Xu Pingru, 57 years old, street cleaner from Anhui province

I came across an old black and white photograph the other day while I was cleaning the house. In the photo I was holding a baby, smiling at the camera with my hair in pigtails. I looked so young.

That photo was taken decades ago, when I was still a teenager.

I was 17 when I first came to Beijing in the 1980s. Back then, I worked as a babysitter for 15 kuai a month, plus room and board.

When I was a child, I only attended one year of primary school before dropping out, so I could barely read. The kid I babysat read picture books, so I learnt to read at the same time. After a while my vocabulary expanded a lot, until I could recognize a decent number of characters.

I was a good student at school. I even received the “Three-good Student” award [editors note: given to students who show good moral character, study, and physical attributes] for my excellent performance at the end of my first year of primary school. After I dropped out, my teacher visited my parents to try to convince them to send me back to school. But it wasn’t practical. My family couldn't afford the school fee, which cost 1 kuai 2 mao.

I’m the eldest of four siblings—it was just too many mouths to feed. So I joined the village commune to earn work points and support my family—family always came first back then, people didn’t get to decide things for themselves. I helped raise cattle from age 11 to 17.

There was no telephone during my first few years in Beijing, so I wrote to my parents once or twice a month, using the vocabulary I had taught myself. My mom can’t read or write, so my dad was the one who responded to my letters.

I remember the first time I received a letter from my father. I held it like treasure in my hands, and read it over and over. I would burst into tears each time. I still remember what my dad wrote: “Daughter, if things are difficult out there, come back home. If you don’t have enough money to buy the ticket, go borrow it from that granny who comes from our village. I can pay her the money back bit by bit.”

I carried that letter around with me and read it several times a day, wiping away tears every time. Sadly, I lost all those letters between me and my father while moving from place to place over the years.

I worked as a babysitter until the little girl I cared for started to attend kindergarten. After that, I went back to Anhui to work in a factory making bricks and tiles.

I met my husband in that factory. I was too young then to make a mature judgement about him; I was purely attracted by his good looks. Back then, it was rare to form a romantic relationship by yourself. Normally, marriage would be arranged by the parents. Once ours found out, they quickly set a date for us to get married. We didn’t really have time to get to know each other very well before we got married.

Once we tied the knot, I found out he was actually a totally different person than what I had thought. He is totally uncaring, and would never say anything intimate or sweet. He’s lazy too, and very reluctant to take on any hard work. I’m the one who’s left to be strong and do the heavy lifting to provide for our children. We have two daughters and one son, which is a lot of responsibility to shoulder. On top of that, we gave up our job at the factory to avoid the Family Planning policy and have our third kid. Agriculture became our only source of income.

When our children were still young, we could survive through farming. But once they all started attending school, we had to pay over 300 kuai in school fees for each of them, despite the government’s policy of free compulsory education for nine years. With various extra study costs on top, it added up to a lot for us to support three kids through school. There was no way to make that money through agriculture alone.