Girl empower
Daisy Gong grew up the eldest of three children in a poor family in the small, remote mountainous village of Aganzhen, in Gansu province, north China, where she planted lily bulbs with her mother.
She started school aged five, walking an hour each way. “When I started high school, my mother would give me 15 to 20 yuan to eat for the whole week. Sometimes she had to borrow the money,” says the 32-year-old by email. “People around me did not think girls should have too much education.”
In many rural parts of China, gender discrimination is rampant, with girls encouraged to quit school to support their families and male siblings. Many girls marry as young as 16.
But Gong “was determined to go to university”, she says. In 2008, she was accepted by Hubei University of Economics to study nutrition science. At the same time she met Ching Tien, a Canadian citizen who grew up in China, and later founded Educating Girls of Rural China (EGRC), a charity that empowers young women through education.
Since 2005, EGRC has sponsored more than
1,400 girls and young women through high school and university, with a 100 per cent graduation rate, helping them find employment and lifting their families out of poverty. In rural Gansu, annual per capita income is about US$1,000, seven times lower than in Beijing or Shanghai. The family incomes of some EGRC students are as little as US$400.
“I connected with EGRC when I most needed help,” says Gong, who had part of her university costs paid for by the charity. “EGRC and Ms Tien did not just provide financial sponsorship, they really cared […] I could not believe there were such wonderful people in this world.”
Last year, EGRC celebrated its 15th anniversary with a book featuring photos by Australian filmmaker and photographer Olivia Martin-McGuire.
She visited Gansu three times, driving “across rivers and up mountains, and to small clay houses to meet the girls and their carers. The family situations were alarming.
“In these remote regions there are no regulations on farming equipment, so many parents have been left disabled,” she says. “They literally have no money and many of the girls were often the first to give up their education to support the family.”
For her portrait sessions, Martin-McGuire had girls sit on a kang – a large bed with burning coals underneath. When she asked what EGRC had done for them, tears would flow. “The mothers would clutch their daughters’ hands, saying they never dreamed of a chance like this and how could they ever repay their beautiful Auntie Ching Tien.”
Ching was born in Beijing into a life of privilege. But during the Cultural Revolution her family, like millions of others, was torn apart. Her paediatrician mother was sent to Longxi County, Gansu. Ching joined her in late 1970, shattering any dream of attending university. Instead she worked in a chemical fertiliser factory for eight years.
In 1983, Ching moved to Canada but in 2005 she returned to Gansu with the intention of supporting girls’ education. “The living conditions were better than when I was there in the 70s, but access to higher education, particularly for girls, was a huge hurdle,” says Ching by email. “Education […] can change lives for the less privileged.”
Gong, an EGRC programme manager since 2016, says many of the sponsored girls are orphans, others were given away at birth. “I encourage the girls to dream big and I spread EGRC’s belief that educated women have educated children.”
All proceeds from the book Educating Girls of Rural China go to EGRC. For details, go to bit. ly/3umu7EL.