A construction worker practices writing in the dormitory. Photo courtesy of the interviewee
Wang Meiyu’s homework when she first started learning Chinese characters.
The palm-sized screen can also be turned into a blackboard, and the students are a group of illiterate adults. Li Hong, 52, has to build a wall for 11 hours every day, lay hundreds of bricks, pay off his son’s college loan and save his daughter’s dowry. But when the live broadcast of teaching adults to read was turned on, she put down her work and became a "student" who concentrated on reading.
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 switched from early childhood education, some have never taught, only have a college degree, and Mandarin is not standard. In the live broadcast room, Li Hong found "classmates", who are old people in their sixties and seventies, as well as post-80s and post-90s who "played very smoothly" on their mobile phones. On the construction site, on the side of the highway, in the vegetable greenhouse, in the gap between work and the moment when the children fall asleep, they eagerly stare at the same "blackboard".
Ding Xiaohua is one of the anchors who first taught adult literacy on the short video platform. She is used to the fact that there are no flying lights and gifts in the live broadcast room, and the constantly beating numbers in the upper right corner prove the existence of the audience. Students can’t type. Many people’s screen names only have a string of numbers, and some of them leave commas and periods that haven’t been deleted from voice-to-text conversion.
She teaches them pinyin, writing, typing on mobile phones, various common phrases in life, and sometimes helps to solve family disputes. Some students call her "teacher", while others call her "Fuxing" and "Savior".
In this big class, the standard of "graduation" is to reach the level of "grade five or six in primary school", which means that the literacy reaches nearly 3000. In a life without these 3,000 words, this group of people can be easily stumped, ranging from doing business accounting, opening an account for their children, signing a divorce agreement, shopping online, singing a song at KTV, and even going to the public toilet.
According to the seventh national census, they only account for 2.67% of the national population, and many people have never told their workmates and colleagues about their illiteracy. A student in his fifties said, "My life is incomplete. I have been a mother, wife and daughter, but I have never had a classmate. "
After starting to learn Chinese characters, Li Hong practiced calligraphy when he was upset at night. He hung the headlights on the upper bunk and wrote on the lower bunk. After writing one book, he threw it away, as if he had thrown away decades of "oppression". Students have fulfilled many wishes, for example, for the first time, one person took the train, one person went to the hospital to register for payment, and one person went to the bank to deposit and withdraw money. Some people lamented that "it is not a loss to come to this world once."
"If you don’t know two words, it’s really hard to move."
There are the least people in the live broadcast room in summer, and the number of people in winter will increase exponentially — — Busy farming makes the "students" in the live broadcast room inseparable, and some people have to work overtime during the peak production season of the factory. Children have summer vacation, and they have to take care of them at home. In winter, migrant workers began to return home, 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’ classes are not as regular as in school. Their income mainly depends on selling literacy books and online courses in the live broadcast room. Because the audience is small and the profit is not high, many "teachers" will not update after half a year.
Ding Xiaohua is one of the few people who still insist. In the live class, Ding Xiaohua always habitually repeats a sentence three times, with a long voice. The barrage is also slow, students rarely stir up, and occasionally typed sentences are mindless. They said, "Good evening, teacher, you are near jiaozi", probably because "beside the noose" is being taught in class.
Students often hesitate for a few seconds before they dare to read pinyin. Someone was too nervous after connecting the wheat, and laughed and said, "Forget it, I can’t read it, and my heart is pounding." Someone read it for the first time, but it was wrong, corrected and wrong again. Five minutes later, Ding Xiaohua asked, why don’t we talk about it next time? But the students still timidly said that they should read. Ding Xiaohua seldom gets angry, which will make students read correctly.
Ding Xiaohua understands this difficult feeling. She is a 35-year-old native of Guyuan, Ningxia, with a college degree and a strong northwest accent. She always reads "village" as "cong" and "wind" as "fen".
Ding Xiaohua’s parents can’t read, and she can’t read for three generations. She is the person with the highest education 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 time became plentiful. 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 get registered and get medicine. She asked the security guard, and the security guard yelled at them, "You don’t have long eyes!" Ding Xiaohua felt uncomfortable. In the past two years, when I had a smart phone, my parents only made phone calls and accidentally clicked the wrong pop-up advertisement. They wouldn’t turn it off, so they left it all day, waiting for her brother to turn it off.
