Home to the 12th power
9 kilometers north from here, you will reach the boundary of Beijing.
He is a doctor in the village and believes in "life is a matter of life".
A newborn baby was left out for one night in this weather, and he knew what it meant.
He couldn't see anyone in the fog, so he could only pedal desperately while yelling: "Give me a favor, I want to save the child!"
In the next 14 years, 11 abandoned infants with varying degrees of defects came to their homes, many of which were sent by police stations or civil affairs agencies.
Almost every child who comes to this family has to undergo 2-3 operations.
Sometimes the family spends the night in the park next to the hospital during medical treatment.
"As long as I dare to come, I will call the police immediately. Do they know that abandoning a child is a crime?"
At the age of 22, there is no "life experience" among the things that bother this child.
What really makes him hard to let go is his own "flaw."
In this family, kinship is not necessarily linked with blood.
In their family, "adoption" is still a taboo term.
All the past events are sealed in a four-layer plastic bag, where there are hundreds of photos.
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Shen Min and Li Fengyue are in their yard.
Heavy fog
In recent years, Li Fengyue often thinks of that foggy morning.
She is 68 years old and has been busy for most of her life. When she was working on the ground, her legs and feet were no longer flexible, and she was more likely to fall into memories than ever.
The day that recurred in my memory was late autumn, when the wheat in the field had just emerged, and there was still some smell of burning corn stalks in the air.
In Gongcun Town, Gu'an County, Hebei Province, the villages at this season are always covered by fog, but the fog that day was strangely heavy, and it didn't dissipate until 1 pm.
The night was already long, and when the daughter of junior high school went out at 6 in the morning, the sky was slightly bright.
She got up and looked out the window, and saw a grayish white, the road disappeared, and the sound of the sanitation worker sweeping the floor was right in front of the house, but no one was visible.
At night, the two-year-old son had a few more troubles, and after her daughter went out, she lay down and fell asleep again.
After some time, she was awakened by a knock on the door.
After sitting up on the kang, she saw her daughter pushing her bicycle into the house, her expression nervous.
"Forgot to bring your textbook?" Li Fengyue asked.
"There is a child by the road in the village." The daughter replied with her head down, not daring to look at her mother and brother.
"It's a small mouth (cleft lip and palate)." The daughter added.
Li Fengyue was a little dazed, repeatedly confirming that what her daughter saw was a child, or a life, and not other strange objects encountered on the way to school.
From her daughter's mouth, she roughly knew that it was a newborn who was abandoned on the side of the road, because it was only found at dawn, and the baby might have been frozen outside all night.
Many years later, it was still difficult for Li Fengyue to explain her decision at that time.
She hardly hesitated, but instinctively felt that she couldn't know that there was a dying life there, but she did nothing.
Or maybe because I just became a mother again, I have empathy for the newborn.
"Hurry up and take him back." She looked at her husband Shen Min beside her, in an urgent tone, waiting for his response.
Shen Min heard his wife's determination. He is a doctor in the village and believes that "the life of a person is a matter of life."
A newborn baby was left out for one night in this weather, and he knew what it meant.
He quickly put on his clothes, the room was dimly lit, and only one sock was found.
Unable to take care of so much, he went out and stepped on the tricycle and drove in the direction his daughter pointed.
He couldn't see people in the fog. He could only pedal desperately while yelling: "Let me save the child!" The streets of the small town were quiet in the morning, with few pedestrians, and only a few breakfast shops were open. Closed the door.
In the ordinary country life, no one remembers Shen Min's yelling that morning, and even the seemingly unusual fog was ignored, not enough to squeeze into people's memory.
But every detail of that day was engraved in Shen Min's mind.
After arriving at that place, the daughter who rode the first step had picked up the child. He saw that the baby kept her eyes closed because of the high humidity, "the little quilt can wring out water."
He took the child home and found that everything below the belly button was black and purple. The couple filled the infusion bottle with warm water all morning, and the child did not open his eyes until the next day.
They named the child "Bei Bei", which is a nickname for "Baby".
This day was October 31, 1998, and later became Beibei’s birthday, although they all knew that this was probably not his true birth date.
Shen Min and his wife did not expect that they only wanted to save the child's life, but the fate of the whole family also changed from this.
In the next 14 years, 11 abandoned infants with varying degrees of defects came to their homes, many of which were sent by police stations or civil affairs agencies.
Except for three of them who died due to ineffective treatment of congenital diseases, and the other two were sent to the orphanage due to special or serious diseases, the remaining seven children were all raised by the Shen Min couple.
