China's orphan saviour devastated by deadly fire (video)
Poor stallholder Yuan Lihai launched a personal war against the mainland’s lack of child care, but it ended in tragedy
The distraught woman lies in a hospital bed, her eyes dry and closed. Slouched on one side, her large frame barely moves except for an occasional twitch as she lets out a half-cry, half-moan with the words, “Wuhai!”
She has no idea of the whereabouts of Wuhai, or her “Child No 5”. What she knows is that the 20-year-old young man, who was mentally disabled and had a deformed hand and a severe limp from poliomyelitis, was dead. He was killed, along with six other children aged from seven months to five years, in a fire that gutted her house. He was last seen that morning feeding breakfast noodles to a younger boy who didn’t make it out of the fire.
The fire broke out at about 8.30am on January 4, an hour and a half after Yuan Lihai left home on her daily routine of taking four children to school on her rusty tricycle. According to local officials, one of the dead children was found with a cigarette lighter in his hand. Thus, they had determined the cause of the fire.
I dreamed that the children came to visit me last night. They just sat in the room and wouldn’t call me mum, no matter how many times I called out to them.
Local police removed the children’s remains immediately after the fire was put out. They wouldn’t tell Yuan if the children were lying in a steel casket in the same hospital’s morgue, or if they had been cremated and buried somewhere in Lankao county, Henan province.
After remaining almost catatonic for a week, Yuan started talking to some of the journalists parked outside her hospital ward.
“I dreamed that the children came to visit me last night. They just sat in the room and wouldn’t call me mum, no matter how many times I called out to them,” she told reporters a week after the fire.
Loving mother or negligent?