“It would be the last kilometer!”

“You’re currently running at a pace of 3:50 per kilometer. If you can speed up to 3:40 per kilometer, you could catch up with him!” Fifty-three-year-old Bai Jian, vice president and PE teacher at Huayu Middle School in Anshan City, northeast China’s Liaoning Province, shouted from a minivan to a student runner.

He is also a “Good Dad” for over 200 students, mostly from families with problems.

Bai was encouraging Zhou Chenliang, 13, a bespectacled and thin child who could outrun most boys aged 17 or 18.

Earlier this year, Zhou’s parents in Shenyang City in Liaoning sent the boy to the Dream Home, a club operated by Bai.

The club, housed in six two-story buildings, is a charitable summer training center that caters for about 120 children aged from 4 to 18. Of the total, 58 have been supported by Bai for many years, while the rest have been sent by their parents.

In Zhou’s case, his father, a restaurateur, had incurred huge debt, a condition aggravated by other domestic complications.

Most of the children are sent here for similar difficulties, being born out of wedlock, have parents who are separated, are seriously ill, or who have run into huge debt.

Bai started the enterprise 29 years ago, when he joined the school as a teacher. A 17-year-old boy named Pang Hao became recalcitrant after his parents were embroiled in rows over divorce proceedings. To stop Pang from dropping out, Bai invited him to join his track and field team, providing him with food and accommodation.

This led to more children being brought to Bai’s attention.

Many parents sent their children to Bai as they need not pay for the training, and the child might have the hope of being admitted to colleges on their athletics strength.

Bai is fully aware that this might be the only way out for these children, but he knew he could only accommodate 10 more at most.

Bai has to juggle multiple roles as a coach and a father. He not only needs to tackle financial and educational issues, but also psychological issues facing some children.

In the club, the only way for the children to earn respect is through stellar running results.

Take Zhang Xin, from Yancheng in Jiangsu Province, from a divorced family. His mother has polio and was diagnosed with cancer four years ago. The mother entrusted the boy to Bai after looking up the Dream Home on a WeChat account.

They arrived at the club on July 14, the day before the training started, with a few pieces of clothing and elementary school textbooks, after a train journey of over 10 hours.

After the mother had undergone four chemotherapy sessions, she had to give up for lack of money.

Zhang avoids any family topics in the company of other children. At night, when lights are switched off, the over a dozen boys in bed in one room would discuss the TV dramas or movies they have seen, the songs they have listened to, or share funny events at school.

It seems to be fun for Zhang except that he might have to stay until he’s an adult.

Bai does not allow parental company, in consideration of those children without parents.

During the summer holidays, some college student volunteers double as coaches, in terms of training and discipline. Before dinner, there was a commotion, as a coach was disciplining some children by telling them to remain in a squatting posture. Bai refrained from interfering, but reminded the volunteers later in the evening that the children, given their traumatic childhood, might not be fair objects for harsh discipline.

Nor is Bai too eager to relate to new children. “They invariably experience a sense of distance or repulsion in the face of strangers in a strange environment,” Bai said.

Once, in spite of the ankle ligament damage he suffered while playing basketball, he continued to join the children in their fun, engaging in mock battles, wrestling, or swimming, in the hope of winning their trust and understanding.

Somehow, in these unfortunate children he saw something of his own past. Bai was brought up in an impoverished mountainous village in Liaoning, the youngest of five siblings. But he was lucky in that the chance to go to school was left to him, while most of the village children his age would drop out of junior middle school.

On an average school day Bai would run 5 kilometers to school. When his talent for long-distance running was discovered, he was admitted to a local college, becoming the second college student in the village. With the financial help from villagers, he managed to finish college and, taking a leaf from these charitable deeds, Bai was determined to help more children to go to school.

Of the over 50 children originally enrolled in the summer training program, 12 survived the training, either on account of their family difficulties, or their ability to tough it out.

Each year, in the run up to Spring Festival, Bai would contact parents to see if they want the children back for the festival, but as a rule more than half of them would remain. Their parents are either out of touch, or had married again.

For most of the children, how to keep up in routine school subjects is a big issue.

Athletic excellence used to afford a short cut to college, but is getting more difficult in view of a 2021 circular requiring such students to be rigorously accredited for their athletic excellence, and to sit the same exams in gaokao.

Bai thus feels an urgency for the students to make up for their deficiency in routine school subjects, by inviting student volunteers from prestigious colleges to give them instruction.

While those students good at athletics could resort to that short cut, the less endowed would have to survive the highly competitive gaokao. Predictably, some failed both, like Zhao Yong, now 43.

Zhao lacked any talent for running, thus he began to practice heel and toe walking. But just as he was about to sit exams for senior high school, this sport was ruled out for would-be students on the athletics track. After graduation in 1996, he briefly worked as a chef, and then at a beauty parlour. Then he learned to repair handsets.

Before Zhao got married, he would give all his savings to Bai to use for the children. He even managed to purchase a flat in a neighborhood near the Dream House.

Zhao said that if it was not for Bai he would have become a tramp, His father suffered from semi-paralysis, and the mother had been laid off, leaving the family to get by on his grandma’s salary. Thus Zhao viewed Bai as his father.

“I am an upright and unyielding person, and would never bow my head in supplication, except for the children,” Bai said.

Bai is fully sympathetic with children who resent marathon race training, but he would encourage children with running potential to go on.

Bai said around 80 percent of Dream House children went on to college.

The project has been financed chiefly by his family and donations.

His wife, a retired athlete who once worked as a diving instructor in Tsinghua University, later turned to teaching in Chinese classics.

By Bai’s reckoning, the monthly outlay for the Dream House amounts to 100,000 yuan (US$14,000). That’s way beyond his income.

His life has been revolving around these children, from 4am to 11pm, for almost 29 years.

Looking back on his spartan existence, Bai said, with a smile: “Everybody arrives at the world with a mission, and my mission is to live up to the expectations of the children.”

Some grown-up children, after leaving the Dream House, would continue to keep in contact with Bai. But Bai will never contact those who choose not to contact him.

Bai observed that those children ended up in the house at a time when they have no choice, and at their lowest ebb in terms of self esteem. Bai hopes they can put their past behind them, by making the best of the present.