‘There is a
story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your
face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and
heartbreaking’, says Mitch Albom, in his celebrated philosophical novel For One More Day. Not all stories have
lucid opening, middle, and conclusion. Somehow or other, some narratives happen
to begin but have no end in sight. This is a story of an eight-year-old boy,
named Wang Fuman, who lives in an impoverished, remote village in Yunnan
province of China and walks three miles through streams and mountains to get to
his school every day.
On an icy
morning in January this year when ‘Little Wang’ reached his school after
venturing the usual 90-minute trek, with his eyebrow, hair, and eyelashes, as
well as his insubstantially thick winter jacket covered with frost – making him
resemble a walking snowman – he immediately became a subject of amusement for
his classmates. His hands were swollen and cheeks sharply red and chapped,
however.
A teacher
at the school snapped some pictures of the boy and sent them to a few
individuals. The teacher or someone else posted those photographs on social
media. Thousands of users of the Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo shared
the pictures, whereas they received hundreds of thousands of likes elsewhere on
Chinese social media, making the boy an internet sensation within days.
Soon, along
with words of sympathy for the hardship of the boy and praise for his fortitude, barrages of donations of warm clothes, heating system, and money to
his school and charities poured in. The boy and his family also received cash,
toys, books, and clothes. Wang’s father – a migrant worker who worked around 250
miles away and usually visited home twice a year – was offered an employment in
his village so he could afford to be with his family.
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| As many as 95 per cent of school kids at Gaida Primary School in Luodian in Guizhou province of China are left-behind children. (Photo courtesy: People's Daily Online) |
Little Wang
is a ‘left-behind child’ – one of more than 60 million children in the countryside
of China whose parents, mostly migrant workers, are forced to leave their homes
and live in cities to earn livelihood. Wang lives in a dilapidated house with
his grandmother and a sister who is two years older than himself. His mother left
the family two years ago after growing frustrated with deprived conditions and
failing to make ends meet.
While Wang’s
internet fame may have comparatively assuaged his family’s difficult
socio-economic conditions, his story unfolds the unfortunate situation of tens
of millions of left-behind children living not just in China but across the
world. A report released by a Chinese NGO in 2017 suggested that around
one-third of rural students in China were left-behind children. Even more
upsetting, the report anticipated that as many as ten million rural students of
the country could have been forsaken by both of their parents.
The stern
circumstances are believed to be causing left-behind children to experience development
problems related to mental health, behavior change, and emotional insecurity. Equally
pressing to contemplate is that leaving these children behind entails an
augmented risk of puncturing the social structure that holds rural communities
together. While Wang’s story may have diminutively helped promote social
awareness of the poverty scowling at children in poorer, remote, and rural communities,
there are millions of other children whose misery finds no voice or
representation to put before the world.
