This morning (March 2nd) at 9:14 am, I called Li Handang and had a conversation with him in our hometown dialect.
Last night, the news of "A poor household daughter in Henan committed suicide by swallowing drugs because she couldn't attend online classes at home" went viral, making Li Handang the most famous poor household in China after Wu Huayan.
Previously, some media comments pointed out that during the epidemic, attention should be paid to families with poor internet access and limited economic resources when it comes to online classes for primary and secondary school students. Soon, this 15-year-old girl swallowed a large amount of her mother's psychiatric medication.
I told Li Handang that my hometown is in a neighboring town, and I attended high school in their Zhangcun town. After his news spread last night, many netizens wanted to donate phones, books, and money to them, so he needed to provide a bank account, which must be in his name. I also asked him if the delivery service in Shangying Village is the same as in our village, where they deliver to the town and then we pick it up.
Li Handang sounded a bit tired. He first said he was in the hospital and could only call back after he was discharged. Then he said he was illiterate and didn't understand these things, and hung up.
To put it bluntly, the news of his second daughter's suicide by poisoning has become a hot topic, and it is an opportunity for Li Handang's family of five to change their destiny. For Li Handang, a disabled person, this is basically his only chance to turn his life around. Faced with so much assistance, his reaction is not calm, but rather indifferent. Perhaps this indifference is due to the fear and panic caused by the "incident" and the uncertainty of how to deal with it.
This shoemaker with a limp in his left leg has been struggling to support a mentally ill wife and three children, exhausting all his strength and dignity just to survive. Whether in the countryside or the market, anyone can bully him. He has never had a chance, and when the opportunity comes, he can't grasp it. There is nothing strange about this.
Before and after contacting Li Handang, I also tried to understand his family's situation through local teacher friends and high school classmates. Summarizing the superficial information, it also preliminarily verified some of my judgments. Today's article is about discussing these things.
According to China Net's report, "Her father Li Handang is disabled in his left leg and cannot farm. He can only rely on repairing shoes on the street to make a living." These few sentences are problematic. Even if Li Handang's left leg is not disabled, he is skilled in farming, but he has no possibility of supporting a family by farming alone.
His wife has a mental illness, which is called "hanzi" in Nanyang dialect. This term has a derogatory meaning. Please forgive me for using this term for convenience. In the countryside, male "hanzi" can only live longer and healthier than their parents, allowing the mentally disabled son to die before them. Otherwise, the male "hanzi" will end up missing and dying from cold and hunger.
The situation for female "hanzi" is not much better. They are also prone to getting lost, and once they are alone, they are easily sexually assaulted by old bachelors. Unless the family is particularly powerful, female "hanzi" are not even accepted by the children next door. Before I started school, I once threw rubbish at a female "hanzi" with a group of children.
With such a wife by his side, even if Li Handang suddenly becomes agile overnight and the family's situation will not be much better. He must take care of his wife, and when he goes to the Zhangcun street fair, he probably worries about how his wife is at home.
In rural areas, men who marry "hanzi" women are either very poor, disabled, or both. If we strictly enforce the law, a considerable number of "hanzi" women's husbands are suspected of rape, and the offspring they have together are living evidence of crime.
However, if adult "hanzi" women are not sent to their in-laws' homes, parents and siblings cannot support them for a lifetime. Brothers also need to start families and have wives and children. With a "hanzi" sister in the family, it becomes even more difficult for brothers to find wives, and the family will come to an end. Sending her away and having a few more children, as long as the children are not mentally disabled, she will have hope in her later life.
If there really are police officers who arrest the husbands of "hanzi" women, their families will probably send the "hanzi" women to the police station and say, "Since you enforce the law impartially, then you take care of her."
Understanding all of this, readers may understand why Li Handang is so poor and still has two daughters and one son. It is not worth mocking the "poorer, more children" mentality. The animal kingdom is the same. The more offspring they have, the higher their chances of genetic competition. Animals are slightly better than humans in that they do not need to support their parents in old age, nor do they panic about their future in their prime years, but humans do.
Therefore, those who criticize Li Handang for having so many children surely have a lack of understanding.
Thanks to free compulsory education, Li Handang's three children can afford to go to school. They seem to be doing well. The eldest daughter is in her first year of high school at Dengzhou No. 2 High School, the second daughter is in her third year of junior high school at Zhangcun Town, and the son is in the sixth grade of elementary school. Even from the worst perspective, even if none of the three children can succeed academically, as long as the eldest daughter and the second daughter reach adulthood, the family's situation will greatly improve.
However, unexpectedly, they encountered the epidemic, and the three children had to compete for a smartphone to attend online classes. The second daughter was clearly at a disadvantage. She not only lacked the maturity of her older sister but also had to accommodate her younger brother. When the teacher asked her why she didn't attend class or submit assignments, and her classmates couldn't find her in the live chat group, she felt ashamed and frustrated. Besides resorting to self-harm, she couldn't do anything else.
Borrowing a phone from relatives or neighbors? People who didn't grow up in poor families would think of this. They think it's easy to ask, simply because they don't have to ask.
The junior high school that Xiao Li attends is just across an old provincial road from my high school campus. In her village, there are several of my high school classmates. It has been twenty years since we left Zhangcun Street, and Xiao Li is from a different generation. One thing is the same: during our upbringing, poverty took away a lot of our dignity and choices.
Li Handang cannot afford a new smartphone, that is for sure. However, did he do everything possible to create conditions for his three children to study? I have my doubts. At the moment when his daughter was taken away in an ambulance, he must have regretted it deeply. He may also recall that there were other ways to help his second daughter get a phone.
This leads to a topic that makes me even more uneasy than poverty: parents in low-income families habitually neglect the dignity and emotions of their children. When the "Ice Boy" went viral, I wrote an article about my childhood, saying that the "Ice Boy" was not just poor, but also because his parents treated him with disdain and neglect.
When I was around ten years old, my rain boots had a big hole in them. Of course, my parents wouldn't buy me new ones, but they also wouldn't repair them. They seemed to forget that I would freeze my feet and feel ashamed when I walked into the classroom wearing those torn boots. Another time, my pants had a hole in them, and no matter how much I begged, my mother refused to repair them. I only had that one pair of pants, so I had to go to school with my tail between my legs.
It wasn't until I was in the third year of junior high school, the same age as Xiao Li, that one day I told my parents that I had nearsightedness and couldn't see the blackboard clearly, and I wanted to buy a pair of glasses for around ten yuan. My mother's first reaction was, "You think glasses look good on others, so you want to follow suit and wear them too? What's the point of pretending?".
It took me many years to heal from the wounds of these experiences. Even today, my fingers tremble uncontrollably when I write about them. Xiao Li's class started online classes on February 4th. She took poison on February 29th. She must have had a more difficult time during those 25 days than when she was tied to a hospital bed for gastric lavage.
Poverty brings the greatest troubles to adults and children in low-income families, as they cannot afford smartphones and other necessities. The longer-lasting trouble is that poverty erodes their imagination and intellect, extinguishes their sense of shame and empathy.
Before her daughter took poison, I don't think Li Handang would have thought it was worth dying for such a "small matter."
What he experienced in the first half of his life seems much more difficult than not having a smartphone for online classes. It is difficult for him to understand that a poor girl from a poor family who loves to study and strives to earn respect from teachers and classmates has only one way out with her original family.
After talking to Li Handang, I started looking for his eldest daughter. With the help of a local teacher, I obtained her phone number and WeChat.
The female teacher asked Li Handang's eldest daughter for her bank account number, and she replied, "I don't know what a bank card number is right now."
This girl is 17 years old this year.