"Adult Literacy Class" in the live room
The palm-sized screen can also be turned into a blackboard, and the students are a bunch of illiterate adults.
Li Hong, 52, builds walls for 11 hours a day, builds hundreds of bricks, pays off her son's college loan, and saves her daughter's dowry.
But when she turned on the live broadcast of teaching adult literacy, she gave up her work and became a "student" who concentrated on literacy.
Searching for "adult literacy" on a short video platform, you will find hundreds of live broadcast rooms, most of which are personal operating accounts, some have changed careers from early childhood education, and some have never taught, only have a college degree, and Mandarin is not very standard.
In the live broadcast room, Li Hong found "classmates", including elderly people in their 60s and 70s, as well as those born in the 80s and 90s who "played very smoothly" with their mobile phones.
On construction sites, along highways, and in vegetable greenhouses, they stared at the same "blackboard" hungrily during work breaks and when children fell asleep.
Ding Xiaohua is one of the first anchors to teach adult literacy on the short video platform.
She was accustomed to the absence of flying lights and gifts in the live broadcast room, and the constantly beating numbers in the upper right corner proved the presence of the audience.
The students could not type, and many had only a string of numbers in their screen names, and some had commas and periods that were not deleted from speech-to-text.
She taught them Pinyin, handwriting, mobile phone typing, various common phrases in daily life, and sometimes helped resolve family disputes.
Some students call her "teacher", while others call her "lucky star" and "savior".
In this large classroom, the "graduation" standard is to reach "the fifth and sixth grade level of primary school", which means that the literacy amount reaches nearly 3,000.
In a life without these 3,000 words, everything from doing business accounting, registering a child, signing a divorce agreement, shopping online, singing a song on a KTV, or even going to a public toilet would be easy and difficult. live with this group of people.
According to the seventh national census, they only account for 2.67% of the country's population, and many have never told their co-workers and colleagues about their pain of being illiterate.
"My life is incomplete," said one student in her 50s. "I've been a mother, wife, daughter, but I've never had classmates."
After she started learning Chinese characters, Li Hong practiced her calligraphy at night when she was upset. She hung her headlamp on the upper bunk and wrote on the lower bunk.
The students have fulfilled many wishes. For example, it was the first time that they could take the train alone, go to the hospital to register and pay bills, and go to the bank alone to deposit and withdraw money.
"If you don't know two words, it's really hard to walk."
In the live broadcast room, the number of people is the least in summer, and the number of people in the winter will increase exponentially. The busy farming has made the "students" in the live broadcast room unable to escape, and there are still people who have to work overtime in the peak production season of the factory.
The children are on summer vacation, and they have to take their children at home.
In the winter, the migrant workers began to return to their hometowns, and there was no work in the fields.
Students come and go like migratory birds, and the live broadcast room will be lively after 10 o'clock every night.
Teachers are not as regular as they are at school.
Their income mainly depends on the sale of literacy books and online courses in the live broadcast room. Because of the small audience and low profit, many "teachers" will not update after half a year.
Ding Xiaohua is one of the few who are still holding on.
During the class in the live broadcast room, Ding Xiaohua habitually repeated a sentence three times, and her voice dragged on for a long time.
The bullet screen flow is also slow, the students rarely come forward, and the sentences that they type occasionally are not thoughtless.
They said, "Good evening, teacher, by your dumplings", probably because they were teaching "twisted silk" in class.
Students who read Pinyin with Mai often hesitate for a few seconds before they dare to read it.
Some people were too nervous to connect to the mic and kept laughing, saying, "Forget it, I can't read it, my heart is pounding."
5 minutes later, Ding Xiaohua asked, shall we talk about it next time?
But the students timidly said that they wanted to read.
Ding Xiaohua rarely gets angry and will let the students read until they are correct.
Ding Xiaohua understood this indescribable feeling.
She is from Guyuan, Ningxia, 35 years old, with a college degree and a strong northwestern accent. She always pronounces "village" as "cong" and "wind" as "fen".
Ding Xiaohua's parents were illiterate, even three generations later. She is the most educated person in the family.
She worked as an accountant in Yinchuan. Three years ago, she quit her job and went home to take care of her children, so she had plenty of time.
After chatting with her parents far away in Guyuan, she began to want to teach them to read.
When she was a child, she saw her parents go to the hospital. She didn't know how to register and get medicine. She asked the security guard, and the security guard yelled at them, "You don't have eyes!" Ding Xiaohua felt uncomfortable.
Having a smartphone in the past two years, my parents can only make phone calls and accidentally click on the wrong pop-up advertisement. They will not turn off the phone.
