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WHEN 69-year-old Anipa Alimahong was selected as one of the Ten People of 2009 Who Moved China earlier this year, her family decided to throw her a grand feast. But it is the understanding of her 19 children, particularly the 10 without blood ties to her, that there is nothing they could ever do to fully repay the love their mother and father have lavished on them for the past 40 years.
An Ethnically Diverse Family
Anipa was the eldest daughter of a Uygur couple from Qinghe County, Altay, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. After her parents’ untimely death, she became her family’s primary caregiver. A few years later she went on to marry a Uygur police officer named Abibao, and started her own family.
In 1970 their Uygur neighbor and his Kazak wife died of disease, leaving behind three boys. “If the three orphans had nobody to take care of them, they might end up in the street. What kind of a future could they expect to have then?” This thought gnawed at Anipa’s heart. “As long as we have food on our table, we can spare some for them,” she told her husband, who agreed. So their family had three new members.
In the dead of the winter four years later,Anipa’s sister brought home a young girl she had found on the streets. The poor little thing was dressed in faded rags and her head wrapped in a filthy scarf; her stench sent the other kids in the house running away.
Anipa immediately dashed off to heat water for the child’sbath. When she removed the scarf she was astonished by the sores on the girl’s head and the flees nesting in her hair. Without indicating the slightest displeasure, the mother of 12 carefully cleaned the girl up. She learned the girl was a Hui Muslim named Wang Shuzhen. Anipa gently applied medicine to the child’s infected wounds. Later the husband Abibao took the girl to be checked out at the local hospital. A few weeks later, when a smile was finally back on Wang Shuzhen’s face, light in her eyes, androses on her cheeks, Anipa decided it was time to return the girl to her parents.
But when she stepped into the dimly lit adobe shanty that Wang called home, she found herself surrounded by seven starving children and their lone, debilitated father. Wang Shuzhen’s mother was a Hui widow with four kids who had remarried to a man named Jin Xuejun. The Han husband had four children of his own. She died not long in to their marriage, leaving the father, who was himself chronically ill, with eight kids. Unable to bring in a stable income, the children spent much of their lives never knowing where their next meal might come from.
Anipa stared at the tiny frail bony bodies quivering in frayed blankets on the mud floor, a mother’s conscience told her what to do. When she returned home, she took Wang Shuzhen and her three siblings with her. Her family had already outgrown this house and her husband’s meager earnings were their only source of income, yet no one dared utter a complaint about taking in the newcomers.
When the local government learnt of Anipa’s philanthropic deeds, it decided to grant a monthly allowance of RMB 15 to each of the orphans. The sum alleviated some of the financial burdens that Anipa faced but not all, for she had also offered to foot the medical bills of the father Jin Xuejun, which piled up over the years. On his deathbed in 1989 Mr. Jin expressed his desire to be buried in the traditional Islamic way as a token of gratitude to Anipa. After his passing, the lady took his three boys into her nest, and expanded her family to 21.
Every Child Is My Darling Baby
Abibao’s monthly salary of RMB 45 was far from enough to cover the costs of feeding, clothing and schooling for 19 kids. In her struggle to earn enough to keep the family going Anipa threw herself into anything that could possibly bring in a bit of extra cash. She scavenged garbage dumps looking for waste items she could sell; she scoured the fields for edible plants to eat, and took on an assortment of odd jobs. In one such job she cleansed sheep heads for local slaughterhouses, her hands soaked for hours in the icy river that originates in nearby snow covered mountains. This eventually led to her developing rheumatism.
For many years Anipa would leave for work before six am and not return home until midnight. Despite all the financial and physical challenges she insisted that all her children should have as much education as their intelligence allowed. Wang Shuzhen had never attended school until being adopted by Anipa, when she was already 14, so she felt timid about joining students half her age. Anipa comforted her: “Baby, you are supposed to build the country someday, how could you do that without learning?”
Wang Shuzhen later recalled: “Our family was poor, but happy. The kids played in groups or collected firewood together. There was always more laughter in our home than in any of our neighbors’.”
In 1994, the family underwent their gravest deprivation at a moment of family joy. Just before the scheduled date of Anipa’s Han daughter Jin Xuelian’s wedding, her blood son Aben was tragically killed when a wall collapsed while he helped another villager build a sheepfold. The loss devastated the mother, but she managed to pull herself together to give her daughter a merry wedding as planned. In front of a big crowd of guests, Anipa planted numerous kisses on the cheeks of the tearful bride, and handed her a gold ring, the only jewelry the mother owned.
