Liehuo's sister, schooling ... and the pig

(Liehuo is a first year university student in Beijing, though she comes from a subsistence farming family in the countryside. There are seven sisters in the family. Liehuo's own struggles to get to – and remain at – university are a fascinating story, but I find the account of her elder sister's determination to continue with her schooling particularly ... interesting, poignant, humorous, humbling ...)

L: Most of young people in our village only finish the junior middle schooling. Children in my family are comparatively crazy about studying. Maybe that is because that my elder sister set a good example for us. ... Without my elder sister ... when she was a junior middle school pupil, many students in my hometown dropped out of school when they finished primary school. For a big family like ours, no one expected to go to junior middle school at that time when we were too poor to enjoy a full meal. But my elder sister was very strong-minded. She told my father that she wanted to go on with her middle schooling. At that time, my father didn't allow her to go on with her study. In fact, it is not my father who didn't allow my sister to study. It was my grandparents who persuaded my father to stop her from going on with her schooling. They said it was no good to send girls to school.

X: Why did they not allow her to go to school?

L: (she was a little shy and smiled) Girls, especially in the countryside, will become a member of another family when they are married in the future. Moreover, at that time, my family was really very poor and we even could not afford food. I had six sisters and the youngest one was only so short at that time. (She gestured the height of her youngest sister, about less than 1 metre.)

X: Your youngest sister?

L: Then, the my elder sister, ...at that time, my family raised a pig, which I still remember now clearly.

X: A pig?

L: Right, a pig. (Both of us laughed!) People in rural areas usually raise pigs. My elder sister said that the pig could be sold for money, although the pig was just over 50 kilos. In the countryside, the people usually don' t kill the pigs until Spring Festival every year.

X: On Spring Festival, pigs are killed, so people can eat meat.

L: Then, do you know what my elder sister did to that pig? She used a spade to chop at the pig. She said if my father did not sell the pig she would chop it! (She laughs!) She hit the pig with a stone. She wanted to go to school!

X: What grade was she in at that time?

L: Grade one in a junior middle school. She was so young and short at that time. I feel that my elder sister had the hardest experience in schooling among seven children in my family. I remember that my father wept at that moment. He said it was his fault to have had so many children but could not bring them up. Then he took my elder sister to borrow money from relatives and acquaintances, even from the money-lender.

X: Ah! You have money-lenders in your hometown!

L: We didn't want to have a loan from the bank because we had to pay extra interest when we return the money. When we asked help from those people who were very rich, they didn't believe we had the ability to return the money. So they didn't lend us the money. My father and my elder sister spent two days looking for people who can lend us the money, but ended up in vain. Then my father told us that they looked down upon us, so we must study harder in school. From then on, my father made up his mind to support our schooling. So the pig was killed and my elder sister went to the junior middle school. She won the first rank in the first exam in the school. In the next term, when my sister could not go to school due to lack of money, it was her teacher who came to my home and encouraged her to go to school. I once encountered a similar situation with my sister in this respect.

X: What you are talking about seems only happened in movies!

L: Before she entered that school, no one knew that she studied so well, so she had to pay the fees for her schooling. But once people knew that she performed so well in her academic work, her teachers would come to encourage her if she didn't register for a new term because of tuition fees. The teacher would ask my sister, "Why don't you come to school? You are the number one student in our class!" My sister would say, "I have no money to pay for the tuition." The teacher said that we could borrow some money or take a loan from the school. So both my sister and I usually borrowed some money first, and then paid it back if we could earn some money by doing some odd jobs. The money we paid for our schooling was only small amount, which could not cover all the expenses at all, but if we didn't pay anything we would feel so guilty, because we knew that our teachers were also very painstaking in their work, especially in high schools. Since my sister had got into junior school, there were no obstacles for me to go to a junior school. If my sister hadn't had that quarrel with my father, we could only have finished our primary schooling and then gone to work.