Post by Raoul Duke on Aug 6, 2005 13:39:05 GMT 7
Warning: A SAD AND DISTURBING STORY FOLLOWS. Although I am deeply in love with an old couple in North China.
China's infant castoffs find home
By Ching-Ching Ni Tribune Newspapers
Los Angeles Times Wed Aug 3, 9:40 AM ET
Chen Shangyi makes a living as a scavenger. He prides himself on having a good nose for unusual finds. So when he saw a crowd clustered around a white bundle at the local train station one day while he was hunting for empty soda cans and soy sauce bottles, he took a peek.
It was a baby, wrapped in a thin sheet.
"Everybody was just looking. Nobody would do anything," recalled Chen, who was 65 on that bitterly cold day 17 years ago. "When I took her home, she was frozen stiff. My wife and I wrapped her in a burlap bag. ... We started a fire. We fed her soup and put some old clothes on her. A while later, she started to wiggle."
Chen named her Ling Ling.
Today, Chen still makes a living as a scavenger in this remote Chinese town of 460,000 people on the edge of the Gobi Desert. And he is still bringing home children--42 in all.
Many had been abandoned because they were born with physical disabilities. Over the years, Chen has developed a reputation as a keeper of castaway kids and local officials have sent them his way. They know Chen would never reject any child, no matter how imperfect.
"Nobody else wants them, because they are afraid of trouble," said Chen's 81-year-old wife, Zhang Lanying. "They think these children are dirty. But I pity them. They are human beings."
The world's most populous nation, China is home to the largest disabled population on Earth: about 60 million. Despite an anti-discrimination law that guarantees equal rights, society's attitude toward the disabled has been slow to change. Handicapped access in public places is rare. Physically disabled people account for about one-third of the unemployed.
For some parents, the prospect of watching their disabled children experience a lifetime of stigma is too terrible to bear. According to media reports, Beijing police took in more than 400 children abandoned in the Chinese capital last year, about 80 percent of them born with deformities, organ abnormalities or mental impairment.
A lifetime of stigma
"I'd say 99 percent of the children here were abandoned because they were born with severe disability," said Shi Guihua, a staff worker at a welfare center in a Beijing suburb that pays foster families to take care of about 600 children. "Many of them were left on hospital benches by parents who can't afford to treat them."
Small towns such as Anding, in northwestern China's impoverished Gansu province, don't have such welfare centers, which are funded by the state and corporate donors.
Local officials say they have sent castaways to Chen because they have no other way of caring for them. A new orphanage sits empty--it takes too much money to operate.
Instead, local officials pay Chen and Zhang to do the work for them--less than $80 per month for the eight children for whom the couple now care.
That meager sum, plus the little cash Chen brings in by picking through trash, and all the love the couple can muster, has been enough to save dozens of children from certain death.
Chen, a sturdy 82-year-old, and Zhang, who have no children of their own, say they have cherished every one of the youngsters who has come into their three-room brick shack across the street from the train station.
Their oldest now is Yuan Yuan, 12. She was born with a lump on her skull the size of a peach. Someone had left her in the yard of the local municipal building when she was about 1.
Chen and Zhang finally saved enough money three years ago to pay for an operation to remove the growth and allow Yuan Yuan to live a more normal life. It cost about $80.
Like the rest of the children, Yuan Yuan calls Chen and Zhang Grandpa and Grandma, or yeye and nainai.
"We love our grandparents. They work so hard for us," Yuan Yuan said. "I don't miss my parents. They are so cruel. They left us because they knew we were sick."
The youngest child now is 2-year-old Ling Ling, named after the baby Chen found at the railway station. The first Ling Ling never recovered fully from being left in the snow and suffered frequent coughs and seizures. She never crawled or walked, and she died when she was 4.
Chen found Ling Ling's namesake crying in an alley. Born with a hunchback and uneven legs, she was just days old. Now the girl with pretty eyes loves to cling to yeye and nainai and keep them company while the older children are in school.
"If you throw a puppy out on the street, someone might pick it up, but throw a baby out on the street and no one bothers," Zhang said.
The sickest child in the household is 9-year-old Long Long, paralyzed and suffering from liver disease. Chen found him one day in a paper box under a blazing sun, crying.
Wary of officials
Another child in the house, Quan Quan, was born with a cleft palate. Chen found him when he was about 1 at the farmers market, crawling on the dirt, eating rotten vegetables. "Everybody knew he had been abandoned for days and was starving," Chen said.
"He couldn't walk yet, and his neck was this thin," Zhang said, shaping her thumb and forefinger into a ring. Today, 6-year-old Quan Quan performs well in school and loves to help his brothers. He likes to play with a kitten and Qiang Qiang, 10, a small boy with a bad heart.
Of the 42 children Chen and Zhang have taken in over the years, 21 turned out to be healthy or suffering from mild disabilities and were adopted. Thirteen very sick children died. The loss of Ling Ling, their first child, still hurts the most.
"We buried her in a ditch by the river," Chen said. "We couldn't afford cremation."
Now Chen worries that local officials may take his children away on the grounds that he is too old to be their caretaker. He believes a recent flurry of news reports about the children that suggested official negligence embarrassed local officials.
Wang Yanfu, deputy head of the district civil administration bureau, said officials are prepared to rent a house and hire two workers to feed and care for Chen's children.
"We sent him the kids before because he was young, in his 60s. Now he is too old," Wang said. "We are trying our best to convince him [to quit]. But if he doesn't want to, there's nothing we can do."
Chen says he can't trust the government to do what's best for the children.
