Ma Huachun
In his brother-in-law's impression, Ma Huachun usually said very little, but when he was with the children, he became the king of children. Ma Huachun worked as a mathematics teacher in a local rural primary school in Lanzhou for five years. The conditions in the rural primary school were difficult, with only a dozen students in a class, and the teachers usually had to cook their own meals when they lived at school. Ma Huachun said, if there are fifty to sixty children in a class, the teacher can't take care of everyone, but now I have just a dozen dolls in my class, I have enough energy to bring them all up well.
When Ma Huachun was on school duty at the weekend when the students were off, his brother-in-law went to visit him and found him in the woods behind the school instead of in the dormitory, surrounded by five or six children. These dolls even came to school on weekends, just to play with Mr Ma.
Ma Huachun started running the marathon three years ago, crossing the Datong River every morning to run a round trip across the province to Minhe County, which belongs to Qinghai, and every day he is the step champion in his family's WeChat movement. His eldest son, who is more than three years old, follows his yoga practice and can now stand on his bed and dabble in cartwheels, keeping his hands off the ground.
In the second half of 2019, Ma Huachun passed the exam for university student village officials and took over the job of village secretary in Shanghai Shi Village in Honggu District, and had just taken up his post when he encountered an outbreak of the epidemic in early 2020. He took the initiative to call the Organization Department to apply for duty. Last year, he hardly stayed home throughout the spring, inspecting each prevention and control point and each road at the entrance of the village every day, sometimes returning home at night to have a hasty meal, a phone call came and he rushed back to the village for a meeting, arriving home late at night at eleven o'clock was a regular occurrence. Since the outbreak, there has not been a single case in Shanghai Shi Village.
The family did not pay much attention to the competitions Ma Huachun had participated in over the years. According to his brother-in-law, Ma Huachun's wife has been working as a temporary paraprofessional for the past few years in order to take care of the children. Now that her eldest son is in kindergarten and her youngest son will have his first birthday next month, she plans to take a preparation test for a stable job. She was in the process of studying when she heard that her husband was going to Baiyin and thought he was just going to run a half marathon. 22 am, Ma Huachun set off on the cross-country course in Baiyin and his wife stepped into the examination room in Lanzhou, which would have been a good day for both of them to achieve good results if no accidents had happened.
At 1:58 pm, his wife felt it was almost time to finish the half-marathon and started to call him, until 7:12 pm, when seven calls went unanswered. The family remained lucky in their worry, perhaps the phone had been lost by him running? Perhaps the phone had gotten into the water because of the rain?
The next day at 8am, the phone finally rang in anticipation, but came the bad news. 23rd afternoon, the family rushed to Baiyin. The brother-in-law looked at Ma Huachun's three-year-old son, and there were tears that could not be shed. He told the child, "Burn paper for dad." The child ignorantly also followed to learn the tongue, "burn paper to dad, burn more paper to dad, dad will buy me good food."