Thinking that there are many people in her hometown who are just like her parents, and everyone learns together with more energy, she opens the live broadcast to teach literacy, and people in the same city can listen to it.
Only single words are taught at first, including everyday phrases related to stations, banks and hospitals.
Later, students from all over the country continued to pour into the live broadcast room, and she began to systematically teach pinyin and capital letters.
There are many reasons why the trainees fail to receive education. Some come from remote and impoverished areas with many children and no money to go to school.
Some are orphans or de facto orphans, in foster care with relatives.
Some people are disabled and cannot take care of themselves.
Most of them are between the ages of 40 and 70, and there are also a small number of post-90s and post-00s.
They are accustomed to silence, silence when they are called "stupid" by their colleagues, and silence when they are called "rubbish" by their partners.
On the short video platform, watching videos and watching live broadcasts, most people have never commented because they can’t type.
But they rely on icons to identify mobile apps, and they rely on voice or the help of family members to enter text online.
The screen name will reveal the secret of the heart.
A practitioner named "Homesick Woman", 42 years old, has never returned to her parents' home by herself.
Her family's home is only more than 100 kilometers away from her, but she doesn't know the place name, so she is afraid of taking the wrong bus.
A cerebral palsy patient named "Zi Ling" on the Internet is also one of the students. She likes watching idol dramas and the boldness and liveliness of "Zi Ling" in "One Curtain Dream".
She has been bored at home since she was a child, and she has a lot of words and nowhere to say.
Pushed by my mother for a walk, I met disabled friends who were performing on the street, and added QQ, but I didn't know the characters they typed.
Many people's privacy needs are hard to articulate.
After 90s, Wang Meiyu spent her teenage years stubbornly: if she wanted to buy milk-flavored shower gel, she opened the bottle cap and sniffed it without asking the shopping guide; she only bought transparent bottles for make-up water, which would not be confused with lotion; sanitary napkins were divided into I don't know whether to use it daily or at night. I bought a lot of wrong products. When people ask, they say they are stocking up.
When you can't take it anymore, you can only ask for help.
When going to the bank to withdraw or deposit money, Wang Meiyu would find someone to go with her, but she was looking for someone from the same village. In case someone stole money and ran away, she would know where his home was.
Her mother said since she was a child, "Learning or not learning (character) is the same, sooner or later you will get married."
But Wang Meiyu did not want to be trapped in the countryside all her life. She just entered the 21st century. At the age of 14, she left home and went south with the tide of migrant workers.
It was the first time to work with a friend from the same village. She got off the train, entered the factory, and left by train three months later. She still doesn't know the name of the place.
After that, she went to various factories and found that "diligence" could not make up for the "clumsy" who was illiterate.
In a garment factory, you can only get money by writing down the completed process. Wang Meiyu can't write, and she always does more and gets less money.
When dismantling the clothing, others can quickly find the corresponding parts according to the drawings. She has to dig through the samples for a long time to remember the structure.
Few of her peers were illiterate. Workers always said that Wang Meiyu didn’t go to school because she was “unbehaved” and “disobedient.” Everyone in the assembly line avoided her for fear of being dragged back by her.
Since then, Wang Meiyu has learned to drink and smoke, sit alone in the corner of the female worker's dormitory, and embroider her thoughts into cross-stitch.
In the past five or six years, the desire for literacy has gradually expanded in her heart.
Screens filled with words appeared in shops, hospitals, banks, and stations, and it was getting harder and harder for her to hide her weaknesses.
Because of her serious attitude, she was expected to be promoted to random inspection. She only had to sit in an air-conditioned room and record product data with a computer, but she could not use a computer.
Many students feel the same way. A student in his 50s recalled that when he was a child, there were "few motorcycles" on the road, and there were no street signs.
Now everyone uses mobile phones to navigate, "it's really hard to move without knowing two words".
"I'm so old, can I still learn?"
Many "older students" do not have high learning goals. It is enough to be able to keep accounts and do business, learn to drive and sell goods, take skill certificates, and work in larger factories.
But after listening to the same course, some people can learn the structure of Chinese characters in half a month, and some people still spin in the single final "aoe" after a year.
Cheng Jie has taught children in private preschools for 10 years. She believes that teaching adults is more difficult than teaching children.
"Children are a blank piece of paper. As soon as you wave your hand or open your mouth, they will read with you. These adults in the live broadcast room have their own ideas and their own ideas."
Some adults have ingrained pronunciation habits.
