On July 4, Zhang Guimei and the women's high school students. Photo courtesy of the Propaganda Department of Huaping County Committee
At 5:15 am on July 4, Zhang Guimei woke up in a student dormitory. This is a room of more than ten square meters. She usually lives here with a student Zhao Siling (pseudonym).
As soon as he opened his eyes, Zhang Guimei felt stiff all over and had a headache. Not daring to make a sound, she motioned for the boardman to come over and picked up her skinny body from the bed. She was wearing an earth-yellow coat of more than ten dollars, black trousers, and a plaster at the joints and wrists of ten fingers, holding her forehead in pain.
After a while, Zhang Guimei took out the black-rimmed glasses next to the pillows and put them on, and then trimmed his hair a little, and left the dormitory with difficulty. 18-year-old Zhao Siling slept soundly. In two days, Zhao Siling will go to the college entrance examination room.
63-year-old Zhang Guimei is the principal of Huaping County Girls' High School in Lijiang City and concurrently the dean of Huaping County Children's Welfare Institute. Huaping Women's High School is the nation's first free public high school for girls. In the 12 years since its establishment, 1645 girls have been admitted to the university.
Zhang Guimei never used the word "poverty" to describe his students, because poverty is also a kind of privacy. She called them "girls in the mountains".
"If a girl is literate, she can change three generations." Zhang Guimei said.
"Big Devil", "Boss", "Mother Zhang"
Zhao Siling is a girl with a round face, wearing glasses, and a quiet and introverted personality. She was born in a remote village in Huaping County. Her 11-year-old brother drowned in an accident. Her father drunk and abused her mother all day long.
When Zhang Guimei knew these circumstances, Zhao Siling had tried to commit suicide several times. She called Zhao Siling's parents to the office and scolded her, and then asked the girl to sleep in a dormitory with her mattress. After her husband's premature death, Zhang Guimei has never been married again, with no children and no daughters.
Several female students originally lived in this dormitory. Zhang Guimei, who was plagued by 17 diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, bronchitis, severe osteoporosis, schwannomas, and hypertension, sometimes groaned at night. She was worried that the students were afraid and asked them to move away, leaving only Zhao Siling She folded the quilt and cleaned up the housework.
Zhao Siling wanted to be admitted to universities in the three eastern provinces. "There are many people of my age in my village who are married, have children, and do farm work. Only by learning and knowledge can we change our destiny."
At 6:30 on July 4th, after checking the morning class, Zhang Guimei was eating while taking medicine.
In this girl's high school, there are students who are poor or single parents, but also have a good family but come to the school's reputation. Here, students of Zhejiang University, Xiamen University, Sichuan University, Wuhan University and many other top-ranking universities have been selected one after another. The online rate of a book in 2019 is 40.67%, and the undergraduate online rate is 82.37%, ranking first in Lijiang City.
Zhang Guimei is both a logistics and a security guard. Her face was yellowish, her eyes, forehead and cheeks were covered with wrinkles, her hair was sparse and shattered, and the bangs on her forehead covered a thumb-sized tumor. Due to long-term pain, her body was almost thinned into a skeleton, but she said nothing. Fast and fast, clear logic and humorous.
After getting up every day, she always leaned forward, holding the stair railing with both hands and struggling to move her deformed feet. The school staff responsible for her life waited on time under the dormitory and drove her to the teaching building on a motorcycle. Before the students got up, Zhang Guimei turned on the lights of the teaching building one by one.
At 5:30 in the morning, there was a glimmer of light in the sky. Zhang Guimei came to the third floor of the teaching building with a loudspeaker. "Girls, get up!" There were already sporadic students walking down the street rubbing her eyes. She urged, "Silly girl, hurry up!" More and more, she raised her voice, "Time is coming soon, go to the court late!"
Some students rushed in and bumped into her. She patted the student's shoulder gently, "Don't be afraid, the lights are on. I walked over again, it's safe." After 20 minutes, when every classroom heard the sound of reading, Zhang Guimei put the whole teaching building Turn off the lights one by one, check the morning class again.
At 6:40 in the morning, Zhang Guimei returned to the principal's office, carrying the garbage collected from various classrooms in his hands, packed in yellow plastic bags and stacked on the ground. The staff of the Children's Welfare Institute come to pick them regularly every day and can sell a dozen dollars. They also brought Zhang Guimei breakfast, a bowl of mung bean porridge and two buns.
