This summer of 22 is a bit special for Yu Yanqia, a Lisu girl.
After graduating from Kunming Medical University, she chose to return to Nujiang Prefecture People's Hospital in Yunnan Province to work, and the news was swiped on the Internet.
Fugong, a small county in the depths of the Nujiang Grand Canyon, also caused quite a stir.
The driver who traveled between the county and the town nodded, "Yu Yanqia? You know, we're a zipline girl here."
Fifteen years ago, Bula Village, Maji Township, Fugong County was still a remote and secret place. People on both sides of the Nu River had to rely on a zipline to cross the moat.
By chance, two TV media conducted in-depth interviews in the local area, and captured the picture of 6-year-old Yu Yancha Feisuo from Bula Primary School.
After the show aired, the story of ziplining to school stung the hearts of many people.
More than 20 media outlets jointly launched public welfare activities and raised millions of donations to build three love bridges in Nujiang, one of which was built next to Bula Primary School.
Poverty used to be like a sieve, causing children to slip halfway through the education stage, and the local dropout rate was once high.
But now, Yu Yancha has drawn a bright tail to this story: people are delighted to find that the little girl not only got into the university with excellent grades, but she also chose to return to her hometown to "light up" for others.
But what few people know is that there is not only one Yu Yanqia in this story, but several girls who walked out of the mountains, entered the university, and returned to the Nujiang River.
A moving easter egg is that the female reporter who once reported on the matter met the girl from Bra Elementary School by accident in the university class many years later, and heard the B side of the story.
The bridge of love, let the children on the zipline be seen.
After the spotlight, how much effort girls in remote and impoverished areas have to make to get out of the mountains may be beyond people's imagination.
changed
In the Hengduan Mountains at the junction of Yunnan and Tibet, the Nujiang River from north to south splits Gaoligong Mountain and Biluo Snow Mountain, dragging a deep Nujiang Grand Canyon.
Yu Yanqia's home is deep in the canyon in the Bu Shi Di Group in Bu La Village, Fugong County.
A few years ago, the local government built new houses for the villagers at the foot of the mountain, and Yu Yanqia's family moved down the mountain.
The small western-style building in the new home is built on the edge of the Nu River, and the pale yellow walls are dotted with elements of the Lisu nationality.
Opening the door, a small piece of corn about two meters high came into view. Behind the cornfield was the turbulent Nu River. The wind wrapped the wet water vapor on the river and passed through the hall, blowing the slightest coolness.
At the end of August, Yu Yanqia was about to join the Nujiang People's Hospital as a laboratory doctor.
In the last vacation of her student days, she decided to stay at home with her family.
Since the news of returning home to work was reported, the interviews with her have not stopped.
On July 24, Yu Yan just had a short time of her own.
After two o'clock in the afternoon, she was cooking small fried potatoes on the firepit in the kitchen.
After a while, she came to the living room with a pot of steaming small potatoes and a small dish of dried chili noodles.
22-year-old Yu Yanqia is petite and has natural curly hair in front of her forehead.
She spoke softly, her dimples looming when she laughed.
"We Lisu people only eat two meals a day." She was a little embarrassed and added, "Not everyone is like this."
The Lisu nationality is one of the unique ethnic groups in Yunnan, and it is also a straight nationality (especially after the founding of the People's Republic of China, without democratic reform, the nationality that directly transitioned from the primitive society to a socialist society across several social forms), has been in a closed state for a long time. The previous generation had little education.
Yu Yanqia's mother, who did not speak Chinese, smiled politely on the side.
Yu Yancha was very pleasantly surprised by the arrival of her little sister Shuang Wanqiu. She pulled Shuang Wanqiu and the two eagerly shared their current situation in Lisu language.
They have been classmates since elementary school and studied at Bula Primary School, the only primary school in Bula Village. There are 52 Lisu students in the whole school. There are four grades in name, but only three grades are recruited. Zipline to school.
Yu Yanqia's home is across the Nu River from Bula Primary School, and the campus is now deserted.
Yu Laihua, who is one grade lower than Yu Yanqia, remembers the original appearance of Bula Primary School.
There was originally a two-story building on the other side of the campus, which has now been refurbished for other purposes.