For some students who cannot read "ne" and "le" clearly, the teacher will ask the students to open their mouths wide, take a video and send it over to see whether their tongues are against the front teeth or the upper jaw.
More difficult to reverse is the inferiority complex of some people.
People who enter the live broadcast room for the first time always ask, "Teacher, I am so old, can I still learn?" When encountering difficulties, the pain of "being inferior" in the past few decades will flood into their hearts, "They feel that they are The dumbest person in the world".
To help them understand the curriculum, Cheng Jie tries to stay close to life.
Using the word "degree", she explained "concentration", "that is, the medicine in the tube when you use pesticides."
Talking about the structure of the right half of "floating", she asked, "There are children under the claws, which are common in rural areas, do you remember? It hatches eggs." Read the single final "u", she taught them the mouth shape, "Your child is angry When you purse your mouth, you purse it."
These "older students" have no parents, and teachers have to provide "nanny-style" services.
Sometimes the mobile phone is wrong, or the platform is stuck, and the students call immediately, "I can't find your teacher!" "You have no teacher in your class!"
When students want to buy online courses that they can watch back, teachers need to start teaching by opening the software and tell them the color and location of the "buy" icon.
After purchasing the course, the teacher wanted to send the book, but the students didn’t know how to write the address. Some people sent their ID photos directly, while others went to the door to take house numbers and street signs.
Many students are used to seeing indifferent eyes, and this is the first time they have been treated patiently.
Double-click the screen in the live broadcast room to light up the red heart and increase the exposure of the anchor.
In order to help Cheng Jie increase his popularity, the students spontaneously came up with a lot of jingles, and they sent out voice promotions in the live broadcast room if they had nothing to do: "There is always love in thousands of waters, thousands of mountains are always love, can a little love do it?" "Go for a walk, live to ninety-nine; Fluttering, knowledge grows taller."
Cheng Jie, 43, is often affectionately called "little teacher" by her eldest sister in her 60s and 70s. She has received raisins from Xinjiang, apples from Shandong, and wolfberries from Ningxia.
Some anchors even received a pennant.
Ding Xiaohua's students will consult her first when they encounter difficulties in parenting and procedures for starting a business.
The live broadcast room is also a tree hole for students to express their joy and sorrow.
A student named "Fire Wolf Girl" and Cheng Jie connected to Mai, saying that their child had received an admission letter from the university.
Cheng Jie was overjoyed, "Bring flowers to our eldest son of the fire wolf girl, the Normal University is really promising!" The barrage became active, and rows of flowers and love conveyed silent congratulations.
One student complained that she never knew how much her husband earned, and another student couldn't help but post a barrage that was not very smooth, teaching her to have financial power at home, "What I want is earned by the gentlemen. You can't save money. How can you fix it? It's a pity that you can't touch the money in this life."
"True Independence"
The students were reading with Mai in the live broadcast room. Teachers could sometimes hear the cynical sarcasm of their children and spouses on the other end of the phone.
A student once wanted a refund because her husband objected to her studies, smashed her phone and ripped up her books.
She could only learn secretly by hiding under the covers.
Some people are worried that their mobile phones will be seen by their family members, and propose to change the "adult illiterate group" to "happy group".
Some people read books at the counter of their own store and hide books when they come to customers.
Cheng Jie often said to the frustrated students, "You should change even more. If your family doesn't support you, it means you have no status. Why don't you have status? Because you are illiterate, you can't do anything. Love is mutual, how can you give love unilaterally without asking for it all your life? In return?" She recommended that the students ask their families to help with some household chores.
Teachers found that the majority of these illiterate students were women.
According to the "China Statistical Yearbook (2021 Edition)", women account for 75% of the illiterate population in China.
For the first half of their lives, they supported their husbands' work and pulled their children together.
Some people always suspect that the husband is chatting with other women on WeChat, but she cannot understand it.
Her husband didn't guard her either, and the phone was left in front of her.
"I've gotten used to sacrifice." The anchor Liu Jia had seen a woman, and when she signed up, she burst into tears on the phone, saying that her husband looked down on her, her family ignored her, and that every penny spent had to look at other people's faces.
Liu Jia felt that she would definitely study hard, but after reconciling with her husband, she stopped studying. "She has crutches, so study is unnecessary."
In the process of teaching these women to read, Liu Jia kept seeing the shadows of her mother and grandmother.
The grandmother was born in the Republic of China, with bound feet and illiterate. In order to wait for someone from a scholarly family, she insisted on not marrying. She married Liu Jia's grandfather at the age of 30 to fill in the house.