There are many people who think of their hometown like their parents, and everyone learns to be more energetic together. She turns on the live broadcast to talk about literacy, and people in the same city can listen to it. At first, only a single word was taught, including daily expressions related to stations, banks and hospitals. Later, students from all over the country poured into the live broadcast room, and she began to teach pinyin and capital letters systematically.
There are many reasons why students can’t get an education. Some of them come from remote and poor areas and have many children at home, so they can’t afford to go to school. Some people are orphans or de facto orphans and are fostered in relatives’ homes. Some people are disabled and cannot take care of themselves. Most of them are between 40 and 70 years old, and there are also a few post-90 s and post-00 s.
They are used to silence, when they are called "stupid" by their colleagues and "useless" by their partners. Brushing videos and watching live broadcasts on short video platforms, most people have never made comments because they can’t type.
But they will recognize mobile phone software by icons, and input text by voice or family help when surfing the Internet. The screen name will reveal the secrets of the heart. A student named "homesick woman", 42 years old, has never been back to her parents’ home alone. Her family is only more than 100 kilometers away from her, but she doesn’t know the place name and is afraid of taking the wrong bus.
A cerebral palsy patient named "Zi Ling" is also one of the students. She likes watching idol dramas and the boldness and liveliness of "Zi Ling" in A Curtain of Dreams. She has been bored at home by herself since she was a child, and she has nothing to say. Being pushed around by my mother, I met a disabled friend who was a street performer and added QQ, but I didn’t know what people typed.
Many people’s privacy needs are hard to say. After 90, Wang Meiyu stubbornly spent her girlhood: she wanted to buy a milk-flavored shower gel, without asking for a shopping guide, and opened the bottle cap to smell it herself; Make-up water is only bought in transparent bottles and will not be confused with emulsion; Sanitary napkins can’t tell whether they are for daily use or for night use. I bought many wrong ones. When people ask, they say they are hoarding goods.
When you can’t support yourself, you can only ask for help. When she goes to the bank to withdraw money and deposit money, Wang Meiyu will find someone to go with her, but she only looks for people in the same village. In case someone steals money and runs away, she also knows where his home is.
Her mother said from an early age, "It doesn’t matter whether you learn (words) or not, you will get married sooner or later." But Wang Meiyu doesn’t want to be trapped in the countryside all her life. Just entering the 21st century, at the age of 14, she left home and followed the tide of migrant workers to the south. The first time I worked with friends in the same village, I got off the train, entered the factory, and left by train three months later. She still doesn’t know the name of that place.
After that, she moved to various factories and found that "diligence" could not make up for illiteracy. In a clothing factory, you can only get money if you write down the completed procedures. Wang Meiyu can’t write, but always does more and gets less money. When disassembling clothes, others can quickly find the corresponding parts according to the drawings, and she has to scrape the samples for a long time by hand to remember the structure.
Few people of the same age can’t read. Workers always say that Wang Meiyu didn’t go to school because she was "naughty" and "disobedient", and everyone in an assembly line avoided her for fear of being dragged down by her. Since then, Wang Meiyu has learned to drink and smoke, sitting alone in the corner of the women’s dormitory, embroidering all her worries into cross stitch.
In the past five or six years, the desire for literacy has gradually expanded in her heart. Screens full of words appear in shops, hospitals, banks and stations, and it is increasingly difficult for her to hide her weaknesses. Because of her serious attitude, she was expected to be promoted to sampling inspection. She just sat in an air-conditioned room and recorded product data with a computer, but she couldn’t use a computer.
Many students feel the same way. A student in his fifties recalled that when he was a child, there were "few motorcycles" on the road, and there were no road signs. When he went out to see the road, he always "walked and asked". Now everyone uses mobile navigation. "If you don’t know two words, you can’t move.".
"I am so old, can I still learn?"
Many "older students" don’t have high learning goals. It is enough for them to keep accounts, do business, learn to drive and pull goods, take skill certificates and work in larger factories.
