Foxconn suicide survivor says no job is worth ending your life over
Early this month, The South China Morning Post visited Tian Yu, three years after her attempted suicide. Paralysed from the waist down and restricted to a wheelchair, the 20-year-old desperately tries to avoid looking back at a painful past that will haunt her for the rest of her life.
Tian Yu’s little tree of fortune – a gift from friends in Shenzhen wishing her a speedy recovery after she leapt from the fourth floor of a Foxconn factory building three years ago – is withering.
Paralysed from the waist down and restricted to a wheelchair, the 20-year-old desperately tries to avoid looking back at a painful past that will haunt her for the rest of her life.
Early this month, The South China Morning Post visited Tian Yu, three years after her attempted suicide. She now lives with her mother and 15-year-old brother, who is a deaf-mute, in the village of Nantianzhuang, just over 80 kilometres from Xiangfan city in Hubei province, by the border with Henan.
In Nantianzhuang, blossoming canola flowers coat the fields where wheat is beginning to sprout. Tiny paths through the fields lead to her home where chickens roam freely and a chained-up dog rests in the yard outside her parent’s two-bedroom brick house.
Tian Yu wipes her face with a worn-out cloth just after waking up, and greets her visitors with a cheerful smile. She wears a pony tail and a pink-quilted coat with black pants. After wheeling herself to the yard, she tells her brother to make tea, using a sign language they have made up between them.
“I realise I can never be normal again. To see other healthy people out there and thinking: ‘That used to me,’ but now I’m living without the use of my left arm and legs makes me sad,” Tian said.