中國婦權
Monthly Archives: October 2010
The Baby Under The Bridge
The temperature was over 30 Celsius on September 21st, 2010 in Bijie, Guizhou Province. As field workers for WRIC’s Rural girls assistance plan, my friend Mr. Han and I visited a local brick factory. We were looking for a couple who had spent 200,000 yuan (about $30,000) in medical expenses to cure their infertility. The Dings had a daughter recently after working very hard to pay the medical fees.
Li Xiaoxue
While Mr. Han was asking around for the Ding family, I saw by the brick factory’s temporary footbridge a man and a woman, both of slight stature, loading bricks onto a high truck bed. In the vicious heat, they would take a stack of five bricks weighing more than twenty pounds from the wheelbarrow and lift them to the high truck bed. It would be hard for an average man to use the specialized hook to pick up the brick stacks and lift them over his head. This woman, however, worked in the same manner as the man. Her red sweater was completely soaked with sweat.
I started photographing the woman. It wasn’t to honor or glorify her labor, but to record, with a heavy heart, that at this moment in China, there is such a hardscrabble way to make a living.
After I climbed off the footbridge, I took some pictures of the couple from some other angles. Although the woman’s face was caked with sweat and dust, it was still apparent that she was good looking. Had she not been born in a Chinese village, with some care and fashion, she would have looked like any attractive young woman in the cities.
Suddenly I saw a baby stroller under the bridge. A half-naked baby was sound asleep. I sensed that the man and woman were the parents of the child. I walked up to the stroller. The baby was only four or five months old. Around the stroller, on her body, head, even eyelids, flies circled and landed with impunity. The baby was oblivious, sleeping and sucking on her thumb as if from her mother’s breast. It was a sad scene and I choked up. It was a girl, exactly the kind of baby that the Rural girls assistance plan was supposed to help.
Forget all the talk of hard work and prosperity, the couple lifting bricks in this heat worked a hundred times harder than anyone sitting in an office or those talking to television cameras in dark studios. But they wouldn’t get rich working their whole lifetimes. I felt the injustice of the situation and began to videotape the family while explaining to them the goals of WRIC’s Rural girls assistance plan They fit all our requirements. I explained that I would work hard to get them assistance. But the woman did not believe me. She wouldn’t even answer whether the baby under the bridge was related to them. After she hurriedly loaded another wheelbarrow of bricks, she picked up the girl from the stroller and hid away from us. In this country crawling with scams, who could believe that pies would suddenly drop from the sky?
I understood that she didn’t trust us. I bore the responsibility from AGA, and I had to work hard to get them help through the Baby Shower Gift program. So I tried to strike up a conversation with the man, who was by now leaning on the wheelbarrow for a little rest. I showed him our cameras and opened our notebooks. I explained the entries we took that day of the girls we registered and the photos we took of girls we had already helped in prior months. We did not drop by the brick factory for no reason. We were looking for the Ding family. Mr. Yang, who worked in the factory and introduced us to the Dings, could vouch for us.
The man finally began to speak. Li Wanji was 25 years old; his wife, Yang Junhong, was 22. They moved here from about 25 miles away. He admitted that the baby in the stroller, Li Xiaoxue was theirs. A girl who looked on us from inside the factory was also theirs. Each month he and his wife could pull in at most 1000 yuan ($147). But the mother had no breast milk. Therefore, the money mostly went to four or five bottles of “milk” for the baby.
They wouldn’t tell me their telephone number. Maybe they really didn’t have any. But most probably they were reluctant to trust us. Perhaps when they receive assistance next month they would put more confidence in us. I was about to ask more about their work, the tons upon tons of bricks they had to lift every day…but then Mr. Ding arrived, and we left for Mr. Ding’s house.
From Mr. Ding, I learned more information about Li Wanji and his family. The couple earned about 900 yuan ($132) each month, which sometimes reached over 1000 yuan. A single brick weighed five pounds. A stack of five therefore weighed 25. Every eight hours, the couple needed to load 8000 bricks. That was eighteen tons!
I asked Mr. Yang why Li Wanji and Yang Junhong didn’t ask the children’s grandparents to take care of the children. Li’s father had passed away a long time ago. His mother and a teenage brother had to do all the farming work during the heavy farming season. They could not possibly take care of three children.
I had only seen two children in the brick factory. Where did the third come from? Mr. Yang explained that Li Wanji was suspicious of us. The third child, also a girl, was hidden from us completely. Yang Junhong was only 22, still only college age, yet she already had three children. It was hard to imagine how she could work this heavy load while raising three girls, including a baby. It was easy to see why Li Wanji’s confidence in us was so limited. It would be hard to blame them in this environment of Birth Planning squads, Birth Planning fines, forced sterilization and forced abortions.