After more than ten years of marriage, my grandfather passed away. My grandmother pulled 4 sons by herself and raised 3 college students.
But grandma never had her own name, and everyone called her "Ni'er of the old Dong family".
Grandma always likes to ask Liu Jia, who is in elementary school, to name herself and teach herself to read. When she sees a word she likes, she adds it to her name.
Liu Jia's mother is "circling around the house".
Liu Jia and her brother never carried keys when they were young, because whenever the door was opened, their mother was always there.
In Heilongjiang in winter, the whole family doesn't need to buy clothes. The mother will knit a set of scarves, hats, gloves, and make cotton shoes, cotton clothes and cotton pants.
Only when quarreling with my father does my mother speak her mind.
Liu Jia remembers one time her mother said in tears, "I just don't have culture. If I have culture, I'll leave!" Because her mother didn't know how to read, she endured it every time she wanted to go back to her parents' home.
Letting a pair of children have culture has become the mother's greatest wish.
Liu Jia remembered that her mother didn't know how to do homework. No matter what her handwriting was, her mother praised her beautifully; as long as she saw the red check mark, her mother would be happy.
She never let Liu Jia get involved in housework. Even if Liu Jia said that she had finished her homework, her mother would still repeat like a conditioned reflex, "I have to do my homework after school."
On the day Liu Jia's brother dropped out of junior high school, this tough woman was rarely ill for a month.
But my mother never put this obsession on herself.
After starting live teaching, Liu Jia once asked her mother if she would like to learn to read.
The mother refused. She depended on her husband first, then her son, and now her granddaughter who just went to college. Liu Jia felt that she could no longer throw away the "crutch".
"She can always find a cane."
In order to help them regain their enthusiasm for learning, Cheng Jie told these middle-aged women who only knew chai, rice, oil, and salt about "cultivating a champion in three generations", telling them how education can bring about changes in their vision.
She talked about how she ran out of the village with her child and went to Beijing for the sake of her child's education, and she stayed there for 15 years.
Cheng Jie will also talk about how women keep up with the pace of society.
For example, when talking about "generals", she knew that many people had heard "The Generals of the Yang Family" on the radio, so she tried to praise Mu Guiying, "This is the pride of our women, and we must also have the idea of being a 'powerful role'."
There are also "powerful characters" among these students.
In the eyes of others, although 52-year-old Sun Feng is illiterate, he is definitely "independent".
She opened a three-story massage parlour and brought a dozen shop assistants to support her two sons by herself in her 20s.
Usually, she likes to chat with people in the live broadcast room, with delicate makeup, stiff false eyelashes, and shiny manicures that are two centimeters long.
She always scolds those netizens who call her "old woman" and drinks 1 liter iced black tea after scolding.
But under the armor, what Sun Feng longs for is "true independence" and "effortless independence".
She was born in rural Gansu, her family was poor, and her grandmother would not let the girl go to school. She worked hard since she was a child, pulling coal from the hillside and pouring cement slabs at the brick factory.
At the age of 17, I met my boyfriend and followed him to Xinjiang to "go for gold". Unexpectedly, my boyfriend spent all their savings due to gambling and domestic violence.
She is strong. After leaving her boyfriend with her child, she has never borrowed a penny from relatives and friends.
When I was the poorest, I only had 5 cents in my pocket, and I kept it for a whole week.
Because of her lack of education, she doesn't even trust the bank, so she stuffs the money she earns into bad shoes and hides it under the bed.
She works in a foot bath shop and competes with dozens of feet every day.
There are many women in the foot bath shop, and there are many right and wrong, and she rarely participates in quarrels.
But if someone is deliberately provocative, she will grab her head and knock on the table.
She always has a solution.
After she opened her own shop, she took friends she had known in the foot bath shop for more than ten years to help her settle accounts, apply for business licenses, and sign contracts.
She knows "male" and "female", recognizes numbers, and stores the customer's number in the format of "female 1" and "male 1".
Paying wages to employees every month, she took her son, who is in junior high school, to the bank to withdraw and save money.
But when her son grew up and became a family, she realized that she was indebted everywhere.
"I can't let my son follow me forever, or beg my friends to follow me." After learning Chinese characters from the live broadcast for more than a year, she flew back to her hometown in Gansu by herself for the first time.
When she got off the plane, for the first time in her life, she felt "confident" in her heart.
"Change is destiny"
No one can tell what standard is "graduated". Ding Xiaohua thinks that he has mastered all the common words in life, and Cheng Jie thinks that he can search for new words and solve problems by himself by searching the Internet.
