A true volunteering spirit

Student from Taiwan played a key role in safeguarding his community in Beijing during pandemic outbreak and is working to establish closer ties between young people across the Straits, Li Yingxue reports.

Chen Wen-cheng from Taiwan, a postdoctoral student at Peking University, had been doing volunteer work in his neighborhood since Spring Festival. This was the first Lunar New Year holiday he didn't celebrate in his hometown of Changhua, Taiwan, during his nine-year stay in Beijing.

Chen, 31, from the university's department of philosophy and religious studies, chose to stay in Beijing's Haidian district with his pregnant wife, who gave birth to their daughter last month.

After the COVID-19 outbreak hit Beijing in late January, he soon applied to be a community volunteer to help with pandemic prevention and control.

He started work on the day he signed as a volunteer on Feb 4, with his duties including such tasks as checking passes and the temperature of people entering the community or delivering food and other necessities to his neighbors in self-quarantine.

The buildings in the community have five floors with no elevators. Chen sometimes had dozens of deliveries each day, including big rice bags and barrels of cooking oil, among other daily supplies.

"The deliveries were heavy, and that's why the community needed us younger people to help," Chen says.

His shift at the community entrance was from 8 pm to 10 pm, two to four times a week. Chen remembers on one cold night an elderly volunteer joined him. "I was touched that the septuagenarian was doing volunteer work together with me," he recalls.

Some residents complained about the strict rules for entering the community, and Chen would explain patiently, meanwhile still sticking to the rules and the checking procedure.

"The volunteer job looks like petty work, but it matters as it enhances the safety of the more than 2,000 residents in our community," Chen says. "The work also allowed me to get to know more of my neighbors, which makes the whole community feel like a big family."

Chen's volunteer work finished when his wife gave birth and he's been adapting to the new role of being a dad.

Both volunteering and parenting didn't stop Chen's other passion-serving as a bridge between young people across the Straits.

During the pandemic, he has organized several online sessions for students from Taiwan who plan to apply to universities or for jobs on the Chinese mainland, sharing experiences, answering questions and offering suggestions.

For the students who are graduating from universities in Beijing but couldn't come back to gather their belongings due to the pandemic, Chen helped to pack and post their luggage to Taiwan.

An eye-opener with a ride

Chen's link with the capital dates back to 2009, when he was a junior student at a university in Changhua.

During that summer, Chen joined college students from the Chinese mainland on a bike-riding tour around Taiwan. In nine days and eight nights, he completed about 1,000 kilometers together with a dozen students.

"I met tutors and students from Peking University, and we soon became friends," Chen recalls.

The trip dispelled many of his stereotypical ideas about people from the Chinese mainland.

"I was so impressed by their logical and detailed thinking when we were playing games, such as The Werewolves of Millers Hollow," Chen says.

That event left such a pleasant impression that he gave up an offer to further his study in Taiwan upon graduation in 2011, and chose to move to Beijing to pursue a master's degree at Beijing Sport University, majoring in sports humanistic sociology.

"I remember when my family saw me off at Taoyuan International Airport, they were worried because it was the first time-and the farthest-that I had moved away from my hometown," he says.