Hundreds of Daughters
At Huaping High School for Girls in Lijiang, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, each day starts with a loudspeaker broadcast at 5:30am. The woman behind the wake-up call is the school's principal, Zhang Guimei. In 2008, the 62-year-old opened the school with her own savings, assistance from the local government and other donors after years of unremitting fundraising efforts. It is among China's few completely free high schools. After her husband died of stomach cancer in 1996, a grieving Zhang decided to move from Dali, Yunnan Province, where she worked with her husband at a local middle school, to teach in the impoverished and mountainous Huaping County. Teaching at a local school, Zhang had many more boys than girls in her class. She learned that many of the girls dropped out because their families could not afford their education and would force them to marry early. In 2001, Zhang volunteered to head a new children's home in the county. In addition to teaching at the school, Zhang spent her extra time caring for nearly 90 orphaned children, many of whom were abandoned girls. Zhang was determined to change their fates by equipping them with an education. Starting in 2002, Zhang spent her next six summer and winter holidays collecting donations on the street to start a high school for girls. The school was built in September 2008. To many of the teens whose fates were changed at the school, their childless principal became a mother figure. Over the past 12 years, the school has helped 1,804 teenage girls from impoverished families leave for cities to go to university. In 2020, 150 out of 159 students at the school passed the national college entrance examination.