Yuxin Lu

I used to be a co-organizer of Firefly Bookstore, an activity where students in my high school donate books and bring them to a relatively poor primary school called Lan Qing. Serving as the representatives who went to that school, we had this particular experience that reshaped our perception of the world.

As Lan Qing locates in a remote area, it took us three hours to get there from the city. The three-hour drive left an unforgettable dizzy experience with us along the rugged and muddy road. When we eventually arrived, it hit me that there was only a two-story small building with four classrooms, where students of different grades stayed in the same classroom, a narrow space where they crowd in every day with limited class time. Shabby playground, broken tables, no computer room…Unlike our modern campus with the most up-to-date equipment, the school could barely provide even the most basic facilities. I could not imagine their situation without seeing with my eyes.

Space and facilities are by no means the only things in shortage here. The principal told us that the kids would be overjoyed once they could read any paper materials beyond the textbooks. We brought five boxes of books in total. As we started to distribute them, I could feel the students' excitement. They jumped up and down for the particular ones that they had craved for a long time. I gave some detective novels to the elder kids sitting at the back rows, who started reading immediately after having them in hand.

I realized that I had always taken sufficient books and big classrooms for granted. Pupils at Lan Qing primary school, on the other side, were genuinely filled with pleasure by the books, their eyes shining with the thirst to learn more things through reading. The scarce school resources had factually affected how they received education and limited their academic development. Lan Qing is not a single case. There are many more kids in schools like Lan Qing who suffer from poverty and the imbalanced resource allocation. These children are put into difficult situations and have to undergo challenges that they should not face. They cannot possibly have the capability to overcome setbacks like this at their ages.