Every week, three teachers in the school bring back rice and corn from the village, and cook on the playground by lighting a fire on the spot.
Back then, it was not easy for the three girls to go to school.
Shuang Wanqiu lives in the east of the Nujiang River. Every morning, she has to walk for 40 minutes to go to school through the rushing traffic. Yu Yanqia and Yu Laihua both live in the west of the Nujiang River and have to zip across the river.
It takes four or five hours to walk from Yu Laihua's house to the school. Later, she simply stayed at a relative's house and traveled to and from home every week.
After the children of Bula Primary School finish lower grades here, they have to go to Maji Wan Primary School to continue their studies, but there is no junior high school in Maji Township, so they have to go to Shiyue Moon Middle School, 30 kilometers away.
After graduating from junior high school, there are only a few children left in Bula Primary School who can successfully go to high school in Nujiang Prefecture.
Yu Yanqia, Shuang Wanqiu and Yu Laihua were all admitted to the Nujiang State National Middle School, a key high school.
After the division of arts and sciences, Yu Yanqia went to the key class of science, and Shuang Wanqiu went to the key class of liberal arts.
In 2018, Yu Yanqia and Shuang Wanqiu were admitted to Kunming Medical University and Yunnan Normal University respectively, becoming the only two college students in Bula Village at that time.
A year later, Yu Laihua was also admitted to Yunnan University of Business Administration majoring in nursing.
In June of this year, Yu Yanqia and Shuang Wanqiu graduated from university and both chose to return to Nujiang.
Yu Yanqia will go to Liuku, where the Nujiang prefecture is located, and become a laboratory doctor; while Shuang Wanqiu is admitted to the establishment of a public institution in Gongshan County, Nujiang Prefecture, she is closer to home and returns from Gongshan County. Home is just over half an hour's drive away.
This summer, Yu Laihua did not come back. She worked as a trainee nurse in a hospital in Kunming.
“It would be nice to have a bridge”
Fifteen years ago, there were two ziplines connecting Bula Primary School and Yu Yanqia's house.
Nujiang Prefecture is surrounded by mountains, and the "three rivers" of Nujiang, Lancang and Dulong are crisscrossed.
In 1954, when the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture was established, there was no bridge across the river, no highway, and in some places, ziplining was the only way to get in and out of the mountains.
In 2011, when Yunnan fully implemented the project of "replacing ziplines to bridges", there were still 42 pairs of ziplines in the Nujiang River.
It wasn't until a few years ago that the zipline finally retired from the Nujiang River.
Ziplining is not a natural skill of the Lisu people, but more like a random draw of fate.
The road to the outside world is built on the east side of the Nujiang River. Therefore, for people born in the west of the Nujiang River, ziplining is a means of survival that must be mastered.
Pu Youheng, 51, still has lingering fears when he recalls the zipline.
After graduating from Nujiang Normal School, he has been teaching in several small villages on the mountain, and he has to zip across the river.
Afraid of heights, he did not dare to zipline alone. He had to rely on students and parents to lead him. It was not until 2005 that he ended his ziplining experience when he was transferred to Bula Primary School and lived in the school.
Yu Yancha remembered that she had been led by her grandmother on a zipline since she was three or four years old.
Every Monday, Grandma would take Yu Yanqia to the market in Maji Township.
Grandma tied her and a few chickens to her body, clamped her legs tightly, and hung them on the zipline.
The pulley rolled out, and with a slight tremor, they quickly slid to the other side.
Yu Yanqia likes to go to the market with her grandmother.
On the other side of the river, there was a tricycle waiting early, which could squeeze nearly ten people in total, and a car drove mightily towards the Maji Township Market.
That was Yu Yanqia's happiest moment. The rice noodles in the market were delicious in her childhood impressions.
The "Qia" in Yu Yanqia's name means "the third child" in the Lisu language.
She also has two older sisters. The older sisters started to zipline alone very early. When Yu Yan was just 6 years old, the first thing that was put into her schoolbag were pulleys and ropes.
In the local area, when children are about to enter elementary school, parents usually take them for a few walks first, teaching them the essentials of operation, how to stick the pulley on the steel cable, how to wrap the nylon rope into three strands and wrap the body to ensure that they slide safely to the opposite shore.
