How two women transformed learning in rural China

Something’s amiss. After a 12-hour train ride, I’ve reached a remote village on China’s Loess Plateau, where I’m searching for a teacher I wrote about 30 years ago. I can still picture Bai Guiling juggling lessons for four grades in a dim cave classroom carved from the yellow earth. Her dedication to the needy village children was unforgettable. Now, I want to revisit her story as a window into education in rural China today. 

But no one in the dusty hamlet in northern Shaanxi province has heard of Teacher Bai or even remembers the school. Worse, my trip unexpectedly coincides with a visit to Shaanxi by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, so security is extraordinarily tight. Plainclothes police are tailing me everywhere. 

I flip through my notebook looking for the phone number of the only person who might be able to help – a Chinese American woman who years ago took a special interest in Teacher Bai. 

Sitting in my taxi while the police watch from down the road, I tap her U.S. number into my phone and wait for what seems like forever.

“Hello?” a frail but chipper voice answers. It’s Lin-yi Wu.

A few days earlier, in mid-May, I’d tracked down Ms. Wu, a retired librarian, at a senior living home in Walnut Creek, California. The nonagenarian was recovering from a fall – taken while jazz dancing – but was in good spirits. “Every time I hear jazz, my feet get itchy!” she said with a laugh. She, too, was eager for news of Teacher Bai.

Born the daughter of a well-to-do Shanghai antiques merchant in 1933, Ms. Wu received an elite education that bore no resemblance to Teacher Bai’s bare-bones cave classes. She rode rickshaws to a stately Shanghai middle school run by American missionaries. After graduating from the top-flight Peking University, she was retained to teach French. A formative moment came when Communist Party authorities exiled her and her husband-to-be, English professor Hung-sen Wu, to labor in a hardscrabble mountain village outside Beijing in 1958, during Mao Zedong’s commune movement.

“My eyes were opened to see how the majority of Chinese lived,” Ms. Wu told me. For that, she was grateful. But she also witnessed how Mao’s failed communes slashed farm output, leaving bok choy wilting in the fields and piglets dying in the street. A massive famine ensued, forcing villagers to eat leaves and corncobs. “It was horrible,” she said. From 1959 to 1961, tens of millions of Chinese starved. 

Once back at Peking University, Ms. Wu was shocked when authorities spread propaganda about a bumper harvest, rejoicing with music and gongs. “People are dying, and they celebrate the big harvest? That was the last straw,” she said. “I could never live under a government that tells such a lie to the detriment of its people.” In 1961, the couple fled via Hong Kong to the United States, only to be labeled traitors in China.

Forging a life in America, the Wus never lost the desire to help their destitute countrymen. Then, in April 1992, they opened The Christian Science Monitor and read my article about Teacher Bai’s struggles. At once, they each decided – without a word between them – to use their savings to build the village a proper school. 

“We didn’t even have to discuss it – we wanted to do something,” Ms. Wu said. She penned a letter to me in Beijing, asking to contact Teacher Bai.

But where is Teacher Bai now? I ask over the phone. “I don’t know where she lives, but I remember her village was in Ansai County,” Ms. Wu tells me. “And I have her daughter’s phone number.”

I open my road atlas and scour the map of Ansai, two counties away from where I am. Suddenly it makes sense – there are two villages with the same name, Yangjiagou, and I’m in the wrong one.   

Her smile and warmth are infectious. After 30 years, I instantly recognize Teacher Bai when I see her waiting for me at the train station in the nearby city of Yan’an, a meeting arranged by her daughter. It feels like we never lost a beat.

Driving a borrowed car, she whisks me into the rugged countryside, winding along steep ravines and terraced fields, and then turns down a bumpy dirt road to Yangjiagou. The plainclothes police grow distant in the rearview mirror and fade away.

Teacher Bai grasps my arm and helps me climb the overgrown path to her former cave schoolhouse, where we met in the spring of 1992.

“Look at this old classroom!” she says, peering through the worn wooden lattice of the cave’s front window at the peeling mud-and-straw walls. “I taught here for five years. We were so poor,” she says in her lilting local twang. 

Back then, she had to overcome huge odds just to become a minban teacher – the low-paid, minimally trained villagers who made up 40% of rural primary teachers. 

Born in 1964 to a farming couple in a cave high on a barren hillside a few miles away, Ms. Bai was the eldest of five children – four girls and a boy. Food was scarce in the wake of China’s famine. They ate boiled thistles and cornhusk buns. “That counted as good food,” she says. Her mother was illiterate. Her father only went to primary school and shared a traditional bias against educating daughters. But, for reasons she never discerned, he made an exception for his firstborn.

