Some years ago, things got so busy in the funeral trade that the village had to consider building a single public cemetery for cinerary caskets. But these plans later fizzled out. As a rule, the deceased are now always buried in the fields of their family. They become a kind of embellishment dotting the fields. The only difference is the new grave mounds are smaller than the old ones.

Cremation was proposed as a way of keeping valuable farmland in cultivation. Now, in our county at least, it has become another official routine, and sometimes a hotbed for shady deals. In the Chinese countryside, even the dead have their price.

According to official sources, the proportion of university students from rural areas is now in steady decline.

At year-end, I went to a wedding banquet, and sat among a group of village elementary school teachers, roughly aged from 40 to 50. I did not know them very well. We drank and began to chat.

At the table, somebody took out a mobile phone. I glanced at it, and saw it was a LG model, worth, I guess, several hundred yuan. Somebody asked: Director Liu, where did you get hold of that new phone? The man said someone gave it to him. The school principal had one, he had one, and later the school supplies manager had got one too.

The person who asked the question laughed and said: “So, it’s graft. You guys will be the ruin of the Party! I’m going to hand in my membership if you go on like that!”

Afterwards, the people continued to drink and brag. I listened quietly at their side.

A middle-aged teacher, who had just had an operation (apparently some kind of haemorrhoids problem) said he could only drink standing up now. “I am now just like Kong Yiji, I only ever drink on my feet.” Everybody laughed.

Mention of Kong Yiji gave me a start. How sad! Today, the countryside is full of Kong Yijis, but where is Lu Xun?

Although in theory the countryside has a nine-year compulsory education system, this is basically just empty talk. Most village children either drop out early or leave after middle school to become migrant workers.

A 15-year-old neighbourhood girl dropped out during elementary school. Before she was physically mature, she spent a year away from the village working. In the spring she went to pick tea, and then to work at a family business in Nantong in the neighbouring province of Jiangsu. She was earning 500 yuan a month to pack food. She never had Saturday or Sunday off, every day she had to start work just past seven o’clock. I asked her when she finished in the evenings, and she said it varied. Sometimes they went on past ten o’clock. There were two other girls of her age. After the wheat harvest, she went home with 2,900 yuan for over half a year’s work.

Two thousand nine hundred yuan: the fruit of six months’ toil for a 15-year-old girl. When I spoke to her, she had no complaints. She said that was simply her lot in life. Endurance and obedience: that is all that is required. She is only 15, her hair is straight, she has a slightly city-girl look, but her hands are rough like those of an old person because of all her cuts and calluses This was her youth, the sweetest time, the springtime of her life, but this is what has become of her.

On the ninth day of the Lunar New Year, she had to go back to Nantong. I gave her my mobile phone number, telling her to call me if anything happened to her.

You will often hear village people say “it makes no difference whether you go to college or not,” or “what’s the point of going to university, you will still end up a migrant worker.”

I am ashamed to say that in the last ten years, I am the only person from our village to pass the university entrance exam and go on to graduate school, maybe even the only one since the resumption of university entrance examinations in 1978. In close to ten years, this village has produced only three undergraduate students, including myself. I say this with sadness, not pride. As Lu Xun said; “It is like seeing a pile of bodies deeply asleep in an iron cell, none of whom show signs of life.”

What I fear most when I come back is people asking how much I earn. In their eyes, after going to graduate school in (to them a place of dreams, a city where the streets are paved with gold), I should be earning over 10,000 yuan a month, with a nice apartment thrown in.

If they ever found out how little I actually earn, they would say, there’s no point in going to study, so-and-so did not even complete middle school, but now earns several thousand yuan a month as a migrant worker. What would I say to them then?

I think we have one of the lowest college entrance exam pass rates of any county in Anhui. The population of our county is more than 800,000, but in 2008, little more than 7,000 students took the university entrance examination (and this figure includes many students doing retakes). Barely 1,500 passed and the majority of those were doing retakes, some for the third or fourth time.

A poor elementary school education leads to a poor middle and high school education. It leaves pupils unable to compete in the provincial college entrance examinations. Those few that do get admitted to universities are basically all children from the county towns.

After the New Year, I went for drink with a high-school classmate of mine, who now works as a teacher at a county high school. He told me that his school’s basic target for getting arts students into college was just one out of 70. Getting three into college would be exceeding targets. I asked him to estimate how many had a realistic chance of getting to college, and he said, at most, five or six. The others he told me would simply have to retake the exams or become migrant workers, and then later come back, marry and have children.

My former classmate asked me to say a few words to his final year students, to give them some encouragement prior to taking the exam. Standing on the rostrum, facing these students, all I could do was tell them that their fate was in their own hands, and how pleasant university life was, and encourage them to go out into the world and gain experience. I warned them that the outside world is very competitive now and that they would have to study even harder in order to realise their ambitions.

In our county, a number of vocational and technical training colleges have just opened, not only in the main town but also in the smaller towns. Training courses include lowly stuff like sewing and electrical welding. Afterwards, the students will go to factories in the coastal areas to work. For more and more children and their parents, this is the only realistic road in life. Even if you study at high school and spend a lot of money on education, there is no guarantee you will get into university. And if you do, it doesn’t mean it will be any use.

I certainly don’t see university as the only option in life for them either. But I do think university can at least give you self-awareness, some understanding of society, and for ever free you of the ignorant aimlessness of country life.

Here, of course, is the paradox for the man of education: who is better off in the end, the enlightened or the benighted? Is it more painful to know, or not to know? Should people be allowed to remain in blissful ignorance until one day they awaken naturally, or should they be awoken? And what happens when they awaken?

That day in the classroom, I drew on the blackboard a pyramid. I told these 17 and 18-year-olds that they should not expect to reach the top, but hoped they did not end up at the bottom of it, either. I only hoped that they could find a place for themselves in the middle. That, I said, would be enough.

Sometimes my parents say, half in jest and half in anger, it would have been better to have kept me out of university, “for if we had done that, we now would have had a grandson to hug.” Nearly all people of my age in the village have produced a grandson for their parents.

This was hard to swallow. It was not what my parents really thought. They were simply voicing a widespread prejudice among country people.

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