Weekly Story Appreciation: Not One Less

If There Were 10 Million Fireflies, Should I Say Goodbye?

Meme to meet you,

On Friday, our Media Appreciation class watched a Chinese movie called ‘Not One Less’. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from this, because of how old the quality of the movie looked like. I make myself comfortable in my seat as the movie started. There was a cold coca cola I just bought and took a long sip. Might as well get comfy, right?

It started with a man and a small girl walking down a rocky path. The girl's clothes are baggy and a bit dull. Both walked towards a rundown shack, it’s walls filled with dirt and it has big cracks on it. It turns out, the shack was actually a primary school for the children who lives in the village.

This is the part where it got me interested. The small girl walking with the man(who apparently is the mayor of this poor village) was hired to be a substitute teacher for one month. Wei Minzhi, a 13 year-old is going to be a teacher to students 3 years younger than her.

There were many challenges faced by both Wei Minzhi and her students. For Wei, she doesn’t have the ability or education to teach anything to her students. It’s not a surprise she couldn’t teach, she had just graduated from middle school. She was told by the teacher she’s going to replace to copy the texts in the book and not let any students out if they haven’t copy the texts. Which Wei did, by locking the door and stand guard outside the classroom.

In the students’ case, because Wei is not inside the classroom to enforce any rules or teach them anything, it became a free-for-all battle royale. In other words, pure chaos.

The days continued on like this until one of Wei’s student, the resident troublemaker Zhang Huike, went to the city to find a job to pay his family’s debt.

Wei Minzhi, the girl who ran to catch a jeep to keep her student, was very determined to bring the boy back to school. She enlists the help of her remaining 26 students to earn some money to go to the city.

And with the help of math (I’m amused and surprised) in real life situations and problems, they all earned some money for Wei to earn a bus ticket to the city. Which was actually not enough at all and the 13 year-old had to walk to the city after she was thrown out for sneaking into the bus.

After a few grueling days in the city, Wei managed to get into contact with the news station and told them about her reasons she came to the city. The station broadcast her in live T.V, prompting a reaction from Zhang Huike's boss to let the small boy know about his teacher.

In the end, both teacher and student were reunited. Their school were donated a whole supply of coloured chalk and other things, a donation for Zhang Huike to pay his debts and lastly, each student gets to write a character on the board with the coloured chalks.

This movie was absolutely amazing and I would definitely watched it again. It is well- balanced, and I definitely liked the humor bits scattered along the movie.

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Yours truly