These "picked up" children survived to learn about the world, to influence others, but did not completely become an item that was discarded at will.
Their arrival also changed the original life of the family and created a completely different family form.
Li Fengyue used to cook wood stoves and iron pots for his family.
First child
The news that Lao Shen's family picked up a kid quickly spread in the village, and someone came to see Beibei the next day.
This is in line with the expectations of the Shen Min couple. If a good family is willing to adopt, it is also a good home for the abandoned baby.
A woman walked in, explained her intentions, and told Li Fengyue that she had always wanted a boy.
After the greeting, she took Beibei, uncovered the little quilt, and hugged her to "look left and right."
This made Li Fengyue a little displeased. Although it is natural to check the child, Beibei just recovered from the freezing, "If it really hurts the child, how can I be so careless".
Beibei's cleft lip and palate obviously made the woman hesitate. After checking for "almost an hour", she suddenly held Beibei's feet and lifted him upside down.
"Only in this way can I see where the gap is." The woman put her face to Beibei's small head, and then said to Li Fengyue with a smile.
Li Fengyue couldn't help it at all, and took the child back. She couldn't understand that the other party chose the child like a commodity.
"She cares so much about the child's shortcomings. Will she lose patience with her child one day after adoption? Will she abandon him and abuse him at that time?" In her yard, Li Fengyue talked about her worries at the time.
In the next ten years, she has seen many parents in this yard who speak different accents and come over to adopt children.
Some people in Hebei and Shandong have white hair and think that they must have a son. Others told Li Fengyue that as long as they can take the child away, "you can give them as much money as you want."
Just as she refused to take Bei Bei away for the first time, all these people were turned down by her.
She admits that some people seem to be sincere and the conditions are better than hers, but she still can't let go of it and can't convince herself to nod.
"If it is a good child, I would rest assured, but my children are sometimes annoying, not to mention that they are not biological, nor are they ordinary children."
Beibei eventually became the fourth son of Shen Min's family.
At the police station, the husband and wife wrote a letter of guarantee, promising that they would not abuse their children in the future, and Beibei had his name and household registration page, a sign of his social identity.
In the year when Yuan's accident happened in Kaifeng, Henan Province, staff from civil affairs agencies came to her yard almost every day to see if the children were abused.
Later, she and Shen Min went to inspect the orphanage, and immediately dispelled the idea of sending the child there, "there is no feeling of home."
Sometimes Li Fengyue would be confused as to whether many of her decisions would kill another possibility in life for the children.
But after returning to real life, she quickly let go.
In addition to cleft lip and palate, Beibei also suffers from Hirschsprung's disease, and his intelligence is not as good as that of ordinary people. "It is the least worrying one."
At the beginning, he could only eat liquid food. In addition to cooking for him alone, Shen Min and his wife had to wash his intestines the next day.
Later, after 6 operations, Beibei was able to live normally.
Almost every child who comes to this family has to undergo 2-3 operations.
So that from the year Beibei arrived home, until the last child Dongdong came in 2012, the Shen Min and his wife had to take their children to Beijing, Tianjin and other cities for surgery every year.
Villagers who come to Shenmin Clinic for medical treatment often see the clinic closed for several days.
They all understood that Lao Shen went to see the child again.
At the most stressful time, three children had cleft lip and palate surgery at the same time, and once two children had operations in different hospitals on the same day.
The couple can't take care of them, so they always bring their daughter to help.
Although many operations are charity projects, raising a dozen children still requires a lot of money. During the medical treatment, sometimes the family spends the night in the park next to the hospital.
In 2002, 4 children came to Shen Min's house.
Tao Zi was one of them. He suffered from absent abdominal muscle syndrome. He was picked up from the police station at 10 am, and the couple took him to Beijing Children's Hospital at 11 am.
After seeing the doctor, the other party stopped abruptly when they started examining the child, wondering what the relationship between the two and the child was.
The doctor confirmed that he had just seen the child the day before, and that the "child's father" was another person.
The doctor gave the young father a surgical drape and told him that he would be able to operate soon as long as he paid a deposit of 10,000 yuan, but the father never saw him again after he left the clinic.
Tao Zi's operation was very successful.
The baby who was abandoned four times by the police at the police station has now grown into a 19-year-old healthy boy who has worked as a waiter foreman in a hotel.
