Chen Shangyi makes a living as a scavenger. One day he saw a crowd clustered around a white bundle at the local train station while he was hunting for empty soda cans and soy sauce bottles, he could not resist taking a peek. It was a baby, wrapped in a thin sheet.
"Everybody was just looking. Nobody would do anything," recalls Chen, who was 65, already retirement age, on that bitterly cold, snowy 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, the sturdy 82-year-old with deep lines on his sun-baked face still makes a living as a scavenger in Dingxi, a remote Chinese town of 460,000 people on the edge of the Gobi desert. And he is still bringing home children - 42 in all, at last count. Many were abandoned because they had been born with some form of physical disability. Over the years, Chen has developed such a reputation as a keeper of cast-away kids that even the local officials send them his way. They know Chen would not reject any youngster, no matter what imperfections the child had.
"Nobody else wants them because they are afraid of trouble," says Chen's 81-year-old wife, Wang. "They think these children are dirty. But I pity them. They are human beings."
LEARN MORE:
View excerpts of other Witness episodes airing on Link TV
More on Witness from Al Jazeera
WATCH ONLINE
See Part 1 here:
See Part 2 here:
About Al Jazeera - Witness
Rageh Omaar presents Witness, a half-hour daily documentary series which features short, specially commissioned or acquired films gathered from independent filmmakers.
Each documentary reveals the unknown lives of ordinary people, following their lives, telling their stories and portraying the challenges that confront them. Our witnesses are people in a situation or those who have observed them first hand.
The films cover conflict, belief, the past and the future and as well as bringing new stories to light they showcase the talents of a new breed of multi-skilled, frontline journalist. In the studio, Rageh will further explore the issues raised in the films, with expert guests on the subject matter and the filmmakers themselves.
Cancel Response
Post Response