Wearing pigtails, a white blouse, and a red kerchief, she ran down the village path to a 1950s-era dugout school. Run by the commune, it bore a single red star. Despite turmoil in education during Mao’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, she graduated from primary school in 1975. Studying late under an oil lamp, she excelled in middle school. In 1983, she became the first person from her village to earn a high school diploma.

Recruited to teach, she finished a correspondence course. Then, as a new wife and mother, she loaded her belongings into a wooden pushcart and moved to Yangjiagou, while her husband labored in a distant city. With no electricity, few books, and the ever-present risk that the cave – dug from soft, silty soil – could collapse, she began lessons for two dozen students in different grades. Her goal: to battle widespread illiteracy, discourage dropouts, and instill a love for learning that transforms young lives.

“I want to popularize the importance of primary education,” she told me back in 1992. “People who are educated can easily use new farming technology – others can’t.” Her dream: to rally the villagers to build a new school.

Now, as wind rustles through the trees and cowbells ring from a herd plodding down from the hills, Teacher Bai recalls the day we met – and how a downpour and mud-clogged roads forced me to miss my plane, giving us more time to visit. 

“That was wonderful – our good fortune,” she says. “The article you wrote changed my fate, and the fate of three generations of my family.”

Not long after my 1992 trip, a local official came to find Teacher Bai. Breathlessly, he told her a group of overseas Chinese and Americans wanted to build a new primary school at Yangjiagou – and they named her to be in charge.

Teacher Bai’s mission to bring learning to village youths had just vastly expanded – as would the challenges ahead.

Back in the U.S., Ms. Wu excitedly tallied the funds. After a benefit dinner, greeting card drive, and garage sale – combined with her $4,000 in savings – she’d amassed more than $8,000 as of 1994. It was enough to build Yangjiagou a new school, the first by her new organization, Friends of Rural China Education (FORCE).

Still, Ms. Wu was worried. Her mistrust of China’s authorities was exacerbated by recent reports of widespread corruption. How to get the funds securely into Teacher Bai’s hands?

Through a Catholic church with contacts in Hong Kong, she found a nun who would soon travel to mainland China to teach. They arranged for the nun to hand-deliver $8,000 in cash to Teacher Bai at the train station in Guangzhou, across the border from Hong Kong. “I will never forget what Teacher Bai told me,” recalls Ms. Wu. “She said, ‘I will guard this money with my life.’” 

Teacher Bai did that and more. After teaching all day, she shoveled dirt and laid bricks to help build Yangjiagou’s new primary school. Once it was finished and full of her students, she began planning for the next FORCE school. “I decided which place was suitable based on how old and broken the school was,” she says.

Ms. Wu kept pace by raising more funds. Within two years, she was receiving donations from 22 U.S. states and as far away as Italy, Jordan, and Australia. Energized, she started teaching tai chi and donating her earnings.

Grieving the loss of her husband in 1996, Ms. Wu found solace in the work of FORCE. “The mission really inspired my mother and helped her get through my father’s passing,” says her son, Tse-Sung Wu. “It transformed her and became the center of her world.”

As a motto, Ms. Wu adopted the words of Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, who wrote that he wished to see – 

Tens of thousands of
mansions
Housing the laughter
Of every penniless scholar
Under the skies.

After FORCE built five schools in Ansai County, Ms. Wu and her children flew to China to visit. Hundreds of people lined up to greet them. Villagers wearing white head cloths and red sashes beat waist drums and danced an ancient folk dance.

FORCE was not done building schools in China. But at that moment, decades after fleeing her homeland, Ms. Wu had come full circle. Even her Peking University classmates, who had denounced her, welcomed her warmly.

“I was no longer a traitor,” she says.

Stepping out of her high-rise apartment building onto a tree-lined street in Ansai’s district center one recent day, Teacher Bai and I walk only half a block before a former student greets her.

After a 36-year teaching career in Ansai, Teacher Bai constantly runs into past pupils. She takes pride in the successes of the generation she helped educate. “He’s the general manager at a big hotel,” she beams.

Ansai – like much of rural China – has made strides in reducing illiteracy and dropout rates. Education levels remain low but are rising. For those ages 15 and above, average schooling has increased from five years in 1990 to just under nine in 2020 – meaning most complete middle school, according to official data. School buildings are safer and better equipped with books.

