CHINA> Survivors
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CHINA> Survivors
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Catching up with her 'baby'
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-12 13:38 Mu Yaoyao refused her mother's embrace the first few days she saw her. Instead, the toddler remembers the first taste of milk she got from Jiang Xiaojuan, when the police officer found her crying in hunger on the streets and breastfed her.
"It was only several days later that she became familiar with our mother." Yaoyao, who was born in January last year, became a celebrity shortly after the May 12 quake struck her home in the remote Chenjiaba township in Beichuan county, one of the worst hit regions in the disaster. Her mother, Fan Xiaoyan, now 33, was on her way to a fair in Chenjiaba with her baby girl when part of a balcony fell during the tremor and hurt her pelvis. Before she was sent to a hospital to treat her injury, Fan asked a relative to take care of her baby girl. Yaoyao was later sent to a resettlement site for quake victims in nearby Jiangyou, where she was found by Jiang. Reporters went into a frenzy when they spotted the police officer, herself the mother of a six-month-old boy, breastfeeding Yaoyao. The two then found themselves famous overnight when the media carried their pictures and captured the imagination of Chinese nationwide. After receiving treatment for five months in Jiangyou and Chengdu in Sichuan, as well as Nanjing in Jiangsu province, Fan returned to her temporary home in a prefabricated house in Chenjiaba and reunited with her daughter. Fan and her husband Mu Zixue, 35, have two children, including Yaoyao, because they are ethnic Qiang. After his wife recovered from her injury, Mu, a carpenter, last month went to work at a construction site in Xi'an, the provincial capital of Sichuan's neighboring Shaanxi province. "He earns more than 2,000 yuan a month and can support our family," Fan told China Daily, speaking from the new home on a mountain slope her family moved into late last month. Covering about 30 sq m, the home consists of a shed and tent holding just three beds, a gas stove and one dinner table. "Yaoyao likes playing outside our home soon after she wakes up at 7 am. I usually carry her to our neighbors and watch TV in their homes," Fan says. Her daughter can now utter a few simple words and play with other children in the neighborhood. "She is very happy whenever her brother returns home from school. She sees him doing his homework and often wants a pencil to write on a piece of paper, trying to imitate him," Fan says. A fourth grader in the Chenjiaba Central Primary School, Fan Chao has only been to Mianyang, which has Beichuan under its administration. The family's previous home occupied 0.4 hectares prior to the quake. "All the five rooms of our old home collapsed and most of the land was ruined in the quake," Fan says. They now have access to tap water provided free by the government, but still need to pay for electricity. The family buys vegetables, meat and rice from vendors near their home. They eat pork every other day. Most of Fan's 600 fellow villagers in Tongbao village, including her three uncles, have also moved to the site near her new home. The mother can often be seen smiling when she speaks with villagers these days. "I am optimistic even after the quake because my family is quite fortunate," she says. "Except for myself, nobody else was injured." |
