain and steel production and eliminating pests—rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows. Having carried out a wildly successful experiment of forming a vast commune in one part of the country, the government leaders decided to form them across China. They gathered many thousands of people into each one where they shared property, food and work responsibility. Within a year, China had formed twenty-five thousand communes.


In 1958, the students dove in to help China progress. One initiative exhorted citizens to help build China’s new factories by making steel in backyard furnaces. With large red flags billowing in the open breezes and singing as loudly as they could, An Wei and the other class leaders of Fufeng Junior Middle School led the long march to the Wei River.


“Across the mountains, across the plains,” they sang.
“Over the turbulent Yellow and Yangtze Rivers;
This vast and beautiful land,
Is our dear homeland;
The heroic people have stood up!
Our unity and fraternity is as strong as steel.”


The words thrilled An Wei. He turned around to look at the long line of students singing behind him. It was his final year of junior high school, and they were helping Chairman Mao launch the Great Leap Forward, a determined effort to outpace the West.


For a month, the students dug up all the iron-bearing black sand they could find in the riverbed and hauled it to the school’s backyard furnace. Their enthusiasm to outpace the British in steel production and help build a strong country was unbeatable.


An Wei loved the colorful posters outside the school gate. One showed happy villagers harvesting bountiful crops. In another, drumming workers on the backs of dragons rushed forward while the British were left behind. “Go all out and aim high,” it read. “The East leaps forward, the West is worried.”


An Wei next threw himself into the Four Pests Campaign to eradicate sparrows and other pests. He helped form teams to battle them. All night he and other students banged pots, scaring the crop-eating birds so they could not land. When the sparrows dropped from exhaustion, he raced other students to kill them. An Wei loved the excitement, but the hours of physical labor meant classes met irregularly, and he missed studying.


At the end of ninth grade the exam to qualify for senior high school loomed. Although his chances of passing seemed slim because of his illiterate village origins, An Wei’s teachers urged him to try. No one from An Shang village had even attended junior high school let alone gone further.

Junior high school English class in a town near Baoji, 2006

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His father hoped he could avoid the backbreaking work of a peasant by becoming the village teacher. To qualify for that, he wanted An Wei to attend a special teacher-training high school. Then, a distant relative who was a school principal said that he would do better at a regular high school, which could lead to college. That fascinated An Wei. It could offer him new ideas and satisfy his ever-growing curiosity.


With renewed purpose, he studied hard and passed the exam to enter Fufeng Senior High School with top scores. The next challenge loomed, though. He needed to convince his grandfather to pay his tuition fee. It was not much, but his grandfather thought education was a waste of time.

Part of the student body at a rural junior middle school, 2006.

Submitted by Nancy Pine
 
“March of the Volunteers” became the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. Translation retrieved from: http://english.gov.cn/archive/china_abc/2014/08/27/content_281474983873455.htm on August 29, 2016, 2:26 p.m.


Future posts will describe An Wei’s later educational experiences.


"Coming next - An Wei's senior high school years and their extensive challenges." 


This short story was adapted from Pine's book, One in a Billion: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey through Modern-Day China, for which she interviewed An Wei over a period of 10 years.