Dongdong was the last child to come to the family. At that time, Li Fengyue’s eldest son had already married a daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law was going to give birth while pregnant. She originally expected her mother-in-law to help her with the child, but he stayed in her natal house for two weeks before returning. , Found that there was an extra baby in the house.
At the age of 60, Li Fengyue took Dongdong to Dalian to see a doctor.
When she returned, she carried Dongdong on her back and was stopped by the staff at the security checkpoint of the train station.
The other party took her ID card and questioned her identity as the "child mother".
A rural woman who took a baby alone in the field and claimed to be the mother of the child, all of which fit the characteristics of a "human trafficker".
She was detained in the station security room. After the truth was found out, the train had already left.
After going through all kinds of hardships, Li Fengyue believed that it was the right decision to keep Beibei and his later siblings by her side.
She was reluctant to let the children leave, and she did not want to take risks, "the heart is unpredictable."
After every child entered the house, Li Fengyue would throw away all their original quilts and milk jugs. She felt that these objects were dirty.
Over the years, life has not been easy, but it is finally calm.
Sometimes this calm can make Li Fengyue nervous. She also thought that the children's biological parents might come to confess their relatives.
"As long as I dare to come, I will call the police immediately. Do they know that abandoning a child is a crime?" When talking about this topic, Li Fengyue's tone suddenly rose and the corners of her mouth trembled. "I also want to ask them, what kind of people can be so cruel and capable Doing this kind of thing has always been a mystery in my heart."
"Should they not come?" After calming down, she added.
Li Fengyue and the children worked in the field.
courtyard
When Beibei arrived home, Shen Min had just built a new house, which was a common courtyard house in rural Hebei.
Because of the adoption of the child, the original renovation plan was put on hold indefinitely.
In 2007, the leaders of the city came to the home to give condolences, solved the decoration of the main room, and laid a concrete floor for the yard.
In this family, children can have enough playmates without going out, and the small courtyard has become their paradise.
Now that the children have grown up, studying and working outside, the yard looks a little deserted.
Shen Min had lumbar spine surgery two years ago, and the wheelchair he was in was parked on the ground at will, covered with mud.
The yard is not large, and it is easy to find traces of a family living together.
Next to the killing well, the baby stroller sent by the neighbor has no wheels. It has been idle for many years and has become a rare color in the yard.
The clothes donated outside are full of half a corridor, short sleeves, trousers and down jackets are tangled together. For a long time, this is a "fashion warehouse" that children can't finish wearing.
A big iron pot is still standing on the stove of Westinghouse. In the past many years, Li Fengyue has used it to cook and fill the stomachs of children.
Feeding more than a dozen people can't care about exquisiteness, and meals are usually large pots of porridge, pancakes, or steamed buns.
At the fairs, Li Fengyue used to go out later and go to the vegetable market to pick up the "goods", which is the most affordable source of vitamins for children.
There are three rooms in the Westinghouse. The one on the north side is built with a 2-meter-wide kang, which occupies most of the space and squeezes 10 people at most.
Before the main house was renovated, this 15-square-meter house has been the main living space for the Shen Min couple and their children.
The couple can't calculate how many sleepless nights they have experienced in this room.
In addition to the daily milk powder and diaper changes, they also need to care for the child after the operation. The two are on duty at midnight, but they still often "fall asleep halfway through feeding."
Not far behind the yard, is the 9 acres of land owned by Shen Min's family.
In addition to a group of children during the day, Li Fengyue also takes care of the wheat, or corn, and peanuts in the field.
The annual output of 25,000 yuan in the field cannot support the cost of raising 9 minor children.
The local government has resolved the subsistence allowance for 8 adopted children, ranging from 200-500 yuan per person per month, and will stop issuing them when they become adults.
A charity organization provided the family with a subsidy of 5,000 yuan per year for 10 consecutive years. When Tao Zi had an operation, a TV station raised 60,000 yuan for them. After the operation, Shen Min approached the Beijing Charity Association and took the rest. 50,000 yuan was handed over to them.
Twenty years ago, the media focused on this particular family. At that time, Shen Min was the one who stood at the forefront.
He was 55 years old and ran one of the only two clinics in the village. He was decent regardless of income or status.
At that time, he always combed his heads carefully and wore a fairly flat suit.
After the children arrived home one after another, he didn't have much energy to do business, and the clinic gradually declined.
Nowadays, there are more standardized clinics in the town, and the young doctors are energetic and quick to move.
Shen Min's clinic is still shrunk in the corner of the street, and the posters on the indoor walls have curled and turned yellow, and it has long lost its glory 20 years ago.
