An Wei's Educational Journey:Post #3: Struggling to Attend High School

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


With renewed purpose, he studied much longer hours than other students and passed the exam to enter Fufeng Senior High School with top scores. Ecstatic, An Wei headed up the dirt track for summer vacation. As he climbed out of the valley, he hummed his way across the fields to An Shang. He was already forming a picture of the future. He was sure high school could offer him new ideas and satisfy his ever-growing curiosity.


All summer he imagined high school classes and the challenges they would bring, but he was paralyzed at the prospect of asking his grim-faced grandfather for tuition money. The family patriarch was stingy. When a little meat was available for Spring Festival, he kept it for himself. When the government required all children to attend school, he permitted only one to go.


Many times while bending to farm chores, An Wei thought about asking. Each time he lost his nerve.


The last week before school was to begin, he found his grandfather behind the homestead sharpening the sickles they used for cutting crops. An Wei walked slowly up to him, his hands clenching and unclenching with anxiety. He told his grandfather how useful school was and how much he had already learned.


“Well, then just go,” his grandfather said.


“I need to pay seven yuan tuition.”


The elder exploded. “No! You will get nothing from me. I have no money for that waste.”


Fifteen-year-old An Wei drew his strong frame up to its full five feet ten inches. He was not going to show how humiliated he felt.


His grandfather yelled louder. “I spend food and money on all you grandchildren. How dare you ask me for money for a useless school.”
An Wei left.
 
He asked his mother and father if they could help, but they had no influence over An Wei’s stingy grandfather.

Desperate, with three days remaining before school started, An Wei swallowed his pride and returned to his grandfather. He told him how important school was. Attending would bring honor to his grandfather and the family.


Unmoved, he yelled at An Wei again. “I have said it already. I will give you nothing. School is a waste of money.”


An Wei walked out. This time he was not just desperate; he was furious. He had labored long hours to get into senior high school, and his grandfather was destroying it all.


By evening he had a plan.


The following morning An Wei and his Brother Number Four snuck into the backyard of the homestead that was shared by the pigs and the family toilet. Dry, packed loess walls surrounded it. The boys shoved the warped wooden entrance door closed and angled a strong stick against it so that no one could get in. Their grandfather was out in the fields and not likely to come around.


The brothers eyed the family’s five piglets in the large open area and slowly began to herd them into one side. They had to keep them from running into the pigsty. An Wei eyed one on the edge of the group and lunged, but it ran the other way. He tried again and again. Finally, he launched himself once more and, sliding across the ground, closed his hand around the wriggling body long enough for his brother to tie its legs. The next one was harder, and as they wrestled the squealing creatures into a tall basket, they decided two was enough. Besides, by now, everyone in the homestead had heard the ruckus.


An Wei brushed himself off, shook out his shirt and swung the deep basket onto his back, balancing the heavy load. Quietly leaving the homestead, the brothers headed along the path that led to the nearest market town. Leaving the village, they spirited their cargo past tilled fields that grudgingly yielded crops of corn and sorghum. A few neighbors were bent over plants in outlying fields.


Once in the town, An Wei sold the piglets for the seven yuan he needed for school.


Two days later, on August 31, 1959, he set off for Fufeng. A defiant edge to his stride, he settled the flour sack of twenty-five-kilos on his shoulder and felt for the yuan tucked safely inside his clothes. He was going to senior high school no matter what his grandfather said or did.


The family patriarch had said nothing about the stolen piglets, but the evening before, An Wei’s tall Number Three Uncle sought him out. He looked down at An Wei and asked what else he planned to steal from the family.


Unrepentant, An Wei looked back at him. “I need nothing right now. But if I can’t get future tuition, I will sell whatever is necessary.” Nobody was going to thwart his drive for more education.


By late afternoon, he strode through the school gate in Fufeng, traded his bag of grain for meal coupons, paid his tuition, and got ready for his first senior high school classes the next morning.


He worked harder than ever—Chinese language and literature, mathematics, English, physics, chemistry, biology, Chinese history and political science. He loved them all. But they were a challenge. Because he wanted to be selected the class leader in charge of study, he was determined to be the best student.

Fufeng high school cafeteria. A meeting with the head master before they ate.
No date, but An Wei said it is the same head master as when he was there.

The head teacher for their class, Teacher Bao, lectured them.


“You must study relentlessly to pass the college entrance exams you will take at the end of senior year.” He warned that less than ten percent of the students taking the exams would qualify for college, and most of them came from cities. Farmers, he said, had little chance to succeed because they had much less schooling and background to prepare them. Still they should try.


“University can change your lives,” Teacher Bao said.


An Wei redoubled his efforts. In the evenings and during free time, he spent hours alone in the classroom where they studied, making sure he understood every portion of the lessons. When he did not grasp concepts thoroughly, he would go back over the material several times to make sense of it. In class, he participated fully.