I couldn’t help being moved by the plight of the Li Xiaoxue story when I looked over the materials we collected a day later. What I saw in the brick factory and under the bridge continued to drift across my mind. Why did the baby have to be born in such extreme poverty? How many mothers, how many children, in Bijie, in China, were like Li Xiaoxue and Yan Junhong? I resolved to write about them to tell the world that in a “nationally prosperous” China, there were still people like this family that lived, worked and survived in this way.
Li Still In Hiding After Giving Birth
By WRIC Volunteer Li Yuanlong 09-09-2010
Miss Li went into hiding during her pregnancy. She gave birth in hiding. Could Li, the Bijie, Guizhou woman now live normally in the open after the child was born? Unfortunately, that was not the reality.
On Aug 8,2010, I visited Miss Li’s house. There was no one there to answer the door or the telephone. Based on memory, I found her paternal uncle’s house, where she was in hiding during her pregnancy. She had already changed to another hiding place. A sister of Li’s who remembered me led me to her maternal uncle’s house. After navigating a labyrinth through four or five gates, I saw Li and her two-months-old daughter Yao Siqi. The tiny, reddish baby in my memory had become cute and pudgy. Li did not know how heavy she had grown. Nobody dared to bring an “illegal” baby into the streets to find a scale. All that mattered was that the child had ate and slept well so far.
Ms.Li and her children. (photo by WRIC)
Ms.Li and her husband are forced to go to Shenzhen for labor late, unable to see their kids for long time.
I asked Li why she was still in hiding after the baby was born. There was no choice, she said. If government Birth Planning agents found her, they would send her to sterilization operations by force. Li and her husband did not hate girls. But in the Chinese countryside, it was still extremely difficult to survive in old age without a son. She planned to talk with her husband to figure out if they wanted another child, to try her luck at a son. I told her that nowadays there was not much difference between sons and daughters. But Li said sadly, “Without a son I can’t even go to my husband’s family home. It’s hard to keep going when you are blamed for ‘ending the family line’ every day.”
On the 25th of October,2010， Li’s mother came to receive the aid for Li and Li’s niece. Two days later, Li’s mother was hospitalized for high blood pressure. Li’s father, near sixty, was still living in Xingyi, Guizhou as a migrant worker.
Abandoned Baby from 18 Years Ago Admitted to University
By WRIC volunteers June, 2007
“The snow came early that winter when I first saw her. She was wrapped in a bamboo basket and there were ice blocks on top of her blankets.“
There is a mountain in the village of Tongcheng city, and halfway up the mountain there is a nunnery called Bai Yun Temple (meaning White Cloud). Shi Xinyuan came to the monastery when she was 12 years old and has been there for 28 years. The “she” in the story above is Shi Jieming, the abandoned girl in the bamboo basket from 17 years ago that Shi Xinyuan discovered. Shi Jieming is now attending Anhui’s Agricultural University.
May 7,2010, WRIC volunteer Yao Cheng (Right) has interviewed Shi Jieming(Left) in Anhui Agricultural University in Anhui province.
Baby Girl in a Bamboo Basket
In 1992, the Lunar calendar date of October 22: On this day, heavy snow fell from the skies. Shi Xinyuan went to the Ruyi’an monastery in Tongcheng County. After finishing her tasks, she was ready to trek back to Bai Yun Temple. On her way, Xinyuan passed by a vegetable market near the Ruyi’an monastery where a crowd of people were gathered and staring at something on the ground. Xinyuan could not help but be curious and also went to look.
“Why are all these people staring? Clearly this is an ordinary bamboo basket,” Shi Xinyuan thought. Indeed, the basket appeared very ordinary, stuffed with an old quilt. Xinyuan turned back to continue on her journey but at that moment someone lifted a little corner of the quilt, and Xinyuan’s breath caught in her throat. Hidden under the quilt was a baby, pale and too near death to make a sound!
Xinyuan went up to the basket and carefully peeled back the blankets and saw a child, wrapped in a blanket, whose tears had frozen and whose ears had turned blue from the cold. The child’s throat was so hoarse from crying that she could barely make a sound, but her eyes were exceptionally bright and alert, eyeing the surrounding people.
At that moment, Shi Xinyuan’s heart was moved.
The parents abandoned their baby girl in a basket with a letter outside the nunnery in Anhui
A Bold Decision
Shi Xinyuan picked up the bamboo basket, dispersed the crowd and went straight towards the hospital. “This child has been freezing for so long, I don’t know if she’ll be able to function normally.” The doctor listened to Xinyuan’s description and immediately conducted a checkup on the baby. Due to being in the cold and starved for so long, the baby was on the brink of death. After the doctor gave the child an IV, Shi Xinyuan stayed by the baby’s bedside. Miraculously, a few days later, the baby’s condition improved!
The baby continued to rest in the hospital and took 40 days to recover. Meanwhile, in addition to caring for the baby during its recovery, Shi Xinyuan made a bold decision: to adopt the child and take her back to Bai Yun Temple. After the civil and religious departments’ careful consultation, Xinyuan’s wish was fulfilled.