This is a rare moment of leisure for Zhang Guimei. She was sitting in a chair, drinking porridge slowly. The ten-square-meter school principal’s office is simply furnished with four desks, a row of bookcases, two long wooden chairs for meeting guests, and a square table. On the wall is a carefully framed calligraphy, "The world is the public, the mother is the world; Chi Zi is easy to learn, and women are good to learn."
With this breakfast, Zhang Guimei swallowed 12 kinds of medicines, including neck pain tablets, Gushukang capsules, Fengshiding capsules, Liuweidihuang pills and so on. She carefully removed the meat from the bun. In the past, she was reluctant to eat meat and saved her salary to the students. In recent years, she would vomit as soon as she ate meat.
For her, eating is to take medicine. These drugs are more for pain relief. The pain relief plaster on her hand can use 2 boxes a day. To save money, she had to stick it during the day and not at night. A fist-sized tumor on the arm can only be tolerated, and gout-like gel is applied to the feet and back.
In front of the students, she carefully concealed the serious side of her illness. She is still the fierce and brutal old lady. The students call her "big devil", and some people call her "boss" and "Mother Zhang".
There are no rules and regulations on the walls of the girls’ high school, but the system is extremely cruel. For example, girls have uniform short hair and red school uniforms. They can only wash clothes once a week, and can go out for 3 hours. In order not to let the students feel emotional, the female teachers should not wear skirts or make up.
The students only have 10 minutes of lunch every day. They need to complete the whole process from cooking, eating to washing dishes. Zhang Guimei sits in the cafeteria and counts the time.
After eating, the students ran out covering their ears and returned to the dorm for a lunch break. Zhang Guimei stood and stared downstairs in the dormitory. According to regulations, the door of the dormitory could not be closed. She could hear anyone who was playing mobile phones or chatting.
At the end of the evening, Zhang Guimei counted the number of people again. As the college entrance examination got closer and closer, a student had diarrhea on leave and went to the hospital. She sat downstairs and waited for 40 minutes.
At this time of year, Zhang Guimei always hangs a heart. She chattered about everybody, if she could train a Tsinghua or Peking University student, she would die. The students in grade one and grade two shouted in unison in the classroom downstairs every time, "Come on! Come on to Tsinghua! Come on to Peking University!"
"I want the children in the mountains to walk into the best schools." Zhang Guimei said. When the reporter asked her, what did you have to pay? Her tears fell straight, "I almost gave my life."
On the morning of July 4, Zhang Guimei called the students to get up with a big horn.
"I have a dream"
Zhang Guimei was born in Mudanjiang City, Heilongjiang Province. He came to the Yunnan branch with his sister at the age of 18, and then taught at the No. 1 Middle School in Xizhou Town with his husband.
When she was young, her life was ordinary. In class, she speaks fluent Mandarin and likes to wear purple pants and red tops. Husband buys her favorite canned bayberry, repairs furniture and teaches calculus classes to others to subsidize households.
In 1996, her husband died of illness. Zhang Guimei applied for a redeployment and came alone to Huaping County, a deeply impoverished bank by the Jinsha River, to serve as a middle school teacher.
At that time, there were many poor middle school students, and many girls dropped out of school. Zhang Guimei ran home and found that his students had been married. She paid all her salary, paid their books, and brought the girls back to the classroom.
In 2001, Zhang Guimei began to serve as the dean of the County Children's Welfare Institute. On the first day of the establishment, 36 orphans were admitted. "I can't pull these places out of the poor pit. Those poor girls deep in the mountains, I just want to save each one."
Yang Wenhua, then deputy director of the county education bureau, recalled to the Beijing News reporter that in 2003, Zhang Guimei proposed to him that he wanted to run a free female high school to solve the vicious circle of low-quality mothers and low-quality children. Yang Wenhua felt that her idea was very naive. "It's too difficult to run a school. It won't work if you have less money. I advise her to give up."
Later, at a demonstration meeting organized by the county party committee, all experts voted against it. One is to run a female high school that runs counter to the times. The second is that the free high school investment is too large and the county does not have the financial conditions.