However, after listening to the same course, some people can learn the structure of Chinese characters in half a month, and some people are still circling in the single vowel "aoe" after studying for a year. Gemee has been teaching children in private preschool for 10 years. She believes that it is much more difficult to teach adults than children. "A child is a blank sheet of paper. When you wave your hand and open your mouth, they will follow you. These adults in the live broadcast room have their own ideas and have their own ideas. "
Some adults have deep-rooted pronunciation habits. Some students can’t pronounce "ne" and "le" clearly. The teacher will ask the students to open their mouths, take a video and send it to see whether their tongues are against the front incisors or the upper jaw.
What is 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 "inferiority" in the past few decades will come to mind. "They feel that they are the stupidest people in the world."
In order to help them understand the course, Gemee tried to be close to life. Using the word "degree", she explained "concentration" and "the medicine in the pipe when you fight pesticides". Talking about the right half structure of "floating", she asked, "There are children under the claws, which are common in rural areas, remember? Incubate eggs. " Read the single vowel "u", and she teaches them how to pout. "When your child is angry, you pout."
These "older students" have no parents, and teachers should provide "nanny-style" services. Sometimes the phone is wrong, or the platform is stuck, and the students call immediately, "I can’t find you, teacher!" " "You have no teacher in class!"
Students want to buy online courses that they can watch back. Teachers should 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 a book, but the students didn’t know how to write the address. Some people sent photos of their ID cards directly, while others ran to the door to take pictures of house numbers and street signs.
Many students are used to cold eyes, and this is the first time they have been treated patiently. Double-click the screen in the live broadcast room to light the red heart and increase the exposure of the anchor. In order to help Gemee increase his popularity, the students spontaneously came up with a lot of jingles. When nothing happened, they made a voice propaganda in the live broadcast room: "Wanshui Qian Shan is always in love, can you show a little love?" "Take a walk with hearts and live to ninety-nine; Red hearts float, and knowledge grows tall. "
Cheng Jie, 43, is often affectionately called "Little Teacher" by her elder sister in her sixties and seventies. She has received raisins from Xinjiang, apples from Shandong and Lycium barbarum from Ningxia. Some anchors even received a banner. Ding Xiaohua’s students will consult her first when they encounter parenting problems and start business procedures.
The live broadcast room is also a tree hole for students to pour out their joys and sorrows. A student named "Fire Wolf Girl" and Gemee Lianmai said that their children had received the university admission notice. Gemee was overjoyed. "Brush flowers for our fire wolf female eldest son. What about Normal University? It’s really promising!" The barrage came alive, and rows of flowers and love conveyed silent congratulations.
One student complained that he never knew her husband’s income. Another student couldn’t help but send a barrage that was not smooth and taught her to master financial power at home. "What I want is the money earned by old men. You won’t save it. That’s not how to do it. It’s a pity that I can’t touch money in my life. "
"Real independence"
Students are studying in the live broadcast room, and teachers can sometimes hear the cynicism of their children and spouses on the other end of the phone. "It’s no use doing it all." "If you can learn, I’ll change my surname." A student once wanted to get a refund because her husband objected to her study, smashed her mobile phone and tore her book. She can only hide under the covers and learn secretly.
Some people are worried that the mobile phone will be seen by their families, and it is proposed to change the "adult illiterate group" into a "happy group". Some people read books at the counter of their own shops, and they hide them when they come to visit guests.
Cheng Jie often said to frustrated students, "You should change more. If your family doesn’t support you, it means that you have no status. Why is there no status? You can’t do anything because you can’t read. Love is mutual. How can you give love unilaterally and never ask for anything in return? " She recommended that students ask their families to help them share some housework.
Teachers found that most of these illiterate students were women. According to China Statistical Yearbook (2021 edition), women account for 75% of the illiterate population in China.
In the first half of their lives, they supported their husbands’ work and raised their children wholeheartedly. Some people always suspect that her husband is chatting with other women on WeChat, but she can’t understand it. Her husband didn’t guard against her, so the mobile phone was in front of her.
"I have adapted to sacrifice." Liu Jia, the anchor, met a woman. When she signed up, she burst into tears on the phone, saying that her husband looked down on her and her family ignored her. Every penny she spent depends on others’ faces. Liu Jia thought she would study hard, but after making up with her husband, she stopped studying. "She has a crutch, so it is unnecessary to study."
In the process of teaching these women to read, Liu Jia kept seeing the shadows of her mother and grandmother. Grandma was born in the Republic of China, wrapped in little feet and illiterate. In order to wait for a person from a scholarly family, she insisted on not marrying, and only married Liu Jia’s grandfather when she was 30 years old. After more than ten years of marriage, my grandfather died, and my grandmother raised four sons by herself and trained three college students.
