How two women transformed learning in rural China

Something’s amiss. After a 12-hour train ride, I’ve reached a remote village on China’s Loess Plateau, where I’m searching for a teacher I wrote about 30 years ago. I can still picture Bai Guiling juggling lessons for four grades in a dim cave classroom carved from the yellow earth. Her dedication to the needy village children was unforgettable. Now, I want to revisit her story as a window into education in rural China today. 

But no one in the dusty hamlet in northern Shaanxi province has heard of Teacher Bai or even remembers the school. Worse, my trip unexpectedly coincides with a visit to Shaanxi by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, so security is extraordinarily tight. Plainclothes police are tailing me everywhere. 

I flip through my notebook looking for the phone number of the only person who might be able to help – a Chinese American woman who years ago took a special interest in Teacher Bai. 

Sitting in my taxi while the police watch from down the road, I tap her U.S. number into my phone and wait for what seems like forever.

“Hello?” a frail but chipper voice answers. It’s Lin-yi Wu.

A few days earlier, in mid-May, I’d tracked down Ms. Wu, a retired librarian, at a senior living home in Walnut Creek, California. The nonagenarian was recovering from a fall – taken while jazz dancing – but was in good spirits. “Every time I hear jazz, my feet get itchy!” she said with a laugh. She, too, was eager for news of Teacher Bai.

Born the daughter of a well-to-do Shanghai antiques merchant in 1933, Ms. Wu received an elite education that bore no resemblance to Teacher Bai’s bare-bones cave classes. She rode rickshaws to a stately Shanghai middle school run by American missionaries. After graduating from the top-flight Peking University, she was retained to teach French. A formative moment came when Communist Party authorities exiled her and her husband-to-be, English professor Hung-sen Wu, to labor in a hardscrabble mountain village outside Beijing in 1958, during Mao Zedong’s commune movement.

“My eyes were opened to see how the majority of Chinese lived,” Ms.