Tang Caiying has been nominated for the country’s top morality award after she adopted 38 abandoned babies. - Weibo
BEIJING: A hospital cleaner in China who adopted 38 abandoned infants over a decade has been nominated as a National Moral Model.
Tang Caiying, 88, is a retired cleaner from a hospital in Xinyu, in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province, the mainland media outlet The Paper reported.
Between the 1980s and 1990s, she adopted more than 30 children.
One winter day in 1982, a 46-year-old Tang found a baby girl wrapped in a cotton coat, abandoned beside railway tracks on her way to work.
Unable to leave the baby in the freezing wind, she brought the crying infant home, fed and cleaned her up.
She named the girl Fangfang, which means “fragrance” like blooming flowers.
At the time, Tang was already the mother of five children, the youngest of which was 12 years old.
Her second daughter, Aiping, who had just graduated from secondary school and was unemployed, stayed at home to help care for Fangfang.
A few years later, Tang discovered another abandoned baby girl at her hospital and named her Zhenzhen, which means “precious gift”.
From then on, she continued rescuing abandoned infants, eventually taking in 36 more.
Most of those she took in were newborns, some tossed into trash bins after struggling to breathe at birth, and others left outside the hospital in freezing winters, their fragile bodies barely holding on to life.
Tang arranged for the rescued babies to stay in an unused room at the hospital where she worked. She made time every day to feed them and regularly monitored their health.
At first, her husband could not understand, arguing their modest income was barely enough for their own kids, let alone more.
But Tang persisted in her determination to save every life she came across.
After retiring, she lived on a small pension and scavenged to buy milk and food for the children.
With an age gap of more than 50 years, the adopted children called Tang “Grandma”.
Some of the youngest kids were cared for at home by Tang’s husband and her own children.
Over time, her husband grew to love the adopted children, who knew their “Grandpa” was strict but always kind-hearted.
As Tang aged and her energy waned, she began carefully selecting adoptive families for the children.
The last children Tang adopted were twin boys. She named the older child Zhang Jiagang, while the younger was adopted later by a teacher couple.
Now 27, Zhang works as a firefighter.
In January, he returned home to celebrate Tang’s 88th birthday. Like Tang’s other adopted children, he visits regularly and sends part of his salary to her.
“If it were not for Grandma Tang, I don’t know what my life would have been like,” said Zhang.
On Dec 16, 88-year-old Tang was nominated as a candidate for the National Moral Model, the highest honour for moral excellence awarded to ordinary people in China.
The announcement date for the final list has not been disclosed.
Her daughter, Aiping, told The Paper: “For my mother, doing a good deed is not about a sense of morality. It is just what she feels she should do. It is an instinctive kindness.”
Tang’s story has moved many on mainland social media.
One online observer said: “This is so touching. The selfless ‘China’s Grandma’ has taught us what true love really means.” - South China Morning Post/ANN
