Liu Xinyu was shocked when he read the results of a survey into the psychological condition of left-behind children a few years ago.
As a seasoned journalist and editor focusing on China's social progress and the resultant challenges, Liu was fully aware of the scale of the problem, and as a father, he also knew the possible challenges the children might encounter, but he was still shaken.
"I didn't expect so many of them would be in the pits of despair," said Liu, who founded the NGO Shangxuelushang, or "On the Way to School", which aims to brighten the lives of left-behind children through reading. He was referring to a report published by the Psychology Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in late 2012 that estimated China had 60 million left-behind children, and 34 percent of them were suicidal.
Liu recalled his first reaction and how he quickly did the math, "What? That means 20 million." At the time, he had quit his 20-year career as a journalist and started his own business, but his inner journalist wouldn't let the matter go.
He brought it up at a dinner with friends, most of them in the media. After a heated discussion, they came up with a project, which later led to the establishment of the NGO.
"We agreed that the lack of parental company was the major reason (for the suicidal tendencies) and discussed how we might help fill the void it created," the 42-year-old said.
He offered a solution his son had suggested in 2011.
When Liu was setting up his business, he became very preoccupied and abandoned his practice of reading to his son, who was then 5, at bedtime, something he had done since the boy was 1. In response, his son produced a tablet computer and asked Liu to record the bedtime story so he could listen to it in his father's absence.
"We thought it was a good solution because it came from a child who was trying to make do, despite the absence of his parent," Liu said.
The idea soon blossomed into a high-profile charity project called "Reading for Love", for which celebrities from across the country volunteered to record a collection of fairy tales and children's literature.
"We hoped to provide the children with the best things - the best voices and the best content," Liu said.
The recordings, delivered via MP3 players, are designed to provide the children with good company on their way to school because many, especially those who live in mountainous areas, have to spend at least 30 minutes, or sometimes even several hours, traveling from home to school every day, hence the NGO's name, "On the Way to School".
In the past two years, the readings have been given to more than 2,800 rural students at 14 schools in seven provinces. In 2014, a sister project was started to establish broadcast stations, in rural schools and provide a larger number of students with access to the stories. The NGO expects to extend access to the entire population of left-behind children by 2020, Liu said.
User feedback suggests that about 86 percent of the students listen to stories every day, and about 40 percent repeat them to their friends and classmates.
Despite the success, Liu and his team have come to realize that the challenges facing left-behind children are manifold - far more complicated than his son missing him when it's time for a bedtime story - and previous assumptions were too restricted to be instructive when it came to offering help.
"Poverty can be a challenge for some rural children, but it's certainly not the primary problem for those whose parents are working away in the cities and sending back money," Liu said.
The hardest lesson
He recalled one girl who told him she hadn't seen her parents for several years. "I used to think the parents would at least come home once a year. The slow, green train would bring them back for Spring Festival."
But the hardest lesson Liu learned came during his first trip to deliver storytelling MP3 players in a remote village in Guizhou province in 2013.
After spending nearly three hours escorting several children along mountain roads to their school, Liu greeted the final arrivals with, "Hi, do you miss your moms and dads?"
He recalled the chattering students quickly fell into an awkward silence, and some even burst into tears.
"Several other volunteers shared similar experiences," Liu said. "I began to realize that 'mom' and 'dad', the first two words every human being learns to say, have become taboo among the children."
It was then that he began to realize how little is known about these children, so he helped to launch a project called The White Paper.
Consisting of a survey, factual literary reports and a photography exhibition, the White Paper is aimed at providing a dimensional perspective to understand the psychological challenges facing left-behind children, he said.
The results have been both enlightening and worrying. Liu was pleased to see that reading plays a positive role in lightening children's lives because it helps to improve their study performances, a key factor in their happiness.
Above all, as the survey showed, 4.3 percent of left-behind children or 2.62 million of them, never receive a phone call from their parents. "Again I was shocked," Liu said.
Key players
Liu hopes The White Paper will help engage all parties that play a role in the lives of left-behind children - teachers, relatives, neighbors, charities and, above all, parents.
"On the Way to School" will continue with its reading project, but also hopes to offer more. The NGO has come up with a high-tech solution that will help connect the children with their parents, allowing them to contact each another in a way that's similar to mobile social media platforms such as WeChat.
"It sounds obvious, but we didn't realize it until recently," Liu said. "The best voice a child can hear is that of their parent, isn't it?"
linshujuan@chinadaily.com.cn
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Liu Xinyu (center), founder of the NGO "On the Way to School", which presents story-telling MP3 players to left-behind children, at a school in Liping, Guizhou province, in 2013. Provided to China Daily |