Not all parents are comfortable with their children ziplining alone.
Yu Laihua didn't go to elementary school until she was 8 years old. Every week, her father took her to and from school on a zipline.
It was not until the age of 10, when the younger children in the village were of school age, that she was allowed to go to school with them.
In the first few weeks of school in the fall of 2007, Dad repeatedly taught Yu Laihua to zipline a dozen times.
Yu Laihua still remembers the first time he ziplines alone, when Dad stood on the other side of the river with his brows furrowed.
She could only hear the sound of the wind blowing into her ears, and she didn't dare to glance at it, staring firmly at the wire rope above.
The children in the village formed a tacit understanding on the zip line. The younger children slid first, and the older children went after the palace. If they caught up with the lighter children and were parked and hung on the river, then the older and more experienced children would go. Assist in pushing the opponent to the other side little by little.
This is the reason why Dad emphasized that Yu Laihua must go to school with a zipline.
Almost every zipline kid has had some scary moments.
Once, before Yu Yanqia had tied herself with a rope, the pulley rolled out.
She was almost hanging upside down on the zipline, and she was about to rush towards the Nu River. A classmate flew to the river and grabbed her feet, Yu Yancha escaped.
Pu Youheng is not very worried about the safety of the children, "They are amazing!" He feels that the hardest part is in winter, when local children only wear sandals and rain boots all year round, and their feet are frozen with red and swollen frostbite. On a rainy day, the children on the zipline were soaked like chicken in soup.
At this time, Pu Youheng was thinking, it would be nice to have a bridge.
Love Bridge
One day in August 2007, two cars with Kunming license plates drove into Bula Primary School, and cameras were set up on the campus. Pu Youheng knew that there were reporters in the village.
At first, this stemmed from a phone thread from Jiangsu TV.
At that time, a girl named Xiong Jie in Nanjing, Jiangsu called the hotline of the TV station and told the story of her becoming a pen pal with a Lisu girl in Maji Township, Nujiang Prefecture, Yunnan Province seven years ago.
From 2000 to 2007, they had been exchanging letters, and Xiong Jie learned that the pen pal of the Nujiang River used a rope to cross the rapids to the other side every day to go to school.
Later, their contact was suddenly cut off, and Xiong Jie hoped that the reporter could help find the pen pal.
After hearing about it, the TV station leaders decided to take this opportunity to pay attention to the current situation of Nujiang children going to school on the zipline.
So reporters from Jiangsu TV got in touch with reporters from Yunnan TV, and they drove from Kunming together for 56 hours to reach Maji Township in Nujiang Prefecture.
Jiang Yan (pseudonym) of Yunnan TV remembered that they would stop to take pictures whenever they encountered a zipline along the way. After arriving at Bu La Primary School, the small campus and the adjacent zipline attracted everyone's attention. Personally, I subconsciously believe that this is a school with a story, "This is it."
During the chat with Pu Youheng, Jiang Yan met 6-year-old Yu Yanqia. She was wearing a rose red top and army green trousers, pulling sandals and carrying a large schoolbag.
The protagonist of the news came into the eyes of the reporters in this way.
The other end of the zipline is Yu Yanqia's home. With the help of the local villagers, the camera reporter ziplines across the river first, and completes the filming of Yu Yanqia's zipline home on the other side of the river.
As soon as the report aired, the TV station's hotline kept ringing.
Afterwards, more than 20 media across the country jointly launched the "Building a Bridge of Hope with Love" public welfare activity. In just two months, a total of more than 1.4 million yuan was raised for bridge construction.
"We can't give children a future, but we can give them a safe way to school," a Changzhou donor said emotionally in an interview.
The site of the first love bridge is next to the zipline of Bula Primary School.
A few months later, construction of the bridge started. Jiang Yan and her colleagues returned from Kunming to Bula Village. She set up the camera by the Nujiang River and filmed the "Bridge Construction Diary", which lasted for two months.
During the construction of the bridge, what impressed Yu Yanqia most was that she met workers who were also hanging on work ropes on a zipline in the morning. They met over the Nujiang River. The workers greeted Yu Yanqia with a foreign accent, almost every day.