“In my eyes every child in the house is my darling baby. And all I wish for them is that they have nice families of their own and successful careers.” All mothers, regardless of their religious and ethnic backgrounds, think alike.
We Are Family
The nine biological children of Anipa had their grievances. Their step siblings seemed to have greater privileges than they did in the house: at their parents’ interference these “strangers” could always win a jostle over a new pair of shoes or yummy snacks – all considered luxuries in conditions of sheer destitution.
Rehei, the youngest daughter, one day raised a question with her father that had long bothered her: “Why do you take in so many orphans when life has been so difficult for us?” The man sat down and told the girl his story. Abibao was an orphan himself, and remained on the verge of starvation and freezing until he joined the communist army. On retirement in the 1950s he got a job in Qinghe County, where he met Anipa, who had lost both her parents not long ago. Similar experience drew the twotogether. “Your mother and I received generous help from many strangers during those years, who never thought of our ethnicity when giving us a hand. Hans, Uygurs or Hui Moslems, we are all family. Though we cannot provide an affluent life for your step brothers and sisters, at least we could give them a home, where they have some people to call mom and dad and don’t feel lonely anymore.”
The little girl never again complained after that talk, and later began to learn to give and be grateful.
Bounty Travels
Today all of Anipa and Abibao’s 19 children have grown up, and entered various vocations. The deeds and words of their parents have had a lifelong impact on them. Several intermarried, extending the ethnic diversity of the family to six layers. And many have themselves adopted or offered regular assistance to dispossessed children.
After Aben died in the accident in 1994, his Hui brother Wang Zuolin took over the custody of his little daughter. Now the girl is close to college graduation. In 2007 Kaliman, Anipa’s eldest daughter, learnt from her daughter that a Kazak student in the class considered dropping out of school after her father died and her jobless mother was devastated by grief. Kaliman immediately reached out to her, promising financial aid to help her go on to finish higher education.
After the massive earthquake in Sichuan in 2008 Anipa went to the local civil affairs authority, offering to adopt quake orphans. Following her example, a dozen other families filed applications.
As Anipa, Abibao and their children have demonstrated, love has the might to surmount any barrier of faith, language and region, and touches off the fountain of humanity in every heart around the world.
An Ethnically Diverse Family
Anipa was the eldest daughter of a Uygur couple from Qinghe County, Altay, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. After her parents’ untimely death, she became her family’s primary caregiver. A few years later she went on to marry a Uygur police officer named Abibao, and started her own family.
In 1970 their Uygur neighbor and his Kazak wife died of disease, leaving behind three boys. “If the three orphans had nobody to take care of them, they might end up in the street. What kind of a future could they expect to have then?” This thought gnawed at Anipa’s heart. “As long as we have food on our table, we can spare some for them,” she told her husband, who agreed. So their family had three new members.
In the dead of the winter four years later,Anipa’s sister brought home a young girl she had found on the streets. The poor little thing was dressed in faded rags and her head wrapped in a filthy scarf; her stench sent the other kids in the house running away.
Anipa immediately dashed off to heat water for the child’sbath. When she removed the scarf she was astonished by the sores on the girl’s head and the flees nesting in her hair. Without indicating the slightest displeasure, the mother of 12 carefully cleaned the girl up. She learned the girl was a Hui Muslim named Wang Shuzhen. Anipa gently applied medicine to the child’s infected wounds. Later the husband Abibao took the girl to be checked out at the local hospital. A few weeks later, when a smile was finally back on Wang Shuzhen’s face, light in her eyes, androses on her cheeks, Anipa decided it was time to return the girl to her parents.
But when she stepped into the dimly lit adobe shanty that Wang called home, she found herself surrounded by seven starving children and their lone, debilitated father. Wang Shuzhen’s mother was a Hui widow with four kids who had remarried to a man named Jin Xuejun. The Han husband had four children of his own. She died not long in to their marriage, leaving the father, who was himself chronically ill, with eight kids. Unable to bring in a stable income, the children spent much of their lives never knowing where their next meal might come from.
Anipa stared at the tiny frail bony bodies quivering in frayed blankets on the mud floor, a mother’s conscience told her what to do. When she returned home, she took Wang Shuzhen and her three siblings with her. Her family had already outgrown this house and her husband’s meager earnings were their only source of income, yet no one dared utter a complaint about taking in the newcomers.
