Part 1: Opening

Editor’s Note:

Ruan Wenping, an ordinary primary school teacher living and working in a mountain village, suffers from a childhood illness-induced disability and has some difficulty in walking.

In 1995, he began working as a teacher at Nonghuai Nian’en Primary School located in Hezhou Village, Xiajia Township, a part of Baise City in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. With Ruan’s hard work, the school for Yao people, which had only 5 students and was on the verge of closing, has been rebuilt into a school providing national-level education for the entire county. He has been awarded several honors by both the State and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, including the Fourteenth National May Fourth Youth Medal, first among Chinese Sons and Daughters of the Year, outstanding Chinese Communist Party member in Guangxi, and the May 1 Labor Medal. Meanwhile, Ruan studied at Guangxi Radio and TV University and graduated first from the Primary School Education junior college programme and later from CCRTVU’s open education Chinese Language and Literature undergraduate programme. This newspaper issue marks the beginning of a series of news reports on Mr. Ruan Wenping’s twenty years as a village teacher.

In a Yao village named Xiajia Township, located in Lingyun County, Baise City, an old revolutionary stronghold in Guangxi, there is a school named Nonghuai Nian’en Primary School. Blooming bougainvilleas fill the clean and tidy quadrangle schoolyard connected to a beautiful schoolhouse, a wonderful world of singing birds and fragrant flowers. Nestled in the most beautiful landscape in the Yao Mountains, a paradise for students and scholars, the school currently offers three grade levels, preschool through second grade. There are a total of 52 students enrolled in the school, including 33 girls, reaching a 100% enrollment rate of local school-age children. The school has developed from a student body of five Yao children to possessing the largest number of students, the best teaching results, and the highest teaching quality among schools at a similar level.

Located at the top of the Dashi mountainous area, it’s unfathomable that the school had no road access 20 years ago, back when it was called Nonghuai Primary School. Only a narrow, rugged, winding path led to the outside world. All around are straight cliffs, under which live the Yao denizens. They were poorly educated and lived a very hard life. After the only teacher of the school passed away, several teachers were sent to teach in the mountain school, one after another, though they all left because of the difficult conditions. The school was shuttered for four years. The schoolyard was in terrible condition, there were holes in the roof of the four-classroom schoolhouse, and the roof tiles lay around, with purlins and tile angles having rotted and tiles falling apart. All the doors and windows had been taken away, while some desks with missing legs lay huddled in classroom corners. The floors of the classrooms were bumpy with weed and moss, and there was cattle and horse feces spread across the classrooms and the playground. Dozens of school-age children had no choice but to look after cows and sheep, cut firewood, or sing folk songs in the mountains.

Things changed in 1995. Ruan Wenping, a wheelchair-bound, lower-limb disabled teacher, came to teach. Puzzlingly, no students came to the school. Ruan tried hard to find out why the villages wouldn’t send their children to school. He discovered that while the school was closed, the children had no school to go. Past teachers had no room to live in at the school, so they had to travel to and from the school to teach. Their instruction sometimes lacked zeal and the children hardly learned a thing. A notion that studying was useless generally prevailed. People thought that they could get by only knowing the two characters for male and female, so as to enter the correct toilet. The Yao didn’t believe in the disabled newcomer. With persistence and great perseverance in the name of education, and with an enthusiastic heart and selfless dedication of spirit, Ruan Wenping confronted the serious challenge by taking it upon himself to outperform ordinary people. Day after day, Ruan walked door to door on his crutches, along the winding path in the Dashi mountainous areas to persuade the school-age children to go to school. Thus, the Yao school previously closed for four years was reopened. He has continued teaching during the 20 years since, sparking the children’s hope in education. He has done a fantastic job managing the school, propping up the school and children with his crutches, offering a brighter future for the Yao children to share in.

Part 2: Life Experience

Ruan Wenping was born in Xiaodongtun, part of Longfeng Village, Xiajia Townshp, in 1977, where living conditions were extremely hard. When he was young, the muscles in both his legs were weak, his knees turned in, and his legs couldn’t bend straight. He could only walk by turning his legs inwards and outwards. People thought he suffered from polio, though this diagnosis went unconfirmed until 2007, when Ruan Wenping was thirty. He is disabled in both legs and suffers more as he ages, a great inconvenience in his life.

Ruan Wenping’s father was a pillar of strength for his family. He was not only hardworking, but also educated. He knew how to manage family life, and was the greatest hope and support of his family. Unfortunately, he became blind in both eyes and ran into heavy debt when Ruan Wenping was just eight years old. This is the misfortune of the Ruans and the misfortune of the disabled Ruan Wenping in particular.

After his father’s blindness, his mother became the family’s sole supporter. She had to do the heaviest work for the family, climbing up cliffs to look for certain local products, and going to the mountains to cut firewood. Misfortunes never come singly however, and several times she fell off cliffs, growing black and blue all over and narrowly escaping the jaws of death for the sake of her family. In autumn 1989, Ruan’s mother went to work in the mountains and accidentally fell off of a mountain cliff. The last pillar of the family was broken, and now the Ruan family, a blind man on work disability, three children with no ability to work, and a grandmother in need of support, suddenly plunged into such despair as the endless darkness of the blind.

Three generations consisting of five people now needed food. Ruan Wenping had to stop going to school to work the family’s farm. Every day, he limped along, leading his blind father to work in the field. The father and son hoed and raked the stony soil. The father dug and the son sowed. The father covered the seeds and the son spread the manure. Every day, they left home early in the morning and came back late at night, whether in rain or wind. The two disabled men toiled in the field, sowing in spring and ploughing in summer, just like the other farmers. They made a living by relying on that field. None of the family calculated how much work the father and son had done that year, nor weighed how much they had harvested from their field. 

But, Father Ruan couldn’t keep back his tears. He decided to lease the family’s land to allow his son to return to school! Ruan valued greatly the hard-earned opportunity to learn and he studied exceptionally hard. After primary school, he entered middle school with excellent marks. In each of the three years of junior middle school he was selected as a student of top merit. He joined the Youth League as well. With the help of the school, teachers, and classmates, and with financial assistance from the civil affairs department, he finished junior middle school. He not only acquired knowledge, but grew a grateful heart. He did well in the entrance examination for higher learning, and the results he earned qualified him for a key senior middle school or technical secondary school. He became the best student at his school. However, finances constrained him once more, and he missed the chance to go to a secondary medical school in Sichuan.

Ruan Wenping is both an unfortunate and a fortunate man. After junior middle school, he earned an exceptional appointment to work as a temporary substitute teacher by Mr. Lei Zhaoxing, Office Director of Xiajia Township Education Committee. His life was thus fundamentally changed.

Ruan Wenping said, “I am handicapped in both legs and this is an unfair fate for me. But I will blame neither fate nor other people. As a disabled man, I am not embracing ambition, but seek to live a happy life every day. Subjectively, I don’t want to be a burden to my father or brothers, and hope to be able to support myself with my own hard work. Objectively, I don’t want to be a burden on society and want to make a modest contribution with my own efforts.”