On March 8, 2008, the last steel plate was finally welded, and the main work of the suspension bridge was completed.
It is a suspension bridge with a length of 140 meters, a width of 1.5 meters and a load capacity of 1 ton.
The day before the completion ceremony, local villagers picked pine needles overnight to decorate the bridge arch.
The name "Love Bridge" was voted by the students of Bula Primary School on the day of the completion ceremony.
On the day of the ceremony, Yu Yanqia was the first to walk the bridge.
Yu Yancha nervously walked to the opposite bank, and since then, she has never had a pulley in her schoolbag.
Growth behind the spotlight
The year the Love Bridge was completed, Yu Laihua was just in the first grade.
Under the leadership of the teacher, more than a dozen first-grade children lined up, holding hands, and completed the bridge of love little by little.
For the first time, Yu Laihua stood in the middle of the bridge and looked at the Nu River carefully. It was a strange feeling.
In the past, every time she zipped, she never dared to look down, she could only hear the wind and water whistling in her ears, but at that moment, she felt that the Nujiang River was beautiful and the wind was gentle.
The relationship between Love Bridge and Bula Primary School did not last long.
More than a year later, Pu Youheng was transferred from Bula Primary School; two or three years later, Bula Primary School was closed, and the children in the school went to Maji Primary School and then went to school, and the campus gradually became deserted.
However, this bridge became the most important passage for the villagers in Biluo Snow Mountain on the west bank of the Nujiang River. Since then, two other love bridges have been built on the Nujiang River.
The media halo dissipated, and the children of Bula Primary School grew up according to the established trajectory.
From Ma Jiwan Primary School to Shiyue Moon Middle School and then to Nujiang Minzu Middle School, they worked hard to move outwards little by little, and every step was not easy.
After the report, Jiang Yan often thinks of Yu Yanqia.
One year, she went to Tibet to shoot a film. She passed by the Nujiang River and stopped by Yu Yanqia's house. She was very familiar with that location.
But Yu Yan was not there. She was admitted to a key high school in Nujiang Prefecture and studied in Liuku.
In high school, Yu Yanqia faced fierce competition and pressure always troubled her.
When she was a child, she was a smart child in the village, but in the key classes of key high schools, her advantages seemed to be less prominent.
Yu Yanqia later realized that she did not have a systematic study method, and she had been working hard to close the gap.
In order to save money and time for her family to study, she eats very irregularly and loses a lot of weight.
Yu Laihua also suffered from gastritis because of saving money on meals.
In a math test in the third year of high school, she didn't eat breakfast, and she was sweating from stomach pain. She only scored more than 60 points in the math test that time.
The most difficult thing for her is English. The classmates in the city began to take interest classes very early, and she only began to contact "dumb English" in the first year of junior high school.
Conceptual shackles are everywhere.
As one of the regions with the largest area of poverty, the deepest degree of poverty, and the most complex poverty-causing factors in the country, Nujiang Prefecture had a prominent problem of dropping out of school in the early years.
According to the statistics of Nujiang Prefecture Bureau of Statistics, in 2006, the gross enrollment rate of junior middle schools in Nujiang Prefecture was 87.49%; while the gross enrollment rate of senior high schools was 27.02%, of which the gross enrollment rate of ordinary high schools was 18.98%.
Junior high school is the first watershed.
Many local parents believe that children can go out to work to subsidize the family after finishing junior high school. Affected by the custom of early marriage, girls are often more likely to drop out of school to get married.
In addition, dropout students showed significant gender characteristics, that is, more girls than boys.
The family has not explicitly prevented Shuang Wanqiu from continuing to study, but whenever there is a conflict, the sensitive girl can always capture the family's emotions, and she can only digest it silently.
In 2019, Jiang Yan was invited to give a lecture in the Department of Radio and Television of Yunnan Normal University. She recounted her interview experience at Bula Primary School more than ten years ago.
A girl stood up and told Jiang Yan that her name was Shuang Wanqiu, she was a student of Bula Primary School back then, and the reported Yu Yan was her good friend.