Zhang Guimei did not give up. She brought award-winning materials, such as a model worker certificate, to collect money on the streets of Kunming. Many people think she is a liar, spit at her, and let the dog bit her. Once she fell asleep by the wall in front of a unit. After being awakened, she stood in front of the chairman of the Provincial Women's Federation and allocated 20,000 yuan to her.
In 2007, Zhang Guimei came to Beijing as one of the two representatives of the Seventeenth National Congress of the Lijiang City. She broke the jeans with two holes and caught the reporter's attention. Then, her talk show "I Have a Dream" was broadcast on TV. The Women's High School project was finally launched. Governments at all levels in Yunnan Province, cities, and counties invested more than 60 million yuan in hardware facilities for the construction of school buildings, sports fields, canteens, and teaching equipment.
In the same year when the project started, Yang Wenhua was appointed as the director of the Huaping County Education Bureau. He recalled that due to difficulties in financing, the project was constructed in five phases, which lasted 7 years before and after it was finally completed in 2015.
In September 2008, more than 90 students from the first session of the Girls' High School entered the school. At this time, the female high school had been built for more than 4 months, with an investment of 1.8 million yuan, and only one teaching building was built. There are no gates and walls, no cafeterias, dormitories and toilets. The famed foreign teachers, after a semester, left no one left.
Luo Menghua, a teacher of the female high school, recalled that the conditions at that time were extremely difficult. Two large classrooms each had a few beds, 10 male teachers lived in one room, 11 female teachers lived in another room, and the students lived on the second floor. The classroom was also remodeled. In the evening when the students go to the toilet, they are accompanied by a female teacher and a male teacher to the ethnic middle school next door.
Because the enrollment did not refuse, the student's foundation was very poor. The mathematics test scored 9 points and the question was repeated 8 times. The students still did not understand. "The teacher can't see the future, the students can't see the hope." Zhang Guimei, who was hit hard, told Yang Wenhua privately that it is estimated that the school can't sustain it. I hope he can help divert teachers and students.
The conversation at the time lasted for more than an hour, and both of them made the worst plan in their hearts.
Yang Wenhua also bluntly told Zhang Guimei, "The quality of teaching cannot be improved. Your so-called original intention is to let the girls in the mountains live in vain for three years and finally get a high school diploma. If that is all, the society will not agree ( At such a huge cost), you cannot win the support of more parents and students and the future government."
Zhang Guimei listened to these words. She is determined that one day not only will poor girls be admitted to key universities, but also students from Tsinghua University and Peking University.
110,000 kilometers of home visit road
The Women’s High School has never held a parent meeting. Instead, Zhang Guimei’s road of 110,000 kilometers of home visits in 12 years.
Every time he visits home, Zhang Guimei always brings buns, bread and mineral water. In order not to cause trouble to the students, he never eats at the students' homes. On one of the visits to the Lisu students, the car was walking on the cliff. When I arrived at the student's house, I realized that this girl was the first high school student in the village. On the day of school, the whole village saw her off.
The girl’s grandfather told Zhang Guimei that if her granddaughter could go to college, she would be relieved if she died. Zhang Guimei assured that she must make the girl the first college student in the village. Today, their village has already walked out of several college students.
After visiting the home in Guanghua Township, Yongsheng County, Lijiang City, the mountains ran across, and I got off the car and walked for three kilometers before reaching a student's house deep in the depression. After coming out of the student's house, Zhang Guimei was no longer able to walk on a steep slope of sixty degrees.
So the grandfather of the students pulled out his horse, and the three teachers accompanying him carried Zhang Guimei on his horse. This was the only time she rode a horse, walking uphill steeply, star-studded.
On this extremely difficult road to home visits, Zhang Guimei had broken his ribs, lost his way, had a high fever, and had fainted on the road. Some students' homes were on the top of the mountain, and there was only a path dug with a hoe. On the left was a steep cliff, on the right was a deep abyss. After getting off a motorcycle, Zhang Guimei was pale and his legs were unstable.
"Ms. Zhang really came to the back of poverty. She knows the mountain people's desire most, and she knows this mountain best." Zhang Xiaofeng, director of the Women's High School said.