Overall, however, education for China’s large rural population – 54% of the total by household status – lags behind. Rural workers are still far less educated on average than their urban counterparts. Two-thirds of China’s 800 million-strong labor force lacks a high school diploma, and most of those are rural workers – jeopardizing future economic growth.

Long-standing challenges for rural schools – lower teaching quality and funding shortfalls – have persisted as China’s economy slows and local government debt skyrockets. Meanwhile, new problems have arisen, such as lack of support for millions of rural children left behind by migrant-worker parents.

“In China now, rich places are really rich, and poor places are really poor. The difference is huge,” says Teacher Bai, as we head to one of the Ansai primary schools that she and Ms. Wu helped build, and where she taught. 

Set against a hillside, the original one-story Dianfangtan primary school that FORCE built has been expanded with new classrooms and dormitories, as part of China’s rural school consolidation since 2000. Migration to cities and a falling birthrate led China to close most village schools and concentrate students in bigger primary schools in towns. But that means about 30% of rural primary students must live at school starting at 6 years old, an expert told me. 

“Some of our students only go home once a month,” says Principal Bao Yanlei. “There’s no one at home to take care of them,” she says. “They are like left-behind children.” 

Many of the school’s 100 students are raised by their grandparents – as are an estimated 30% to 40% of rural children overall. More than 65% have divorced parents, making child care harder, says Ms. Bao.

“My parents work out of town, so I only go home if my relatives come get me,” says Tuo Jingxing, a second grader. Teachers care for as many as 20 students left behind each weekend, one of many hardships that make rural teachers tough to recruit. 

“There still aren’t enough teachers,” says Teacher Bai with a sigh. Indeed, the uneven progress of education in rural China is playing out in the fortunes of Teacher Bai’s own family.

Our car climbs deeper into the ravine, passing clusters of cave dwellings flanked by terraced fields of corn and potatoes. 

We pass the dugout with the faded star that housed Teacher Bai’s childhood primary school, now abandoned. Crossing a stone bridge, we arrive at her parents’ quiet cave home. Goats graze in the pastureland above, and bees hum in the apricot trees on the adjacent hillside.

“You’re here!” says Li Jinlan, her mother, wiping floury hands on her apron after rolling out homemade wheat noodles. 

Though no longer facing hunger, Ms. Li and her husband, Bai Yunfu – both octogenarians – live frugally and work hard. Their home has an outhouse and lacks running water, apart from a well with a pump. Ms. Li grows tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables to feed the family. She scales the hills gathering firewood to heat the family’s communal earthen bed, or kang. 

Teacher Bai’s three sisters – all illiterate or semiliterate – are farmers, like their parents. Her brother graduated from high school and left farming to open a men’s clothing shop in the city of Yan’an. But competition from e-commerce forced him to shutter his shop, and the pandemic kept it closed.

“This is my life experience,” says her brother, Bai Xu, now unemployed.

As the only son, he is duty-bound to support his parents, who have a tiny income. But he can’t afford to finish a project he started to fortify their house. Also looming is the high bride price for his own son’s marriage.

“My life is a little tense,” he says.

This sense of being stuck, of having advanced as far as they can, is prevalent among some members of Teacher Bai’s family – but not all.

In the old cave school where Teacher Bai began her career, a 4-year-old girl with ponytails and bangs wrote on the ground with a stick as she played behind her mother’s desk.

“We couldn’t afford paper and pen,” recalls Nie Yan, Teacher Bai’s oldest daughter. “Even a book was a treasure for us,” she says. “When the first [FORCE] school was built, it was the first time I had my own book. It felt amazing, like ‘Wow, you are really a student now.’

“That was the beginning of my education.”

Ms. Nie and her younger sister and brother followed Teacher Bai to the second FORCE school, Dianfangtan, where Ms. Nie started fourth grade. The school had 10 teachers and “even a music class,” she recalls. “I learned to sing.”

FORCE co-founder Ms. Wu met Ms. Nie when she was a middle schooler in Ansai and remembers her as “a very shy little girl, hiding behind Teacher Bai’s apron.” But when Ms. Nie graduated from high school in 2004 with no prospect of college due to her family’s poverty, Ms. Wu’s friend and FORCE supporter, an American named Richard Katz, made a surprising offer.

“I can help her,” he told Ms. Wu one day. A widower and World War II Army veteran, Mr. Katz adored his late wife, a Chinese American woman he married after the war. As a retired federal government employee, he wasn’t wealthy but lived simply and didn’t have any children of his own. He had sponsored several students, including a young man from China in the 1980s, Jonathan Li. 