Once again An Wei was selected class study monitor, the job he loved. He oversaw study habits and served as the liaison between students and teachers. He collected everyone’s exercise books at the end of each class, delivered them to the teachers and redistributed them the following day. He kept his classmates informed of the decisions made by the faculty and deans, such as midterm examination information and up-coming competitions. This meant he sometimes met privately with the teachers.


In October, school closed for the autumn harvest. Students and their teachers returned home to help bring in crops of corn, millet, sorghum, and soy bean and to plant the winter wheat.

An Shang Village fields of winter wheat in a good year, 2008.
Photo taken from the roof of An Wei’s family homestead.

The previous year’s wheat crop had been scant and summer plantings were disappointingly meager. Food was rationed. Yet An Wei headed home brimming with enthusiasm. He was sure shortages would end with this new season. Under Mao Zedong’s leadership crops had improved almost every year since 1949, the founding of the new country, and now the Great Leap Forward would create a better life.


As part of new China’s first generation, An Wei and his peers believed deeply in the government’s reforms. They sang about the country’s achievements and encouraged each other to work hard to build a better China and beat Western countries.


Now the village was a production brigade of the huge Wujing People’s Commune, and his family’s neighborhood had become Production Team #1. Their land, their animals and tools, their homes, and their labor now belonged to the commune. An Wei thought all these new improvements were certain to improve their life.


From the first morning after An Wei arrived home for the October harvest, he joined in the backbreaking work. His labor helped the family earn additional work points that they traded for food and other essentials from the commune.


Each night by the time he fell onto the kang, exhaustion numbed him, yet he knew they had to continue for many days to stave off hunger and build a prosperous country. The commune had promised to turn over a large amount of corn and grain to the government, so they must meet that goal and still have some for themselves.


As the family prepared to plant the winter wheat, his father directed An Wei to plow, which required both skill and strength. He was honored his father thought he could do it, yet he hated to learn new farm chores. He was going to be a college student, not a farmer. His father, however, insisted that he master the plowing technique, and he had to admit, his father was right. There was no guarantee he would pass the college entrance exams.


Once the wheat was planted, students and teachers headed back to school, pleased that they had started a new crop on its way even though they knew that food rationing continued.

The main building of Fufeng high school, 2008.
Located in the same place as where An Wei attended.

Walking through the school gate, An Wei felt renewed energy. He wanted to learn all he could. Right away he reviewed everything they had learned before the harvest. Then, as usual, he turned to making sure he understood every lesson in all his subjects. His favorites were Chinese literature, English, physics, and history. He read as much as he could from the school library—mostly modern literature. His teachers said older books like Dream of Red Mansions and Chinese classics would mislead young people. They should read new ones such as The Song of Youth, about the 1930s student movement opposing the Japanese invaders. That book made a deep impression on him.


He also loved to write. For years he had wanted to become a writer, and in junior high school he had even written a short story about his family’s life. An Wei and his classmates who read a lot became followers of a talented teacher who was an expert on Chinese literature and spent hours alone in his office writing stories. He was too serious to approach, so they admired him from a distance and even hand-copied a story of his that had inspired them. Then one day they learned that their idol was accused of abusing the government mandated beliefs of Mao Zedong Thought. With the Anti-Bourgeois Writers’ Movement gaining strength, the teacher was forbidden to teach, publicly criticized in struggle sessions, and forced to burn his manuscripts.


Seeing his teacher sent off to be instructed by illiterate farmers, probably for years, An Wei buried his writer’s dream.


An Wei had begun senior high school toting the required twenty-five kilos of grain to school every month, but as the year progressed, the bags grew lighter and the school cut back on food. Students lost weight, their hunger increased and yet they kept studying.


Despite the difficulties, teachers sometimes entertained the students. During one memorable assembly, An Wei was awestruck when two teachers pretended to speak different languages. One said something in a pretend language; the other interpreted the “foreign language.” It was hilarious. It also introduced a new idea. He had just begun to study English. What if he became an interpreter between Chinese and English or another language? It would be safer than being a writer. Writing your own ideas was dangerous, but maybe translating someone else’s would be safer.

The student body of a rural high school gathering for an assembly.
Located between An Shang Village and Baoji, 2005.

As the school food supply shrank, students continued to study despite growing hunger pains. Sports were cancelled and rest periods instated. Through good humor and enthusiasm, painfully thin Teacher Bao urged them on and the teachers continued their valuable instruction. Although his energy weakened, An Wei pushed himself. He was determined to go to college, no matter what, and to escape this awful poverty.


Submitted by Nancy Pine


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


"Coming next - An Wei's senior high school years and their extensive challenges - Part 2." 


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.