A student peruses books at Bao Qiong Library at the university. PHOTOS BY CHEN LIANG / CHINA DAILY

It is a room with 1,700 books in English, she said. She and her students decorated the library themselves. “It’s not just the books, it’s the environment that is also important.”

She said she hopes to build up libraries in the province’s middle schools, “as many as possible”, and she is thinking of setting up an organization to run the project. “In this province, especially in remote areas, the students’ English is not very good,” she said. “But if they have support, some books and some help, they can do better.”

Many years ago she bought books mainly with her own money. While returning home for summer holidays, she would buy many books and bring them back. “But it was very expensive to do that,” she said.

Several years ago an international school was closed in Kunming. Boulerice wanted to buy the whole library of the school, but she didn’t have money to do it. So she and her assistant Li Jingyuan called her former students for help. They raised twice as much money as they needed.

Since then, she said, people often donate to her library, including Chinese teachers, former students and even some strangers.

“Just recently a person gave me 12,000 yuan ($1,933) for the library,” she said. “It was a person who didn’t know me personally, but knew me through other people.”

She is now thinking about raising funds to hire a librarian in the middle school, because she has been disappointed in the middle school’s teachers.

“Teachers are not getting on board to encourage students to read,” she said. “They’re always teaching to the test.” So she wants to hire a graduate from the college to work at the school as a library leader. The librarian could encourage students to read and keep the library in order. “In that way, I can also give jobs to my students because jobs are not easy to find these days.”

She said that she enjoys being a teacher because she likes seeing people’s lives change and she can do something to help make that happen. “No other job can have such influence on a person as a teacher,” she said. “I think being a teacher is the most valuable use of my life. I also feel I was born to do this, and to do it in China.”