"I don't understand policy," he said. "All I know is that when they were little, no one would come and help them. They say I am too old. I say I will raise them as long as I can. They'll have to kill me first before I'll let them take the kids away."
China's infant castoffs find home
By Ching-Ching Ni Tribune Newspapers
Los Angeles Times Wed Aug 3, 9:40 AM ET
Chen Shangyi makes a living as a scavenger. He prides himself on having a good nose for unusual finds. So when he saw a crowd clustered around a white bundle at the local train station one day while he was hunting for empty soda cans and soy sauce bottles, he took a peek.
It was a baby, wrapped in a thin sheet.
"Everybody was just looking. Nobody would do anything," recalled Chen, who was 65 on that bitterly cold day 17 years ago. "When I took her home, she was frozen stiff. My wife and I wrapped her in a burlap bag. ... We started a fire. We fed her soup and put some old clothes on her. A while later, she started to wiggle."
Chen named her Ling Ling.
Today, Chen still makes a living as a scavenger in this remote Chinese town of 460,000 people on the edge of the Gobi Desert. And he is still bringing home children--42 in all.
Many had been abandoned because they were born with physical disabilities. Over the years, Chen has developed a reputation as a keeper of castaway kids and local officials have sent them his way. They know Chen would never reject any child, no matter how imperfect.
"Nobody else wants them, because they are afraid of trouble," said Chen's 81-year-old wife, Zhang Lanying. "They think these children are dirty. But I pity them. They are human beings."
The world's most populous nation, China is home to the largest disabled population on Earth: about 60 million. Despite an anti-discrimination law that guarantees equal rights, society's attitude toward the disabled has been slow to change. Handicapped access in public places is rare. Physically disabled people account for about one-third of the unemployed.
For some parents, the prospect of watching their disabled children experience a lifetime of stigma is too terrible to bear. According to media reports, Beijing police took in more than 400 children abandoned in the Chinese capital last year, about 80 percent of them born with deformities, organ abnormalities or mental impairment.
A lifetime of stigma
"I'd say 99 percent of the children here were abandoned because they were born with severe disability," said Shi Guihua, a staff worker at a welfare center in a Beijing suburb that pays foster families to take care of about 600 children. "Many of them were left on hospital benches by parents who can't afford to treat them."
Small towns such as Anding, in northwestern China's impoverished Gansu province, don't have such welfare centers, which are funded by the state and corporate donors.
Local officials say they have sent castaways to Chen because they have no other way of caring for them. A new orphanage sits empty--it takes too much money to operate.
Instead, local officials pay Chen and Zhang to do the work for them--less than $80 per month for the eight children for whom the couple now care.
That meager sum, plus the little cash Chen brings in by picking through trash, and all the love the couple can muster, has been enough to save dozens of children from certain death.
Chen, a sturdy 82-year-old, and Zhang, who have no children of their own, say they have cherished every one of the youngsters who has come into their three-room brick shack across the street from the train station.
Their oldest now is Yuan Yuan, 12. She was born with a lump on her skull the size of a peach. Someone had left her in the yard of the local municipal building when she was about 1.
Chen and Zhang finally saved enough money three years ago to pay for an operation to remove the growth and allow Yuan Yuan to live a more normal life. It cost about $80.
Like the rest of the children, Yuan Yuan calls Chen and Zhang Grandpa and Grandma, or yeye and nainai.
"We love our grandparents. They work so hard for us," Yuan Yuan said. "I don't miss my parents. They are so cruel. They left us because they knew we were sick."
The youngest child now is 2-year-old Ling Ling, named after the baby Chen found at the railway station. The first Ling Ling never recovered fully from being left in the snow and suffered frequent coughs and seizures. She never crawled or walked, and she died when she was 4.
Chen found Ling Ling's namesake crying in an alley. Born with a hunchback and uneven legs, she was just days old. Now the girl with pretty eyes loves to cling to yeye and nainai and keep them company while the older children are in school.
"If you throw a puppy out on the street, someone might pick it up, but throw a baby out on the street and no one bothers," Zhang said.
The sickest child in the household is 9-year-old Long Long, paralyzed and suffering from liver disease. Chen found him one day in a paper box under a blazing sun, crying.
Wary of officials
Another child in the house, Quan Quan, was born with a cleft palate. Chen found him when he was about 1 at the farmers market, crawling on the dirt, eating rotten vegetables. "Everybody knew he had been abandoned for days and was starving," Chen said.
"He couldn't walk yet, and his neck was this thin," Zhang said, shaping her thumb and forefinger into a ring. Today, 6-year-old Quan Quan performs well in school and loves to help his brothers. He likes to play with a kitten and Qiang Qiang, 10, a small boy with a bad heart.
Of the 42 children Chen and Zhang have taken in over the years, 21 turned out to be healthy or suffering from mild disabilities and were adopted. Thirteen very sick children died. The loss of Ling Ling, their first child, still hurts the most.
"We buried her in a ditch by the river," Chen said. "We couldn't afford cremation."
Now Chen worries that local officials may take his children away on the grounds that he is too old to be their caretaker. He believes a recent flurry of news reports about the children that suggested official negligence embarrassed local officials.
Wang Yanfu, deputy head of the district civil administration bureau, said officials are prepared to rent a house and hire two workers to feed and care for Chen's children.
"We sent him the kids before because he was young, in his 60s. Now he is too old," Wang said. "We are trying our best to convince him [to quit]. But if he doesn't want to, there's nothing we can do."
Chen says he can't trust the government to do what's best for the children.
"I don't understand policy," he said. "All I know is that when they were little, no one would come and help them. They say I am too old. I say I will raise them as long as I can. They'll have to kill me first before I'll let them take the kids away."
