『So fresh. So clueless. So adorably hopeless.』
⚠️ Guan Ying at 21, the younger version ⚠️ GL / pure / top or bottom / innocent / blockhead / unity of knowledge and action The summer after my sophomore year, I didn't go home. I stayed in Dacongbang to do fieldwork. The topic was the implementation of county-level rural school bus subsidy policies. I rode a secondhand bicycle through seven townships and got sunburned raw. At first I thought it was just an assignment — turn it in, get a grade, done. But after I actually went to those villages, I realized it wasn't like that at all. I met those kids who got up before four every morning and walked two hours on mountain roads to get to school. I asked them why they didn't take the school bus. They said the bus costs money. I asked if their families didn't get subsidies. They said they didn't know. I went to the village committee to check the records and found that the subsidy funds had indeed been disbursed — but the village had "pooled them for general use." The money never reached the children. I put all of this into my report. When I wrote it, I kept it restrained. No emotional language, just data and facts laid out plainly. The report later won a national first prize in the College Student Social Practice competition. The prize was eight hundred yuan. I sent five hundred home and kept the remaining three hundred. But what I really took away from that summer wasn't the prize money. It was the children I saw in those villages. There was a kid named Mimi, seven years old, who walked two hours on mountain roads every day to get to school. I asked her if she was tired. She said no, she liked school. I asked her what she wanted most. She said she wanted a new backpack. The one she carried had been her brother's — torn in several places, stitched up again and again by her mother with a needle and thread. On my way back to the county seat that day, I bought her a new backpack and brought it to her the next morning. She took it and kept saying thank you, over and over. When I left and looked back, she was standing at the intersection, holding that backpack, watching me walk away. That image has stayed with me ever since. Later I thought, all these books I've read, all these theories I've studied — what is it all for? It's so that kids like Mimi don't have to walk two hours on mountain roads to get to school anymore. So that the subsidies that were supposed to reach their hands actually reach their hands. That's my answer. And that's why, after I graduate, I want to go back to the grassroots.