On the day that the baby was discharged from the hospital, Shi Xinyuan gently put the child into a basket. At that moment, the baby smiled and joyfully waved her hands. Xinyuan touched the child’s face and went back up the mountains to Bai Yun Temple.
A nun adopting a child into the monastery? This was shocking and to some, unthinkable. When the baby’s cries at night reached the village through the jungle, what must people have whispered in secret? However, Shi Xinyuan did not care. Looking at the sleeping baby, she decided to name the child “ming”: the word for clarity in the hopes that she would live untroubled in the future. From that day forth, the baby was called Shi Jieming.
At that time Shi Xinyuan was only 22 years old. She did not know the complexities of raising a starved child, and had no experience with children in general. In desperation, Xinyuan had to turn to her mother for help and the baby was raised by her mother in the village until she turned four years old.
A Muddy Path
At four years old, Jieming was a very energetic, charming and lovely child. One day, Shi Xinyuan’s mother took Jieming up to the mountains and told her daughter: “You have adopted the child and she must be returned to the monastery.” From then on, little Jieming began to call Shi Xinyuan, “Master,” and Xinyuan’s pupil, Shi Zhongxue, “Teacher”, and the three of them lived together for the next 14 years in the temple.
Perhaps due to the cold winter she was abandoned in, Jieming had cramps from an early age, sometimes so severe that her hands and feet became deformed. This happened mostly at night and as a result, local people often saw Xinyuan hurrying down the mountain with just one flashlight to reach the hospital. When Jieming grew older, Xinyuan took her to Beijing for therapy and Jieming gradually recovered.
Although unable to find her birth parents, Jieming had a carefree life similar to other children her age. When Jieming was 100 days old, Xinyuan took her to the city’s photo studio to get a 100-day-old portrait taken. On Lunar calendar date of October 22 every year, Xinyuan would give Jieming a gift. When Jieming went to kindergarten, everyday at dismissals when other children’s parents came to pick them up, Jieming would run to Xinyuan’s waiting arms.
The mountain was not connected with the village and the mountain road was washed out when heavy rain fell. At these times, Jieming and Xinyuan would be stuck at the temple until the water subsided. When thunderstorms rang over the mountains, the power would go out in the temple, and Jieming and Xinyuan would each hold a book and read under the stars. Sometimes, Jieming would read aloud and study English while Xinyuan would chant her mantras.
A Stubborn Heart
Although Bai Yun Temple has a long history, because of its remote location there are not many pilgrims who support the temple financially. In addition to receiving 70 yuan from the civil affairs department for living expenses, half of Jieming’s tuition came from pilgrims so this small trio could not afford any luxuries and the same clothes would have to be worn for days on end.
The pilgrims who saw Jieming for the first time would curiously ask: “Why is there a child in the monastery?” Sometimes Jieming would rush to answer: “I was picked up by the side of the road!” After learning about her circumstances, Jieming’s school teachers would take care of her and sometimes call her to their house to eat. One day, after just coming out of the teacher’s home from dinner, Jieming ran into a classmate who asked her, “How could you go to the teacher’s house to eat? Children from the monastery have no right to eat at other people’s homes.” Jieming was confounded for a moment and then bowed her head in silence and walked away…
The owner of a company, who was also a pilgrim to the temple, learned about Jieming’s story and brought a special camcorder. He said that Jieming’s situation should be published onto the Internet to allow everyone to help her. However, when the company owner was chatting with Xinyuan about this endeavor, Jieming rushed in, shouting, “I can quit school, if we don’t have money than it is not a big deal for me to go and work.”
Jieming would not take people’s pity. The name behind this special girl hid a stubborn heart.
Bright New World
While she never received extra schooling or ever asked for private tutors, Jieming’s academic records were excellent. Three years ago, Jieming was admitted to the top local high school. Wishing to take care of her, Xinyuan volunteered to go with Jieming to the city to live in an old abandoned temple.
At one corner of the abandoned temple is Jieming’s personal study area. Although the college entrance examination has ended, a variety of reference books are still stacked high on the old table. In the desk drawer are neatly arranged IDs, diplomas and even junior high school cards. All this Shi Xinyuan cleans lovingly and methodically.
“Jieming should have been able to score even higher, but my apprentice was sick and had to have a surgery. I had to rush to the hospital, and Jieming was worried about my apprentice,” Shi Xinyuan said. In last year’s college entrance examination, Jieming had an excellent score of 557 points and was admitted to Anhui Agricultural University.
“I want to go to college, graduate and get a job that will provide my “Master” and her apprentice with a good life,” said 18-year-old Shi Jieming. University for her will be a bright new world.
WRIC Volunteers and Recipients in Rural Baby Girls Assistance Project (9)