In 2011, the graduates of the first Huaping Women's High School participated in the college entrance examination with a comprehensive online rate of 100% and a book online rate of 4.26%. "Our vice governor at the time came to investigate, and he said with tears that the achievement of the female high school is very remarkable. Because the entrance of the female high school is extremely low, as long as you want to study, the comers will not refuse and there is no limit on the score." Yang Wenhua Say.
"I really can't imagine how much principal Zhang and other teachers have paid in the past three years. The female high school has completely achieved low in, high out, and middle in and out."
Teacher Luo Menghua recalled that the online rate of female college students' college entrance examination in 2017 was 10-20 percentage points higher than that of the county's No. 1 middle school, and it ranked first in the county's liberal arts and sciences. "We have more than 10 high school teachers ran to play a basketball." For them, this is already the most luxurious way to celebrate.
In 2019, out of 118 graduates of women's high school, 109 of them entered the undergraduate course and 9 of them entered the junior college course. "We don't pay what the average teacher can pay. The male teacher got married and came back to class immediately after the ceremony. The female teacher got the tumor surgery and came back in clothes. The children are desperate to brush questions, we only have this way." Zhang Guimei said.
"Successful experiences of women’s high schools are hard work for students, hard work for teachers, hard work for students. The fundamental measure to stop the intergenerational transmission of poverty is education. The quality of people does not change, and it is always the poverty alleviation. In this regard, Teacher Zhang It has persisted for 12 years. The spirit of girls' high school has also led to the development of our county's education." Yang Wenhua said.
On the morning of July 4, Zhang Guimei, who was checking the class.
"This is my last hope of reading"
Zhou Yunli is a beautiful girl. She was wearing a neat suit and her hair was carefully tied back. She was the first graduate of Huaping Women's High School. Eight years later, she became a math teacher at the women's high school.
When she was less than a year old, her mother died of cancer, and her father with polio pulled the sisters up. In 2008, Zhou Yunli and her sister reached the high school admission score at the same time. My father sold all the valuable things and borrowed money from relatives. It was far from enough to raise the tuition fees of the two sisters for three years.
Soon after, the sisters learned about the free admissions of the girls’ high school, and soon received an admission notice after signing up. On the first day of school, I stepped into the dormitory, the mattresses were already laid, and the name of the classmate was posted on the edge of each bed. Zhou Yunli looked at the note and wept bitterly over her face.
Zhou Yunli once dreamed of making big money. After graduating from Girls' High School, she changed her mind. After graduating from the Mathematics Department of East China Normal University, she became a teacher of Women's High School and was responsible for a high school graduating class and a high school math class.
She sometimes thinks that if there were no women’s high school, she might have dropped out of school early to marry someone, carrying several children and unable to walk out of poverty in her entire life.
"If I didn't go to women's high school, I wouldn't be a police officer. I might be the target of law enforcement by the police." Chen Fayu, a policeman from Yongsheng County, Lijiang City, was the second graduate of women's high school. The admission score, her father persuaded her to go home to work in agriculture and find someone to marry.
"I can't believe what a painful and long life it will be to greet myself." She began to regret the experience of fighting and drinking in junior high school. After receiving the girls' high school admission notice, Chen Fayu changed all bad habits. In her impression, Zhang Guimei was a very fierce teacher. "Sometimes I dreamed of being scolded by her, and I was awakened from a cold sweat."
In 2012, Chen Fayu was admitted to Yunnan Police Officer Academy.
So far, Zhang Guimei will talk to people about the poor parents she has seen. There are grandparents who have ignored her once since her granddaughter was born. Until the girl graduated, the parents did not come to school once, and they did not even know the child’s scientific name. "If they don't study, their lives will die."
On July 5, Yuan Miaomiao, a 23-year-old girl who lives in Guang'an, Sichuan, found Huaping Women's High School by bus from the place where she worked. She stood outside the gate for two days and finally found an opportunity to meet Zhang Guimei.
After finishing high school in 2013, Yuan Miaomiao dropped out of school. In seven years, she worked as a live broadcast, assembly line worker, restaurant waiter, KTV waiter, sold a car, sold clothes, sold cosmetics... and finally saved 10,000 yuan.
