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Small change, big changes

By Liu Mingtai (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-04 07:16

Sister and brother pick garbage, save penny by penny, donate to others

JILIN, Jilin province - On a chilly April morning, a teenage girl and her brother stumble under the dim light on a snow-carpeted street.

Each carries a stack of heavy newspapers to sell in the early market.

Wang Yuren and her brother Wang Yuquan surf a donation website at home. [China Daily]

Afterward, on their way to class, they stop now and then to pick up plastic bottles and waste paper at street corners and cram them into school bags, with anything recyclable taken to the depot.

It's just the beginning of another ordinary school day for 19-year-old Wang Yuren and her half brother Wang Yuquan, 16.

Indeed, the newspaper-selling and garbage-picking pair have donated more than 20,000 yuan ($2,900), to welfare organizations and people in need - money they saved penny by penny.

"They are by no means two ordinary teenagers. They are kind and diligent youths with big hearts," said Li Junqing, a one-time cameraman who has filmed 200 hours of video of the two since his retirement.

"They are not only doers of big deeds, but also great motivators," he said.

Early in 2002, Yuren and Yuquan began a "Reading Campaign" in the Jilin Orphanage by selecting 10 books each weekend and sending them to orphans.

In 2007, they bought books with 4,800 yuan from their savings and donated them to the orphanage. Later, with the help from Xinwen Student Support Center, a branch of the "Quanyuan Library" was established in the orphanage.

"It's a weekly event for patients in our hospital," said the director of the Jingxin Mental Health Hospital. "We expect the brother and sister to come every Sunday afternoon."

Yuren and Yuquan tell stories, play the erhu and dance for the patients, who beam and join the singing and dancing.

In 2006, when they read in a local newspaper that the wild bird rehabilitation center on Changbai island in Songhua River had one sole resident - a volunteer called Ren Jianguo - they joined his company to take care of wild waterfowls. To save money on transportation, the teens walked 16 kilometers each week, bringing a chessboard and newspapers and tending to injured birds with Ren.

Their activities are all the more remarkable given their background.

The two grew up in an impoverished family, and their father had two unhappy marriages. When Yunren was only 4 months old, the family was mired in despair over her father's struggle with mental disorders and her parents filed for divorce.

Two years later, the father got remarried after his condition improved and the new family had a son, Yuquan, the next year. However, the recurrence of the father's mental illness ripped the family apart once again, leaving the children living a hard life with their poor and moody father.

On a cold morning after an autumn rain in 1995, Yuren, then 5 years old, was first seen faltering down on the street with her 2-year-old half brother collecting plastic bottles and waste paper hand in hand.

Such actions, first performed out of necessity, blossomed to become a way of giving to the society around them.

Donations for people rendered homeless by tsunamis and earthquakes, leukemia patients and wounded policemen emptied their piggy banks, but the pair continued to collect money through living a prudent life.

"Unlike most teenagers today, the two kids are frugal on food and clothing. I have not seen them spend one penny on snacks," a teacher in Yuren's class said.

"Yuren has a 3-yuan (45 US cents) budget for her school lunch, and Yuquan's budget is only 1 yuan. I've tried many times to persuade them to spend more on their food, but both declined," said Ma Yunqing, Wang Yuren's stepmother.

Once asked why she enjoys her current simple life, Wang Yuren said: "For survival all we need are food and warmth. People with insatiable needs are unwise and know little about life."

In the eyes of those who know the teenagers, they are inspirational role models to learn from.

"They changed my life," Shao Mingjing said with deep gratitude. "They came into my life with bliss."

It was 2008, and five years before Shao had quit high school to toil in the field because her debt-ridden family could not afford tuition. When Yuren and Yuquan heard her story, despite the fact they had never met Shao, they wrote a letter to the middle school principal and with the help of the "Xinwen Student Support Center", Shao finally returned to school.

The brother and sister have even turned one room of their three-room apartment into a miniature "salon" where desks and chairs, chessboards and musical instruments are neatly arranged.

"Our apartment is an ideal place for both recreation and learning," Yuquan said proudly, pointing to a mid-sized room full of books. It is a small library with 7,000 volumes, the result of years of collection, and is free to students.

Zong Zheng contributed to the story.