When the local government learnt of Anipa’s philanthropic deeds, it decided to grant a monthly allowance of RMB 15 to each of the orphans. The sum alleviated some of the financial burdens that Anipa faced but not all, for she had also offered to foot the medical bills of the father Jin Xuejun, which piled up over the years. On his deathbed in 1989 Mr. Jin expressed his desire to be buried in the traditional Islamic way as a token of gratitude to Anipa. After his passing, the lady took his three boys into her nest, and expanded her family to 21.
Every Child Is My Darling Baby
Abibao’s monthly salary of RMB 45 was far from enough to cover the costs of feeding, clothing and schooling for 19 kids. In her struggle to earn enough to keep the family going Anipa threw herself into anything that could possibly bring in a bit of extra cash. She scavenged garbage dumps looking for waste items she could sell; she scoured the fields for edible plants to eat, and took on an assortment of odd jobs. In one such job she cleansed sheep heads for local slaughterhouses, her hands soaked for hours in the icy river that originates in nearby snow covered mountains. This eventually led to her developing rheumatism.
For many years Anipa would leave for work before six am and not return home until midnight. Despite all the financial and physical challenges she insisted that all her children should have as much education as their intelligence allowed. Wang Shuzhen had never attended school until being adopted by Anipa, when she was already 14, so she felt timid about joining students half her age. Anipa comforted her: “Baby, you are supposed to build the country someday, how could you do that without learning?”
Wang Shuzhen later recalled: “Our family was poor, but happy. The kids played in groups or collected firewood together. There was always more laughter in our home than in any of our neighbors’.”
In 1994, the family underwent their gravest deprivation at a moment of family joy. Just before the scheduled date of Anipa’s Han daughter Jin Xuelian’s wedding, her blood son Aben was tragically killed when a wall collapsed while he helped another villager build a sheepfold. The loss devastated the mother, but she managed to pull herself together to give her daughter a merry wedding as planned. In front of a big crowd of guests, Anipa planted numerous kisses on the cheeks of the tearful bride, and handed her a gold ring, the only jewelry the mother owned.
“In my eyes every child in the house is my darling baby. And all I wish for them is that they have nice families of their own and successful careers.” All mothers, regardless of their religious and ethnic backgrounds, think alike.
We Are Family
The nine biological children of Anipa had their grievances. Their step siblings seemed to have greater privileges than they did in the house: at their parents’ interference these “strangers” could always win a jostle over a new pair of shoes or yummy snacks – all considered luxuries in conditions of sheer destitution.
Rehei, the youngest daughter, one day raised a question with her father that had long bothered her: “Why do you take in so many orphans when life has been so difficult for us?” The man sat down and told the girl his story. Abibao was an orphan himself, and remained on the verge of starvation and freezing until he joined the communist army. On retirement in the 1950s he got a job in Qinghe County, where he met Anipa, who had lost both her parents not long ago. Similar experience drew the twotogether. “Your mother and I received generous help from many strangers during those years, who never thought of our ethnicity when giving us a hand. Hans, Uygurs or Hui Moslems, we are all family. Though we cannot provide an affluent life for your step brothers and sisters, at least we could give them a home, where they have some people to call mom and dad and don’t feel lonely anymore.”
The little girl never again complained after that talk, and later began to learn to give and be grateful.
Bounty Travels
Today all of Anipa and Abibao’s 19 children have grown up, and entered various vocations. The deeds and words of their parents have had a lifelong impact on them. Several intermarried, extending the ethnic diversity of the family to six layers. And many have themselves adopted or offered regular assistance to dispossessed children.
After Aben died in the accident in 1994, his Hui brother Wang Zuolin took over the custody of his little daughter. Now the girl is close to college graduation. In 2007 Kaliman, Anipa’s eldest daughter, learnt from her daughter that a Kazak student in the class considered dropping out of school after her father died and her jobless mother was devastated by grief. Kaliman immediately reached out to her, promising financial aid to help her go on to finish higher education.
After the massive earthquake in Sichuan in 2008 Anipa went to the local civil affairs authority, offering to adopt quake orphans. Following her example, a dozen other families filed applications.
As Anipa, Abibao and their children have demonstrated, love has the might to surmount any barrier of faith, language and region, and touches off the fountain of humanity in every heart around the world.