Bai Fangli: one tricycle, 350,000 yuan for poor students

In 1987, Bai Fangli went home to Cangxian in Hebei to visit relatives. He was seventy-four. Walking through the village he noticed the children — a good many of them had started school and then quietly stopped, because their families had no money.

He came back to Tianjin with the weight of it on him. Then he told his sons and daughters something that alarmed them: he was going to get back on his pedicab, earn money, and put children through school. They told him he was too old, that it was time to rest. "I'm an old pedicab," he said. "I've got no other skill. But I can still put out strength. If the kids can't study, I can't get past it."

From that year on, Tianjin had a new sight on its streets: a white-haired old man on a worn three-wheeler, in wind, in rain, in the flat grey cold before snow. Other men pedaled to feed their own families. He pedaled for other people's.

He set himself a life that was severe to the point of harshness. He lived in a small tin shed beside the railway station. He ate steamed bread and drank plain water. In winter he hung a single cabbage on the handlebar and made it last for days. One coat went white and shiny at the seams before he replaced it. When the soles of his shoes wore through, he cut cardboard to fit inside and kept walking. Passengers sometimes pressed a few extra coins on him and told him to buy something nourishing. He put the coins in the tin and gave away every one.

In the 1990s he set up a small stall near the station and gave it a name: the Bai Fangli School-Support Company. A company it was not; it sold cigarettes and soda to people waiting for trains. But he was solemn when he explained the name. "Whatever the company earns goes to the children's schooling." He wrapped the money in newspaper and carried it to the schools himself, trip after trip, saying a sentence that eventually traveled the whole country: poverty can be poor in anything, but it must never be poor in education.

Over more than a decade the road he pedaled added up to eighteen circuits of the equator. The money he gave away came to 350,000 yuan, and it sent more than three hundred poor students to school.

Three hundred and fifty thousand does not sound like an enormous figure now. For an old man who earned it with his legs, it was everything — saved meal by meal, ridden out one fare at a time. A student who received it later remembered the first time he met Grandpa Bai. The boy assumed he had come to the school to buy scrap paper, his clothes were so old. Then the old man put a bundle on the table, unwrapped it layer by layer from a handkerchief, and smoothed out the notes. The teachers cried. The children cried.

He never once described his own life as hard. People asked what he was after. "At my age you can see the end of the road," he said. "I just think, one more fare, maybe one more child finishes school. A child who finishes school has a different life altogether."

There is a kind of love that knows none of the people it helps, and treats every one of them as its own child.

In September 2005 Bai Fangli died at ninety-two. On the day of the funeral, tens of thousands of people in Tianjin came out into the streets on their own. Some were students he had paid for. Most were strangers. Wherever the hearse passed, people held up his photograph and walked along with it, wiping their eyes.

Old men still pedal three-wheelers in Tianjin. Say the three words Bai Fangli to them and they will tell you: that one was our elder, our old-timer.

He used a tricycle to say something to this country that no lecture could have said as well. Love is not measured by how much strength you have. It is measured by whether you are willing to put the last of your life's strength into the pedals.