Jiang Yan was amazed. She never thought that she would reunite with the children of Bula Primary School in this way. She went back and watched the program of that year and recognized the appearance of Shuang Wanqiu's childhood in the camera.
The class that day turned into an interview class, and the students threw their own curious questions to Shuang Wanqiu.
She shared the story of a Lisu girl growing up from Bula Primary School, as well as some thoughts she had never confided to anyone outside the zipline.
Jiang Yan recalled that her tone was relatively calm, "It seems to have reconciled with the past."
Shuang Wanqiu can't forget that day. She and her parents and sister were building a house. Dad was standing on the ladder and yarding bricks. Mom was working with cement. She went to the computer in the other room to check the admission results of Yunnan Normal University. Excitedly rushed out to announce the good news.
The inarticulate parents kept laughing, and Shuang Wanqiu had never seen them so happy.
Tears welled up in her eyes as she recalled the details of the scene.
cross the river
The children of Bra Elementary School finally got out of the mountain.
"Kunming is open." Yu Laihua described it like this. In the Nujiang River, the field of vision is narrow, and there are mountains at a glance, but Kunming is different, "Kunming can't see the head at a glance."
For a long time, Shuang Wanqiu felt that the road to the Nujiang River was too far. She used to study in Liuku, and she had to take two motion sickness pills every week to get through the long journey.
Because of the geographical remoteness and isolation, the girls' parents have never left the Nujiang River or even Fugong.
Shuang Wanqiu remembered that it was the first time she went to Kunming to go to university, and her father, who had only been to Liuku, drove her to report for the first time. For this reason, he specially invited an uncle who had "experienced the world" to go with him. 12 hours to get to school.
Jiang Yan has also been paying attention to the growth of the girls.
After learning that Yu Yanqia's university tuition was subsidized by the government, she asked a friend to introduce a work-study program to Yu Yanqia to subsidize living expenses. In the second semester of her junior year, Shuang Wanqiu found a job as a camera assistant through Jiang Yan.
It was a humanities documentary from Yunnan. In April this year, the documentary was broadcast on CCTV. Shuang Wanqiu's Moments collected a screenshot of the video clip of the list of staff at the end of the film. Her signature is in the "Photography" column.
Shuang Wanqiu came into contact with anthropology and sociology in the university class, and planned to take the postgraduate entrance examination for these two majors, but now, she is thinking of working as soon as possible to reduce the financial burden for the family, "If there is a chance in the future, I hope to go Better schools in first-tier cities for further education.”
After walking out of the Nujiang River, the decision to return to the Nujiang River became the common choice of the girls.
Yu Laihua's idea is very simple, "If we don't even go back, who will build the Nujiang River?"
Although Yu Laihua has not yet graduated, Yu Laihua has already thought about the future. Next, he will prepare for the nursing qualification examination. He will study for a junior college next year and return to the hospital in Nujiang to become a nurse after graduation.
When she was in junior high school, Nujiang Prefecture People's Hospital and Maji Township paired up to help. A nurse became Yu Laihua's sponsor, and Yu Laihua called her Auntie.
When I was in high school in Liuku, every weekend, my aunt took Yu Laihua to her home to improve her meals, and sometimes took her to the hospital where she worked. .
In media interviews, Yu Yanqia was often asked a question, why did she choose to return to her hometown to work?
Perhaps there is another answer to this question that has never been told to anyone. Yu Yancha looked at the rushing Nu River outside the door and was a little dazed.
In the four seasons of the year, she likes the Nujiang River at the turn of winter and spring the most, because "the Nujiang River in that season is not angry", it has a deep and jade-like tranquility.
And in one day, early morning is the best, the dark green peaks of the mountains are in the clouds, and she once dreamed at midnight in Kunming.
In the myths and legends of the Lisu people, they are "the descendants of tigers and apes" and are good at climbing mountains and forests. In order to cross the Nujiang River, they were inspired by the rainbow in the sky and invented the zipline.
Today, Yu Yancha never ziplines anymore, the rainbow has become a real bridge, and the Nujiang River ends the history of ziplines.
She is still blessed by that courage, and they have overcome all difficulties and dangers, and "the future will be the same."
Beijing News reporter Li Zhao