Yuan Miaomiao begged Zhang Guimei to let her enter the female high school and have the opportunity to take the college entrance examination in the future. "This is my last hope for reading. If I don't read, I feel that the world is empty every day. I still have a blank piece of paper. I hope there is a beautiful painting on it, a cultural painting."
When the mountains are blooming
In the past two years, sports teacher Tan Yanhua discovered that Zhang Guimei had fainted three or four times on the playground. Once, she fainted by the stairs. Another time, she maintained order in the cafeteria and suddenly fell to the ground.
One day before the college entrance examination last year, the students finished the inter-class exercise and found that there was no sound of the headmaster shouting with a big horn. Looking back, she was lying on the ground unconsciously. After feeding a few quick-acting rescue pills, Zhang Guimei woke up. The teachers wanted to send her to the hospital, but was refused. There are only two weeks before the college entrance examination, and she wants to do it again.
Zhang Guimei personally sends the senior three students to the examination room every year, and then sends them back after the exam is over. The women's high school never graduated. When the college entrance examination was over, she quickly sent the students away. "The day I left, it was the same as usual."
Her only obsession is that the rest of her life will train students from Peking University and Tsinghua University.
"She is racing against time." Yang Wenhua sometimes bumped into her in the office, curled up in a wooden chair, dying. He shed tears uncomfortably, and pretended to be joking with her easily, "You are a person whose dream has not been realized, the task is not completed, you can't rest assured, Marx does not want you."
One night in April 2018, Zhang Guimei lost consciousness in pain. The students living in the dormitory quickly gave her painkillers. An hour later, she was taken to the county hospital for rescue.
County Governor Pang Xinxiu also hurried to see her. Sometimes sober and sometimes confused Zhang Guimei took the hand of the county governor and said, "I want to prepay the funeral expenses in advance. I want to see the money spent on the children."
Zhang Guimei also thought about it, after she died, she would be cremated casually and thrown anywhere. "Come quietly, just walk quietly."
A child she adopted said, then we can't see when we miss you. Zhang Guimei said, where you miss me, I'm by your side.
Upon hearing the news that Zhang Guimei was seriously ill, the 24-year-old Zhang Huihua, a child of the child welfare institution she had adopted, hurried to the hospital.
Zhang Huihua was admitted to Huazhong Agricultural University and returned to Huaping County as a grassroots civil servant after graduation.
He stayed beside the hospital bed for 5 days, watching his mother lose 20 pounds.
All children in the Children's Welfare Institute call Zhang Guimei the "mother". Even if the work of the women’s high school is busy every day, at 6:30 pm, Zhang Guimei always returns to the children’s home on time.
"I'm going home." At this moment, she seemed to relieve all her fatigue, and she always laughed easily.
At the Children's Welfare Institute, Zhang Guimei simply took a shower, changed clothes, and then lay down to sleep. After more than an hour, she carried the bag and returned to the high school. Some children cried and did not want to let her go, so she coaxed, "Mom is going to work to make money and buy you a hamburger."
The serious illness in 2018, Zhang Guimei finally got through. She returned to the girls' high school and resumed her former life, wandering around the school with a big horn.
In the Spring Festival of 2020, she went to Kunming for medical examination, and the 17 diseases on the medical record increased to 23. "I don't know how much time I still have. I can still move. I want to do something. I know that there is no cure for my illness. If I leave the best time for healing, this is my greatest regret. "
At 9:30 in the morning on July 5, the girls' high school students danced in ghost steps. This is a kind of high school gymnastics. Zhang Guimei specially invited a dance teacher to teach the students for a while. She is an eccentric person, the most popular dance steps girls in the city can dance, and girls in the mountains can't fall, they can't be worse than them.
On this day, the girls danced happily. Zhang Guimei slowly walked between them, a little lost, "Maybe I can't dance in my life."
After the lesson, the girls recite a poem in unison, which is Zhang Guimei's favorite "Bu Shuzi·Yong Mei"-Wind and rain to send the spring return / Fei Xue to welcome the spring to / is already a cliff of ice / there are still beautiful flowers / She doesn't fight for spring/only reports spring/when the mountains are full of flowers/she laughs in the bush.
Beijing News reporter Wang Yuqian intern Zhuo Manman
Photography/(Except for the signature) Beijing News reporter Wang Yuqian