At a desk-packed classroom in Xixin Primary School of Longquan City, Zhejiang Province, a teacher is leading a single student in reading aloud a Chinese text. Xiao Yu is in second grade, and suffers from autism. Due to this, he has been unable to attend regular classes. But this semester, he is being taught by a new teacher specially employed by the school.

When Xiao Yu was three, his father, Mr. Ye, noticed that his child seldom spoke and refused to communicate with others. After conducting examinations, doctors suspected that the little boy was autistic, but were unable to make a definite diagnosis due to his young age. “We had no idea how it happened, but we knew his behavior was not normal,” Mr. Ye recalls. “When watching TV at home, he might suddenly cry or laugh without reason, and except for us parents, he did not respond to anybody who called his name. He would not even look at them.” Xiao Yu appeared to live in his own world, which touchingly, his father refers to as “probably just as wonderful as ours.”

Despite his autistic tendencies, Xiao Yu was enrolled by his parents in a kindergarten for regular pre-school education. However, his actions soon began to concern teachers and other parents. During class, he would sometimes suddenly stand up to walk around the room, or advance to the blackboard to scribble something, or even approach the teacher and latch on to one of her legs. Because of this, when Xiao Yu attended a class, his mother would stand outside watching through the windows. When Xiao Yu misbehaved, the mother would enter the classroom, take the boy out, and only send him back after he had calmed down.

The Ye couple sacrificed a great deal to ensure a decent education for their son. When he turned six, they sent him to a special school for autistic children in Shanghai. “The Shanghai schooling was effective,” Ye says. “When he returned home after just a week of study, he began calling us ‘Dad’ and ‘Mom’.” But the extremely high fees of the school were a heavy burden on the Ye’s modest income, and after only a year’s study, they had to send their son back to their home city, Longquan.

In Longquan, Ye enrolled Xiao Yu in Xixin Primary School, but the school soon received complaints from the parents of other students, which caused a dilemma for Principal Ye Yudong. A single student should not be allowed to affect the study of the whole class, but at the same time, every child has the right to be educated. “We must not abandon him,” the principal determined.

And so at the beginning of the latest semester, the school hired a teacher to look after Xiao Yu alone. The principal noted that the boy usually began to misbehave around 20 minutes into class, and so the teacher was allowed to rearrange the length of lessons, rather than adhering to the conventional 45 minutes.