Huang Chunhua, a 7-year-old girl in a township in Southwest China’s Hunan Province, looks like a tomboy with tattered clothes and short hair, and only eats two simple meals a day. She does not choose to be like this; she simply has no choice.

Huang is just one of the 132 kids living without their mothers at Huangjing village in Shaoyang County in Hunan. And that’s how the township got its nickname “motherless village”.

It once again puts the spotlight on the problem of migrant-workers’ children, or what are called “left-behind children,” in China. Millions of migrant workers have to leave their children at home in the villages when they move to cities to find jobs.

All the 132 kids are school-age kids with oldest ones attending middle school. Of these children, 116 are motherless because their mothers either remarried or simply left home without returning, and the mothers of the rest of the children passed away.

Most of the children do not remember what their mothers look like or only have a glimpse of their appearances. They want to look for them, but do not know their whereabouts.

Without the care of their mothers, these children suffer from poor living conditions and even emotional traumas. Chunhua, which means “spring flowers” in Chinese, and her younger sister Guihua, which means “osmanthus flowers” in Chinese, cook their meals using a makeshift “stove,” a hole dug in the ground with several bricks put around it.

They eat at a small square table piled with unwashed dishes. They don’t have a desk to do their homework.

Their father is somewhere far away from home working as a migrant-worker and come back home only once a year or every two years. Luckily, they have their grandma with them. But since she is very old, the only thing she can do is make sure that the girls have something to eat every day.

As the two young sisters are struggling in life at such young ages, it’s hard for them to have big dreams like most other kids of their age. They never think of going to college or having a great career in the future. “I only want to grow up soon and to go to somewhere to make money,” said Chunhua.