Bai Sumei took a sip of milk tea and told Tang Long that during the summer vacation of her sophomore year of high school, despite the opposition of her family, she joined a high school student teaching alliance and was assigned to teach in the remote Daliangshan area at an altitude of more than 3,000 meters. After she arrived in the town on a broken bus, a local female teacher had been waiting for a long time, and under the leadership of the female teacher, she came to the impoverished Nanshan Village, which was surrounded by high mountains. In the village, there is a dilapidated small school, the school is built of mud bricks, the roof beams are covered with black tiles, it is in disrepair, the tiles are broken, and when it rains, the rain will flow into the classroom from top to bottom, and the children can only find all the basins, foot basins, bottles and cans to catch the rain. Moreover, the beams were corroded by rainwater and were very fragile, so they could not break and fall off the day and hit the students' heads.

When she saw this, she immediately hitchhiked to the rural credit cooperative, the only bank in town, and took out her New Year's money, and asked local workers to repair the very dangerous parts of the school, replacing rotten beams and cracked roof tiles.

The school has 36 students, mainly in the second and third grades, all of whom are left-behind children. Together with a local female teacher in her fifties, she taught the children Chinese, mathematics and foreign languages, and at the same time, she also gave full play to her versatility and taught the children to sing, draw and dance.

She quickly adapted to life in the countryside and integrated into this group of simple and lively children, who quickly fell in love with her, a minor female teacher from Shenzhen, who affectionately called her Meimei. Because of her dedication to her children, the whole village respected her very much.

There were three children in the village who were still studying at the school in April of that year, but later, their guardians took the three children out of the school and sent them to dig in a southern red agate mine near the village, citing their poor grades and no future in their studies, despite the teacher's objections and the children's desire to continue studying. They are called Ajie, Li Mo, Zhang Shuai, Ajie was thirteen years old at the time, because he often dropped out of school to repeat grades, is still in the fifth grade, his parents from he was very young in Shanxi coal mine digging coal, and finally both suffered from pneumoconiosis, when they found out that they had pneumoconiosis, when they claimed compensation from the coal mine boss, the coal boss's coal mine had a gas explosion, the coal boss absconded overnight, and finally ran to Outer Mongolia.

There was no way, the couple could only return to their hometown in the countryside with a pile of shabby bags and two columns of black and stiff lungs. Back in the countryside, Applejack's mom leaves Applejack first, closing her eyes forever. His father became addicted to drugs in desperation, and he had to numb himself by taking drugs, alleviating the fear of death and the torment of illness, which depleted the family's savings and hastened his death, and soon he left Applejack forever to find Applejack's mother. Applejack's grandmother died when he was five years old, and since then, he has been left to live with his sixty-five-year-old grandfather. And Li Mo and Zhang Shuai's situation is not much better than Ajie, they grew up in a single-parent family, strictly speaking, they were raised by their grandparents, when they were very young, their father divorced their mother, Li Mo's parents divorced when they were working in Guangzhou, and his mother married a wealthy local man. Zhang Shuai's mother left the village at the age of six without warning in the autumn twilight, and they never returned to the impoverished mountain village, and the two children never saw their mother again.

After knowing the situation of the three children, she was led by the local village party secretary and the local female teacher, and found the homes of the three children along the winding mountain road, and she still remembers clearly, those dilapidated houses made of loess, standing lonely on the hillside, and on the door frames and window lattices made of pine trees, clumps of green mold and some small yellow mushrooms grew.

She communicated with the grandparents, the guardians of the three children, and asked them to do their work and persuade them to return to school. She told the old people who didn't quite understand Mandarin – only then could they find a real way out of the mountains that surrounded them.

At first, the old people were surprised and moved by her arrival, but they ignored the fact that their grandson was allowed to return to school from the mine where he worked, especially Applejack's grandfather believed that the poor children could not afford to study at all, and even if they had good grades and were admitted to middle and high school, he could not afford the tuition and living expenses, and after being admitted to university, the cost would be even higher. What's so bad about children now being able to earn their own money to support themselves? At least it's better than being lazy at home!

Later, after she and the village party secretary came to persuade her many times, especially when she told Applejack's grandfather that the mine was dangerous and Ajie should not be allowed to follow in the footsteps of his parents, and the village party secretary told the old people very seriously that it was illegal to hire child labor in the mine, and if it was investigated, they would be fined.

It was the first time she had seen a mine, the bare hills, full of devastation, drilling rigs digging hole after hole, like a surgeon cutting deep holes in a patient with a lancet, the holes were piled with bags of dirt in snakeskin bags, next to each hole was a crane, the feet of the crane were pressed with several snakeskin bags of dirt, the mine was full of wires and ropes, and you could see two-wheeled vehicles everywhere, some of them empty, some of them full of rough agate. Under the car, there were many women and teenage children, women wearing headscarves or hats, the children were mainly boys, but there were also some girls, they were wearing thick clothes, their hands were black, stained with a lot of mud, and they were full of calluses, and many children had thick tape wrapped around their hands, which was originally white tape, but became as black as the dirt under their feet.

The women and children held short-handled iron wheels and tapped a pile of rough agate stones that had just been brought out of the mine by a two-wheeled cart. Some middle-aged men and some elderly people are guarding the entrance of the cave, and are responsible for lifting up the two-wheeled cart full of agate rough stones with a crane, and pouring the agate rough stones near the entrance of the cave, so that women and children can pick out good stones.

Approaching the entrance of the cave and looking down, people gasp, the two-meter-wide mine hole, more than four meters deep in a straight line, and then extend diagonally to the ground, one or two diesel engines that generate electricity can be seen on the edge of the tunnel, and the diesel engines make a violent roar, which makes people feel restless. The mine has little protection and may collapse at any moment, burying the miners who drilled along the mine to dig the rough southern red agate.

Applejack's grandfather walks forward panting as he yells into the crowd, "Applejack...... Applejack ......, the hoarse and hurried voice rushing into the monotonous and dull sound of the crane and the iron crane, which was particularly harsh. A thin boy wearing a black sweater and a brown torn jacket, listening to the call of the old man, stood up with an iron kin in his hand, his face was tanned, and under his two faint eyebrows, a pair of eyes were shining and full of aura. These eyes looked at his grandfather and the village party secretary behind him and the strange her with doubtful eyes.

The old man tells Applejack that this is the new teacher, so let's go back to study with him! Applejack looks at her grandfather and then at her, confused.

When the foreman saw the village party secretary coming, he hurriedly walked over and handed out a cigarette to the village party secretary and Ajie's grandfather, and lit it for him. The village party secretary held a cigarette and told him about the purpose of their visit, and the foreman expressed his support for the children to go back to school.

When she told Applejack that I was the new teacher at the school, Ms. Bai Sumei, who came to visit you, and the students in the school were expecting you to go back to school, would you like to go back to school with us?

Applejack looked at her, hesitated for three seconds, blinked, and nodded.