I regard myself as a very lucky person. Growing up in a big city in China, I have always had access to many resources, including good schools and various private lessons from piano to tennis. However China is so big, millions of children live completely different lives. Just like this girl in the picture. Love and hope are glowing in her black shining eyes, we all know she should deserve the same level of education and care, but in reality, her future is not promising at all. Over 200 million children live in rural China have limited access to quality education. According to the statistics, nearly 80% of students from Chinese developed urban areas will have the opportunity to attend college, but in poor rural areas, this number is only 3%. I always wanted to do something for those children, therefore, right before I graduated from the States in 2011, I decided to join an non-profit organization in the area of Chinese rural education as my first job. 

I found Teach Future China, a non-profit organization located in Beijing. This organization supports and assists college graduates as volunteer teachers to teach for two years in rural schools. This serves two purposes: firstly, complementing rural teacher force and equipping rural children with knowledge and broader visions; secondly, honing young members of Teach Future China, to prepare them to be the leaders who will promote education equality in various fields in future.

In Sep 2011, I was sent to teach at Beijing Tongxin Experimental School, a school established for migrant children that located at the outskirt of Beijing. What is “migrant children”? Migrant children came to cities with their parents, who formed the main labor force for the cities, but normally don’t have stable jobs nor residency in the city. Therefore, those children are not eligible for using education funds provided by the local government and could not study in public schools in cities. That is why numbers of private schools for migrant children appeared in urban villages of Beijing. At Here, I saw their needs for more and quality teacher force; moreover, I got to know the real lives of migrant children.

Please allow me to share a story of my student:

Her name is Xiao Li, 2nd grader, eight years old, coming from Guizhou province.

She is a very lovely girl. Different from other kids, she was always neat and well groomed, the cloths she wore had the smell of fresh forest, her hairstyle changed every day. Whenever I went to teach the class, I had irresistible temptation to look at her. 
I asked her, “Who dresses you up so pretty every day?” “Mom,” She answered.

But three months later, Xiao Li started to live at the school. “What happened?” I asked her. She whispered, “My mom goes to work in a factory in Tongzhou, coming back every two weeks, and my dad works in a furniture factory, he doesn’t have time to take care of me.” 

Even if Xiao Li was more sensible than her peers, an eight-year-old kid can’t take care of herself. She started to come to class with tangled hair and changed her cloths only once a week, sometimes when the weather was hot, in less than a week, she would smell.

It was a Monday afternoon, in my Chinese class I smelled strange odor on her, I thought it was because she didn’t take shower. But after two days, after all the small boarders finished taking shower, the odor on her got even worse. Other kids even said, “Xiao Li smells so bad, let’s go away and not play with her.”

Something must be wrong. I decided to take Xiao Li to the bathhouse myself and figure out what had happened. In the bathhouse, Xiao Li didn’t say anything, but she was a little hesitant when taking off the cloths.

I looked at the pants she took off, and I was shocked.

Pieces of earthy yellow lumps stuck on her pants, I finally knew what had happened. Xiao Li pooped in her pants, but she didn’t know how to deal with it and didn’t say anything. In the past two days, she wore her dirty pants to go to classes and play with friends. I asked her, “How come you didn’t say anything?” She didn’t answer me and showed me a little smile, seeming to tell me “Don’t worry.” In such migrant children school, there is no professional care for small boarders. From then on, I would put extra attention on them, ensuring they could have regular meal, cleaning and sleep. 

My friend, another volunteer teacher Liu Xiuqi, who was teaching in Hebei province, faced more difficult situations. In order to maximize the use of limited education resources, the rural children are centralized at the schools in town, which are far away from their village home, so many students have to board at the school staring from third grade. However, 3rd graders are too small and they always cry over the night in their dorms. So every night, teacher Liu would bring her story book to every dorm and told a bed story to the children. A simple bed story could make her students sleep quietly in peace. 

There were also a number of left-behind children in Teacher Liu’s class. These children’s parents went to work in big cities in order to bring more money back to home, but their children left at home without parental care, company nor basic security measures. 

As volunteer teachers who will spend two years to teach either migrant children or left-behind children, we know our efforts are not strong enough to entirely change the situations these children are facing now, however, we are willing to try our best to deliver the most useful knowledge they need. More importantly, we will be there for them when they need help, putting seeds of love into their hearts.

Teach Future China only provided 6 volunteer teachers in 2009, while this year (2013), we have 170 young people teaching in more than 50 rural schools across China. After finishing the regular work, those young teachers keep exploring and trying innovative yet practical methods to bring up their students in happy and confident ways.

Math teacher Zhang Jing, she leveraged her art expertise to guide students creating their own picture book, recording village lives, stories, and natural beauty by drawings and writings. In order to overcome the lack of resources, Teacher Zhang used everything such as stones, empty bottles, and dry branches and so on. They all can be the pallets for art and creativity. The pictures showed here are all the art works by her students. The seed put in children’s hearts by Teacher Zhang is enjoyment of art.

Chinese teacher Jiang Jinyu made diary recording into a five-theme based writing activity, to inspire her students. Having her students to write in this way for two years, Teacher Jiang made those articles into a book under the help of one alumnus of BiMBA. This book, “The Writing Childhood That We’ve Been Through”, ended up as great memories for the children. And with the encouragement of Teacher Jiang, six of those articles were published in newspaper. The seed put in children’s hearts by Teacher Jiang is passion for writing.


Math Teacher Ma Huiming is good at inspiring students by games. The first is “you say and I draw”, helping his students exercise language skills and spatial imagination. By filling a form of “Appointment with Teacher”, his students learned how to make appointment with teacher to communicate. This is “mini novel”, students practiced storytelling skills by folding an A4 size paper into a small book. The seed put in children’s hearts by Teacher Ma is sense of creativity.

In this spring, Chinese Teacher Liao Renyan and her students set up a small vegetable garden in school. They planted and ploughed in team work, learning the whole cultivating process. Teacher Liao said, “The seeds that we planted into the ground are not vegetables, but hope, dream and love.”

I will never forget the words from the director of Qing Long Education Bureau of Hebei province. He said he used to be a naughty village boy, having no purpose of life, and didn’t like study until he met his “volunteer teacher”, the so-called Zhi Qing in Chinese, back in 1970’s. From then on, he decided to live a meaningful life and make positive impact in his community and society. That is why he became a teacher and advanced his career in education. The seed planted in his heart 30 years ago has flourished now.

His words made me think a lot. We don’t expect to see the harvest today, but we just want to put some positive seeds into children’s hearts. Now I would like to play a song to express ourselves. It is composed by our volunteer teachers who teach future China. 

This 2-year experience has taught me more than any textbooks or private tutors can. What I saw, lived through and shared with is deeply engraved in my heart. Ten years or twenty years later, when we become the backbone of the society, we will lead the world to a better place. And at that time, I believe, all the seeds will sprout nicely eventually. Master Lu Xun has said, “Many people, from afar, are related with us.” We believe the rural children are also related with us, and they are important. Hope each one of you, my dearest friends, could join together, supporting Chinese rural education!