High ambitions and a dream fulfilled

When Xu Yan, from the Songtao Miao autonomous county in Tongren, a city in Guizhou province, was in junior high school, she would avoid conversations with her classmates if the topic turned to kindergartens. "I was afraid that they would laugh and say my hometown must be terrible because it didn't even have a kindergarten," she said.

Instead of attending preschool education, the 19-year-old spent most of her early childhood on the farm where her mother worked, and when her mother left to look for work in the city, Xu was carried to the fields by her grandmother. "I had a dream that my experiences would not be repeated by children in my hometown," she said.

To follow that dream, she decided to study preschool education and become a kindergarten teacher in her home area. Last year, after graduating from Hunan Zhijiang Normal School, Xu returned to Songtao and began work at the new kindergarten in Houzhai, based in disused primary school classrooms.