At the end of the day, only three or five people came to get the medicine, and their income was less than 20 yuan.
He usually sleeps on a wooden bed in a consulting room. The room is full of debris, always smelling of leftovers.
For several days, he wore the same outdated T-shirt, perhaps because of his thinness and his clothes looked a little loose.
A bunch of keys hung around his neck, his hair was gray, and his teeth had almost fallen out.
A few months ago, he suffered a cerebral infarction, and now he can only pace slightly sideways.
This 75-year-old man who has almost lost the ability to work has to continue to perform the duties of a father.
"As long as they are willing to make progress, I will create conditions for them and strive to make them talented. But like Beibei, his brain is not clever, and we have no choice but to give him his life and let him live well." He stood in the yard. In the center, the voice is ambiguous.
Family
Beibei entered the sixth grade of elementary school, and had to drop out of school because of mental retardation and unable to keep up with class.
This year he is 23 years old and is close to 1.7 meters tall.
Most of the time, he was silent, speaking slowly.
He has always stayed at home, except for his parents, the one that accompanies him most is a small bicycle.
It was something he insisted on buying with Li Fengyue two years ago. Although it wasn't very coordinated to ride on it, it didn't prevent it from becoming his own treasure.
As long as he is free, he will polish the car brightly.
On weekdays, he likes to ride it around the town, buy some snacks in the small shop, and sometimes bring back a copy for his parents, or find the "Little Treasure" who always likes to run around-a parent in 2007 Adopted younger brother with epilepsy.
Many people are curious about how "stupid" he is, but in the eyes of Shen Min and his wife, Beibei is very sensible.
Sometimes the parents quarreled, before the smell of gunpowder came up, Beibei walked over and stood in between the two, bowing her head without speaking.
When discussing the life experience of her child with outsiders, if Beibei is present, Li Fengyue will always take him away.
"He has something in his heart." Li Fengyue couldn't be sure whether Beibei could understand, but she didn't want the past to hurt him.
In Shin Min's house, the children's life experience is not only a taboo topic, but sometimes it can also be a "mystery."
Dashan is the third son of the Shen family, two years older than Beibei, and is now studying in Beijing for graduate school.
Before entering junior high school, he didn't know his true origin.
Li Fengyue was worried that if he knew that he was his own son, he would bully his younger siblings and told him that he was adopted as well.
When Dashan was born, Li Fengyue was 43 years old and Shen Min was 50 years old.
This little son, who should have been loved by his parents, has been squeezing the big kang of Westinghouse with his younger siblings, eating big pot of rice and playing in the mud together.
Because of his healthy body, he can't even share his parents' attention equally.
When I was young, Dashan was also a frequent visitor to the hospital.
He doesn't have any disease, but his parents and elder sister cannot leave him alone at home when he is operated on with his younger siblings.
In this family, kinship is not necessarily linked with blood.
Gazi ranked fifth and was "picked up" home in 1999.
He said he never felt that he was treated differently, nor did he feel anything special about his relationship with his parents.
At the age of 22, among the things that bothered him, there was no such thing as "life experience".
What really makes him hard to let go is his own "flaw."
He and Beibei, as well as the white fat and Kexin who came into the house later, are all suffering from congenital cleft lip and palate. This is probably the reason they were abandoned in the first place.
Later, several brothers and sisters underwent surgery, which also left traces.
When he was in school, Gazi couldn't bear the look in his eyes, and always felt that someone was laughing at him.
He keeps changing schools, hoping to hide in an unfamiliar environment.
Now, he has become the person in his family who cares about his image most.
One day in September, even at home, he has to wear elegant clothes. The white T-shirt and gray cotton sweatpants are ironed. The white sneakers on his feet are polished like brand new, and the shoelaces should be tied as symmetrically as possible.
Li Fengyue laughed at him "Smelly Beauty" and turned around. She felt sorry for her son again, regretting that she could not find a better doctor for them and perform a more perfect operation.
Within the family, avoiding all topics related to "life experience" has become a tacit understanding.
The children are convinced that "discussing those makes no sense."
But as long as they get out of the house, they have to face their own "different".
After graduating from technical secondary school, Gazi went to Beijing to find a job delivering express delivery.
He recently had a girlfriend, who is a kind of "normal family".
In order to earn more money, he became the employee who worked the longest every day in the distribution station.
But this still can't reduce his anxiety. He can't imagine the day when his girlfriend actually meets his family, "most people shouldn't be able to accept it."