Liu Jia hopes that they can achieve normal writing and independent reading, although only two or three of the 10 students can read complete paragraphs.
Their daily exposure to text is very small, and reading can help them review and consolidate.
So in addition to literacy and pinyin classes, she also opened a reading class, taking students to read primary school texts.
The students all like to read "Teaching Ants to Recognize Characters", and stumbling across sentences:
"Citizens of the ant/kingdom/ are all/hardworking, but/illiterate and/or illiterate. The ant/king/is very distressed. Without knowledge of/culture, they will be/being/looked down by/others, and will be/by/others / bullying."
A 54-year-old farmer is busy in the vegetable greenhouse during the day. He must read aloud before going to bed at night.
To this end, she bought a large light bulb and a magnifying glass. After taking a bath for her grandson every night, she sat in the gauze account and read "How Beautiful a Summer Night" in cadence.
For those whose lives have long been "set", literacy is about making dreams come true.
A student in his 60s who has never walked 5 miles away from home.
In order to be able to go to the market alone, she carried a pen and a piece of paper with her, and wrote in the fields, in the kitchen, and when she was doing laundry.
The day when she mustered up the courage to go out by herself, for the first time, she dared to look up and read the plaque on a street.
A 72-year-old student shivered with a pen at the beginning, "I can't draw it with hard strokes." Now, because of the good-looking words, serious homework, and sufficient time, he is the monitor in the WeChat group and has added more than 20 people's WeChat.
She recalled being a vice-captain of the production team 50 years ago, and was dismissed because she could not pass the minutes of the meeting. Now, she feels that she is a "useful person".
In the "typing practice group", students will share their favorite sentences.
A female student in her 70s sent an excerpt, "Slowly savouring tea and enjoying life on the road in the sunset. Live happily and leisurely every day, keep healthy and watch the sunset."
Some students like to copy the lyrics, "Watching the years linger, drag me away slowly, and loneliness tricks me into the intersection."
Cheng Jie looked at it, and excitedly said in the group, "Whoever said we can't do it, you are all pearls buried in the soil."
Many people have watched the class several times, but still haven't given up learning and practicing calligraphy every day.
Wang Meiyu works in a fan factory, where she drives thousands of screws a day, and the fans are humming overhead and sweating profusely.
As she drew and recalled new words in her mind, her heart became very quiet.
Every night after get off work at 9 o'clock, she learns new words as soon as she gets home, and she doesn't sleep until she finishes her studies.
She likes to put the previous homework and the current one together and take pictures for her boyfriend.
It turned out that a line of characters was high and low, large and small, and a word was scattered into several parts, which was "extremely messy".
Now, her words lie obediently in the center of the grid, clean and tidy.
Every time she goes out, she likes to ask her boyfriend to slow down the speed of the electric car and read out the names of the shops on the roadside one by one.
Li Hong, a 52-year-old construction worker, posted wild flowers by the roadside, abandoned construction sites, and barren ridges on a short video platform, but there was no narration and no music.
The videos now have titles, as well as her brief comments.
It turned out that she was afraid of disturbing her daughter's work, so she only called once a week.
The happiest thing now is to send a message to my daughter every morning, noon and evening, "Have you eaten yet?"
Students are always embarrassed to say that after learning Chinese characters, they become "talkative".
The cerebral palsy student "Zi Ling", no one in the class knew that she was physically disabled, and her classmates praised her for "learning really well".
She knocked a lot of words into the circle of friends, including small things such as going out to do nucleic acid, visiting the supermarket, insomnia, etc., and "swipe the screen" several times a day.
A 45-year-old male student followed the boss to the dinner. He just drank with his head down, "all in the wine."
He has good skills and is highly valued by his boss. His colleagues are not convinced and take him for "no culture".
He used to be silent before, but now he has learned to deal with it skillfully, "If I hadn't studied, you wouldn't be able to catch up with me."
Sun Feng, a strong woman who opened a massage parlour, said that her temper was not so rushed, "I know it's the end of it."
Some familiar avatars always appeared before. She couldn't read names, she could only say, "Thank you for coming."
Now that she could call out their names, her tone was subconscious and soft.
She seemed to finally be able to pour out the pain in her heart.
Looking back on her life, Sun Feng wrote a sentence as a personal profile for her short video account, "Are you really tired? Tired is right, suffering is life, patience is experience, and change is destiny."
(At the request of the interviewee, except Ding Xiaohua and Cheng Jie, the rest are pseudonyms)
China Youth Daily, China Youth Daily reporter Jiao Jingxian Source: China Youth Daily