From The Chicago Tribune (subscription required): In a small town, a poor elderly couple make room for disabled, unwanted babies at hearth, in hearts.
Chen Shangyi makes a living as a scavenger. He prides himself on having a good nose for unusual finds. So when he saw a crowd clustered around a white bundle at the local train station one day while he was hunting for empty soda cans and soy sauce bottles, he took a peek.
It was a baby, wrapped in a thin sheet.
“Everybody was just looking. Nobody would do anything,” recalled Chen, who was 65 on that bitterly cold 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, Chen still makes a living as a scavenger in this remote Chinese town of 460,000 people on the edge of the Gobi Desert. And he is still bringing home children–42 in all.
