Peihe Xianning City, Hubei Province
I always believed that my husband and I passed our lives “with our faces to the soil and our backs to the sun” because we didn’t study enough when we were young, and because we had no knowledge. That’s why I decided that no matter how hard or how much I had to suffer, I would send my sons and daughters to school so that they could accomplish something, and wouldn’t have to follow in our footsteps. With that guiding us, my husband and I ate and dressed simply and squeezed every penny to send our oldest daughter to technical school and our oldest son to university. But we still had two more children, so to send them to university, my husband had to leave home to work for years at a time, and I wasn’t either idle; I tended the fields and the pigs at home from dawn to dusk. Whenever the farm work got too exhausting, I wished I could simply stop.
