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Huang Shengen tied a small blackboard to his motorcycle, together with all his teaching materials, slung an alarm clock with a Hello Kitty bowknot on it around his neck, and turned the ignition.
"The villagers thought I had opened a new grocery store," the 53-year-old veteran rural teacher said.
Huang has worked as an elementary school teacher for 35 years in Yichun City, east China's Jiangxi Province.
People could only find Huang at home on weekends, since he always left for work every Monday and returned after school on Fridays, riding more than 15,000 km over 18 months on winding mountain roads.
As the only teacher in Shaniping Primary School, which has not reopened yet due to the coronavirus outbreak, Huang headed to 7-year-old Zeng Yufen's place. The first-grader is the only student in the school who lives with her grandmother in a mountain village.
The local education authorities have required all primary school students to have online courses at home. However, Huang found that the network signal was poor at Zeng's residence when he delivered textbooks to the girl at the end of February.
He tried to help with the network debugging but found it was difficult to catch a stable signal.
"I tried again and again, but it didn't work. Zeng asked me what she should do if she couldn't attend classes online," Huang recalled.
In order not to let her down, Huang came up with the idea of a mobile classroom and showed up at Zeng's home the next day with a blackboard tied to his motorcycle, a ruler and a chalk box in the trunk.
Every morning since then, Huang rode some 15 km up the mountain road to Zeng's home. Class started with the roaring of an approaching motorcycle when the girl rushed out to her teacher.
Huang's motorcycle trunk has become a "treasure case," with school objects, boiled eggs, snacks, toys and medical supplies such as surgical masks.
And the Hello Kitty-style alarm clock was used as a school bell.
"Even if there is only one teacher and one student in the class, a 'sense of ritual' is still needed," Huang said.
The teacher and the student would play homemade "bowling" together in the front yard after class, throwing a softball at 10 pins made of plastic bottles. It was one of the leisure activities Huang prepared for his student.
Huang also moved his art class to the rape field. The teacher and the student would set up an art board, took out a paintbrush and drew the yellow rape flowers and the colorful landscape of the mountain village.
Huang lives alone in the countryside while his son hoped that he could move to the city as soon as possible. With only two years before retirement, Huang can not leave his only student alone.
"I'm a rural teacher, and my job is to teach her so that she might someday leave the mountains and live a better life," Huang said.