Ke Xin was the third child to enter the house in 2002, and the only girl among the children adopted by the Shen Min couple.
In the upper grades of elementary school, she began to realize her special identity.
Several times when school was over, Shen Min picked her up at the school gate. At that time, Shen Min was in her 60s, and her unknowing classmates would always tell her, "Your grandfather is here to pick you up."
She didn't correct this simple mistake, but pressed it to the bottom of her heart and didn't want to mention it to anyone.
Sometimes, friends just ask about her family in the usual way, and they will hurt her unintentionally.
She hates the word "abandoned baby", and hates this identity even more, and all the eyes cast on her, including sympathy.
Many times, she is trapped in her own identity.
The better the parents treat her, the more guilty she feels.
"If it were not for us, this family would be better than it is now." Her voice was low, showing a sad expression that shouldn't belong to her age.
In fact, it is difficult for her to say the meaning of "home", but when she is wronged outside, she will call her mother and cry hard.
Last summer, Tao Zi, who had recently worked, paid her the technical secondary school tuition.
During the New Year, more than a dozen brothers and sisters and their parents gathered together to make dumplings, which was the most at ease for her.
Now, the children are older, living in various rooms in the clinic and the yard, and rarely at home on weekdays.
The big pot of rice also stopped. Even if there are children coming back during the holiday, everyone will solve the problem of eating separately.
They are like kites, no matter how far they fly, they are pulled by the string, and the origin is in this yard.
No matter how busy he is, Gazi will take the time to go home and live for two days. He can't worry about his parents getting older.
Last year, the walls of the main room were old, Bai Pang bought back the paint, and he repainted the three rooms by himself.
Seeing that he is about to graduate from college, when it comes to the future, he is sure that he will not go too far from home, which will make him feel flustered.
Photo
In the last 10 days of August, Li Fengyue's family spent almost all of them in the peanut field.
She is no longer suitable for heavy work, but this year there is a lot of rain, and the 4 mu of peanuts in the family have matured and are about to sprout.
She is reluctant to hire people. This land is an important source of income for the 12 people in the family. She wants to squeeze the maximum value of each peanut.
Kexin and Bai Pang are at home during the summer vacation. Together with their second wife, there is no shortage of labor at home.
In the past few days, she went out to the ground at 5 o'clock every morning. When the sun made her neck slightly hot, the children brought breakfast and dragged an outdoor parasol to her.
The umbrella was placed diagonally on the ground, and the whole family gathered together, surrounded by peanut seedlings that had been pulled out.
Most of the time, they immersed themselves in picking peanuts, silent, and from time to time they made a few homely.
In the open field, they hid under the umbrella and moved their positions constantly following the light, the shadows became shorter and longer.
In Gongcun towns, such scenes where young and old are busy farming together are rare.
9 kilometers north from here, you will reach the boundary of Beijing.
Not far from Gu'an County, the neat streets of the new city divided the newly built real estate into blocks. A certain Internet celebrity real estate advertised "Half an hour of living in two cities, one stop for the new airport".
Xigong Village is located on the edge of the "urban circle". In early autumn, in the responsibility fields behind the village, the crops are growing vigorously, and the air is filled with the sweetness of half-cooked corn.
But more often, farming is no longer the way of survival for the villagers in Xigong Village.
Under the radiation of one of the largest cities in the world, they lived a semi-civilian life early on.
Except for Li Fengyue's family.
She and Shen Min are getting older and can't do anything else.
After the sun went down, the family left Peanut Field and returned to their own rooms.
The next day, they need to face new or old daily routines—Little Treasure needs someone to keep an eye on, and Dongdong is still in elementary school.
This year's peanuts sold for more than 7,000 yuan, which solved the tuition fee for the new school year.
Kexin is studying music in Shijiazhuang. The erhu used for performance costs more than 6,000 yuan, which has not yet been settled.
In their family, "adoption" is still a taboo term.
All the past events are sealed in a four-layer plastic bag. There are hundreds of photos that record the family's memories of more than 20 years.
In one photo, Shen Min is sitting next to the Kang in Westinghouse, Bai Pang is riding on his neck, Da Shan and Tao Zi each share one of their father's shoulders.
Ke Xin and Bai Pang couldn't get a good position, so they could only be carried by their father's arm.
Everyone in the photo smiled with their mouths open, without a trace of sadness.
China Youth Daily · China Youth Daily reporter Yang Haiwen and photo Source: China Youth Daily