But grandma never had her own name, and others called her "Nier of Lao Dong’s family". Grandma always likes to let Liu Jia, who is in primary school, give herself a name and teach herself to read. When she sees a favorite word, she adds it to her name.
Liu Jia’s mother is "turning around the house". Liu Jia and her brother never brought their keys when they were children, because whenever they opened the door, their mother was there. In winter in Heilongjiang, the whole family doesn’t have to buy clothes. Mother will knit a set of scarves, hats and gloves neatly and make cotton shoes, cotton-padded clothes and trousers.
Only when she quarrels with her father will her mother speak her mind. Liu Jia remembers that once her mother said with tears, "I just have no culture. If I had culture, I would leave!" " Because my mother can’t read, every time she wants to go back to her mother’s house, she always puts up with it.
Let a pair of children have culture, which has become the mother’s greatest wish. Liu Jia remembers that her mother didn’t know her homework, and no matter what her handwriting was, she praised it. Mother will be happy as long as she sees the red checkmark. She never let Liu Jia interfere in the housework. Even if Liu Jia said that her homework was finished, her mother would still repeat it in a conditioned way, "Do your homework after school."
On the day that 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 persistence on herself. After starting live teaching, Liu Jia once asked her mother if she would like to learn to read. The mother refused. She relied on her husband first, then her son, and now she is her granddaughter who just went to college. Liu Jia feels that she can’t throw away the "crutch". She’ll always find a crutch.
In order to help them regain their enthusiasm for learning, Gemee told these middle-aged women who only know daily necessities that "three generations cultivate a champion" and told them how education can bring about changes in their horizons. She talked about how she ran out of the village with her children and went to Beijing for 15 years for their children’s education.
Gemee will also talk about how women keep up with the pace of society. For example, when talking about "Jiang", she knew that many people had heard of "Yang Jiajiang" on the radio, so she praised Mu Guiying hard. "This is the pride of our women, and we should do something ‘ Powerful role ’ The idea. "
There are also many "powerful roles" among these students. In others’ eyes, Sun Feng, 52, although illiterate, is definitely "independent".
She runs a three-story massage parlour with a dozen shop assistants, and in her twenties, she supports her two sons by herself. Usually, she likes to chat with people in the live broadcast room. Her makeup is exquisite, her false eyelashes are stiff, and her shiny manicure is two centimeters long. She always scolds netizens who call her "old woman" and drinks 1 liter of iced black tea after scolding.
But under the armor, Sun Feng longed for "real independence" and "effortless independence". She was born in rural Gansu, and her family was poor. Grandma didn’t let her girls go to school. She worked hard since she was a child, pulling coal from the hillside and pouring cement boards in brick factories. At the age of 17, I met my boyfriend and followed him to "gold rush" in Xinjiang. I didn’t expect my boyfriend to gamble and domestic violence and spend all their savings.
She wants to be strong. After leaving her boyfriend with her children, she has never borrowed a penny from relatives and friends. When I was poorest, I only had 50 cents in my pocket and spent a whole week. Because she has no education, she doesn’t even trust the bank, so she stuffed the money she earned into rotten shoes and hid 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. She seldom participates in quarrels. But if someone deliberately provokes, she will grab her head and knock it on the table.
She always has a solution to the problem. After she opened her own shop, she took her friends who had known her for more than ten years in the foot bath shop to help her settle accounts, apply for business licenses and sign contracts. She knows "male" and "female", knows numbers, and stores customer numbers in the format of "female 1" and "male 1". Pay employees every month, and she takes her son from junior high school to the bank to withdraw money and save money.
But when the child grew up and became a family, she found that she owed people everywhere. "I can’t let my son follow me forever, or beg my friends to follow me." After studying for more than a year with the live broadcast, she flew back to her hometown in Gansu for the first time. When she got off the plane, she felt "emboldened" for the first time in her life.
"Change is fate"
No one can say clearly what standard is "graduation". Ding Xiaohua thinks it is to master all the commonly used words in life. Gemee thinks it is "everything is Dont Ask For Help" to look up new words and solve problems through online search. Liu Jia hopes that they can write normally and read independently, although only two or three out of 10 students can read complete paragraphs.
