Crippling injustice

Saturday, February 22, 2014 SPORK! 0 Comments

Willy hated dirty things. Dusty cans of Coke in small shops, stained tables at noodle diners: they reminded him of the small-town poverty of Anhui, his home province, where he’d started work at 13 and earned his way to university before moving to Beijing. Willy would refuse to eat in a restaurant if he found a mark on a glass.

At 23, he was trying hard to shake off country habits, like his accent. But some stuck like burrs until others dislodged them. ‘Mia!’ he said. ‘You know, when I first saw her, I thought she was a monster. I was scared of her. I didn’t want to go near her because I thought she would curse me.’ His face flushed with embarrassment, then broke into a smile: ‘But now I think she is the most beautiful of all the girls.’

Willy and I had worked together at a summer programme in Beijing in 2004, teaching the winners of a Henanese English competition, including Mia. They were sweet but conventional provincial teenagers, excited to be in the capital. But Mia, though already 20, still lived in the Luoyang Children’s Home, where she had been raised since being abandoned shortly after birth by her parents. Born with scoliosis, she stood around 4ft 6in, her back crooked and walking with the aid of crutches. It was common practice to call nameless girls Dang (‘party’) and boys Guo (‘state’), and so her name was Dang Miaomiao, ‘little darling of the party’.

Read the full article at AEON