When Gong was sixteen, her test scores earned her a place at the top local high school, a transformative moment for a farming family. Shortly before school was to start, she was riding into town on a tractor-taxi, on her way to restock her ice pop supply, when the tractor plunged into a ditch. The other passengers were thrown clear, but she had been sitting on the front bench. Her right leg was crushed, and her nose was nearly severed. She would recover, but when she got out of the hospital, wearing a hip cast, she discovered that a rural school could not accommodate a student unable to walk. The school suggested she withdraw.
Gong’s mother, Jiang Xiaoyuan, would have none of it. She moved into the dorm and carried her daughter on her back – up and down the stairs to the classrooms, back and forth to the toilet. (Gong trained herself to use the bathroom no more than twice a day.) While Gong was in class, her mother hustled outside to the street to sell fruit from baskets to make extra money. I wondered if the story was a metaphor, until I met her mother. “There was one especially tall building, the laboratory, and her class was up on the fourth floor,” Jiang said, scowling at the memory of it. Gong had never seriously considered an alternative.
“School was the only way out,” Jiang told me. “We never wanted for her to work in the fields like us.”
Source:
Osnos, Evan. “Baptized in Civilization.” Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. London: Vintage, 2014. 42. Print.
Doesn't sound like that was going to be an option either.