They have little daily contact with words, and reading can help them review and consolidate. So in addition to literacy and pinyin classes, she also set up reading classes to take students to read primary school texts. Students all like to read Teaching Ants to Read, and they stumble over sentences:
"The ants/citizens of the kingdom/are all very/hardworking, but/illiterate, yes/illiterate. The ant/king/is in great distress. If you don’t have/cultural knowledge, you will be/looked down upon by/others, and you will be/bullied by/others. "
A 54-year-old farmer is busy in a vegetable greenhouse during the day. He must read aloud before going to bed at night. To this end, she bought a big light bulb and a magnifying glass, bathed her grandson every night, sat in the gauze account and read How Beautiful a Summer Night is in cadence.
For those whose lives have long been "stereotyped", literacy is to realize dreams. A 60-year-old student has never been out of the house for 5 miles. In order to go to the market alone, she takes a pen and a note with her, writes in the fields, writes in the kitchen, and writes when washing clothes. On the day when she got up the courage to go out by herself, she dared to look up for the first time and read the plaque on a street all over.
A 72-year-old student, who was shaking with a pen at first, "can’t even scratch it". Now, because of his good handwriting, serious homework and plenty of time, he is a monitor in the WeChat group and has added more than 20 people’s WeChat. She remembered being a vice captain in the production team 50 years ago, because the minutes of the meeting could not be delivered. Now, she feels that she is a "useful person".
In the "typing practice group", students will share their favorite sentences. A 70-year-old female student sent an excerpt, "Slow life and fine tea, spend time on the sunset. Happy and leisurely every day, keep healthy and watch the sunset glow. " Some students like to copy the lyrics, "Look at the years swaying, slowly pulling me away, and loneliness deceives me to the intersection."
Gemee saw it and excitedly voiced in the group. "Who said we can’t? You are all pearls buried in the soil."
Many people have watched the class several times and still haven’t given up studying and practicing calligraphy every day. Wang Meiyu works in a fan factory, hitting thousands of screws a day, and the fan buzzes overhead and sweats. When she recalls new words in her mind, her heart becomes very quiet. After work at 9 o’clock every night, she learns new words as soon as she gets home, and she doesn’t sleep until she finishes learning.
She likes to put her previous homework together with her present one and shoot it for her boyfriend. It turns out that a line of words is high and low, big and small, and a word is scattered into several parts, which is "very messy". Now, her handwriting obediently lies in the center of the grid, clean and tidy. Every time she goes out, she likes to let her boyfriend slow down the speed of the electric car and read the names of the shops on the roadside one by one.
Li Hong, a 52-year-old construction worker, posted wild flowers, abandoned construction sites and deserted fields on the short video platform, but there was no narration and no music. Now these videos have titles and her brief comments.
It turns out that she only calls once a week for fear of disturbing her daughter’s work. The happiest thing now is to send a message to my daughter every morning, noon and evening, "Have you eaten?"
Students are always embarrassed to say that after learning Chinese, they become "talkative". Zi Ling, a student with cerebral palsy, no one in the class knew that she was physically disabled, but all her classmates praised her for "learning really well". She knocked a lot of words into her circle of friends, including going out to do nucleic acid, going to the supermarket, insomnia and other small things, and "swiping the screen" several times a day.
A 45-year-old male student went to dinner with his boss. He just drank with his head stuffy. "It’s all in the wine.". He is skilled and highly valued by his boss, but his colleagues are not convinced, so they take him as "uneducated". He used to be silent, but now he has learned to respond skillfully. "If I hadn’t studied, you wouldn’t have caught up with me."
Sun Feng, a strong woman who runs a massage parlour, said that her temper was not so impulsive, and she "knows when to stop". Before, some familiar avatars always appeared, and she couldn’t read the name, so she could only say, "Thank you for coming". Now she can call out their names, and her tone is soft.
It seems that she can finally pour out the pain in her heart. Looking back on his life, Sun Feng wrote a sentence as a personal profile of the short video account, "Are you really tired? Tired is right, suffering is life, forbearance is experience, and change is fate. "
(At the request of the respondents, except Ding Xiaohua and Gemee, the rest are pseudonyms.)
Zhongqingbao Zhongqingwang reporter Jiao Jingxi Source: China Youth Daily