Teacher Bai was overjoyed. “There’s a very generous American willing to sponsor your college,” she told her daughter.

Ignorant about the world beyond her hometown, Ms. Nie randomly picked a college in a place “with a name that sounded far away,” she says. It was Zhuhai, on China’s southern coast. Her parents bought cheap tickets, and they all stood for 30 hours on the train to get there. Then she glimpsed the ocean, “like endless water,” she says. She began learning Mandarin, as no one in Zhuhai understood her thick Shaanxi dialect. Mr. Katz wrote her letters; she wrote back a few words of broken English.

After her college years, in 2008, he quietly opened a new door to graduate school in the U.S. Scared and still unable to speak English, Ms. Nie nervously boarded a plane from Beijing to Tampa, Florida, where Mr. Katz met her at the airport. They spoke in sign language. He got her settled at an English-language school and gave her a phone.

“He called and talked with me every day, so I got used to the language. Slowly, I picked up what the words meant,” she says. In three months, she could speak.

Then Mr. Katz taught her to take in the world around her. “You just need to observe,” Ms. Nie recalls him saying. “You have to be in the environment; then you can learn more.”

“I didn’t get it at first,” she says. She was too used to memorizing what her teachers told her. She held back. 

“I wasn’t curious. I didn’t have the ability to push myself to go and find things, and discover, until he slowly guided me to do it,” she says. “But when I understood, I was like ‘Wow, I should do that’ – you will find new things every day! 

“After that, I could just go to a park and sit there and talk to people in the park the whole day. I never did that in China,” she adds. “I became more confident and outgoing.”

During summer breaks, they packed up his Toyota Corolla and hit the road. There was a “history trip” up the East Coast, where she learned about slavery in Atlanta and saw where the Wright brothers built their first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Next was a meandering “music trip” to country music concerts in Nashville, Tennessee, and jazz venues in New Orleans. He taught her to drive.

They talked about everything – her friends, the news, books. He spoke to her of his Christian faith, but he never pressured her. “I want you to know about these ideas. Then you can make up your own mind,” she recalls him saying.

Her view of him changed. “Richard was not only kind and generous,” she says. “He was very wise. Over time, he became like my family. He called me ‘granddaughter.’ I called him ‘grandpa.’”

During eight years in the U.S., Ms. Nie would earn two master’s degrees, one in business and one in journalism. “My life changed because of the news. When they built the first school, I saw the power of writing,” she says. She wanted to be an investigative journalist in China, she says, “to change the lives of others, like happened to me.”

After returning to China in 2016, she briefly tried journalism but found government restrictions on media too constraining, so she switched to marketing. Now working for a solar energy firm in the cosmopolitan city of Suzhou, she often travels internationally. 

Ms. Nie and Mr. Katz stayed in close touch, meeting in Vietnam in 2019. She asked the nonagenarian to come to Suzhou, where she could care for him, hoping finally to repay his kindness. They were planning the move when the pandemic struck, thwarting it.

Still, they spoke often, talking about the news and life. Then, in late May, Ms. Nie was at a weeklong trade show in Shanghai. After returning to Suzhou, she checked Facebook. A friend from the U.S. had messaged her, “Hey, did you know that grandpa passed away?”

As I walk along a river with Ms. Nie on a recent moonlit night in Suzhou, her grief and love for Mr. Katz overflow. “He was my family, my teacher, my friend,” she says, her voice breaking. “He gave me an incredible gift.” 

In Chino, California, where Mr. Katz lived his last two years, his American and Chinese friends and family gathered in June for a memorial that was streamed online. 

Mr. Li, whom Mr. Katz sponsored in the 1980s, opened with a hymn in Mandarin. “He loved people,” said Mr. Li in his eulogy. “He has a sacrificial love.”  

Ms. Wu and FORCE built at least 11 more schools, serving thousands of students in poor border regions such as Yunnan province.

She now enjoys memorizing Tang dynasty poetry, taping verses to the seat of her walker to read while cruising the halls of her senior home in Walnut Creek.

Teacher Bai is preparing to move to Xi’an, Shaanxi’s capital, with her
preschool-age grandson, whom she’s raising since his parents work long hours. The two will live in Xi’an until he graduates from university. 

“I don’t want to leave Ansai,” Teacher Bai confides on my last day there. “All my friends and family are here.” Yet she wants to give the next generation the best chance. “Education is better in the big city,” she says. “Maybe one day, he can study in America.” ρ