Don't want to be born a rural child

My daughter has kept sighing in the past week about what it means to be born a rural girl. We have been traveling across the vast mountainous countryside in Fujian province, meeting farmers picking tealeaves and hakka people dwelling in 500-year-old round earth buildings, which American spy satellites in the 1980s suspected to be giant missile-launch sites.

"Dad, I feel so fortunate that I was not born here and don't live here. Men are surely not born equal," said my daughter, after we joined local villagers picking tealeaves for an hour, our backs paining.

It was a good learning process for both of us. But in the hilly tea fields, village boys and girls as young as seven were working with their parents in the scorching sun for a whole day. Yes, it was already burning on a sunny afternoon in Fujian in early April.