Looking for place under the sun
After years of being employed by restaurants and bars mainly for their freak value, the |
What these sisters crave for is to be treated as normal people and ordinary adult employees.
The two said their experience working at a Beijing restaurant in 1999 was typical: Hired to greet patrons at the door for a monthly salary of 300 yuan ($38) each, they first felt happy, but soon felt hurt.
"Almost every customer talked about us," Xianhua recalled. "Some would even bring their friends to eat at the restaurant just to see us."
And ultimately they were fired. "A granny guest complained to our boss that she didn't want to see us at meals," Yanjun said.
The Ruan sisters are not the only ones facing such problems, as Web chatrooms established by "little people" around China show. They call themselves xiuzhenren, or midgets.
The Ruans' dwarfism, or stunted growth, is most likely pituitary dwarfism caused by an insufficiency of the growth hormone. Typically, the pituitary dwarf stops growing in early childhood but retains normal body proportion, mental capacity, and sexual development. This type of dwarf, or midget, is completely normal except for the height, with no body distortion.
Pharmaceutical companies have begun cloning human growth hormone to stimulate growth in children afflicted with the disease, but Yanjun and Xianhua come from a poor rural area and never had access to good medical care, let alone advanced genetic therapies.
Born in a village in Shaodong County, Hunan Province, the two girls seemed fine up to about the age of 5. Their family has no history of arrested growth; their parents and younger brother are all normal sized. Doctors at the local hospital attributed their problem to a gene mutation and said it could not be helped.
Their mother, a migrant worker in her 50s who left the village to work in Hebei Province when the Ruan sisters graduated from middle school, said Yanjun and Xianhua had always been able and independent, doing cooking, washing and other housework even when they were children.
Despite their competence, however, the girls found themselves looked down upon in the village, shadowed by gossip about being "useless" and "unmarriageable". Xianhua became hyper-sensitive, anticipating that her classmates would be mean and challenging them first. "I had a lot of fights at that time," she acknowledged.
Yanjun left the village first, after graduating from middle school in 1997, to try to make a living in the nearest town. A teacher who had town residency and managed a grocery store hired her to tend to the place. The salary was a meagre 100 yuan ($12.8) a month, but Yanjun felt lucky to have a job at all.
Xianhua left school the next year for work in another village at a factory that made cigarette lighters, and Yanjun joined her there. For the first time in their adolescent lives, they were happy. Even though they earned very little in the factory, they had friends among their co-workers and got on well with the young couple who ran the factory. They have fond memories of group sing-alongs and companionable sessions watching the only TV in the village.
Emboldened by this experience, the sisters decided to strike out for a fresh start in Beijing. Arriving in 1999, they immediately encountered difficulties finding work. One manager told them bluntly: "There are so many beautiful college graduates, why should I employ you?"
They finally got the door greeting positions at a restaurant on Qinghuayuan Road. That lasted only one year. Work for another restaurant also ended badly, when it turned out the proprietor only wanted them for their freak value.
For a while, they rejoined their mother, who was working in Sanhe City, Hebei Province. But they needed their own incomes, so they returned to Beijing, where a nightclub manager employed them as hostesses out of pity. "We were still considered as less capable than normal girls although we did the same work," Xianhua said.
For the first time, however, the girls both had boyfriends, also employees of the club. Xianhua fell in love with a computer technician. From the beginning, he insisted the relationship would go nowhere. Indeed.
"No matter what I did for him, he still decided to leave me and marry a Beijing girl," Xianhua said, adding that she understood how he would prefer someone "normal".
Yanjun's boyfriend was in charge of the sound system at the club, and for a time her situation seemed more hopeful. "I think we loved each other, but his family strongly opposed our relationship," Yanjun said. So they too parted ways.
It was time for another fresh start. Inspired by a TV program, they founded an online shop selling the only type of clothes in which they had some expertise girls' garments. Friends lent them 7,000 yuan ($897) to set up Dongfang Erxiu "Two Eastern Pretties" at the site www.taobao.com.
They bought their wares at wholesale markets around Beijing, traveling by bus. They continued to encounter obstacles and got little sympathy or understanding: Sometimes conductors and other passengers would tease them about how they got on to the bus, as one sister would climb up first and pull the other after her. They dreaded it when people inquired about their ages and met the answers with surprised expressions.
Gradually, with Beijing and other cities accommodating the disabled, the transport situation has improved. "We are happy now that the bus entry threshold is lower and that we can buy electronic passes," which minimizes the need to interact with the conductor, Xianhua said.
Their online business is a going concern: The sisters get orders from around the country, bargain with customers online by instant messenging, and ship the goods by express delivery. Still, returns barely enable them to cover their monthly bills 650 yuan ($83) for rent, 120 yuan ($15) for Internet use, food and transportation and other expenses. Moreover, they are beginning to face the prospect of having to help support ageing parents their mother is still working in Hebei, while the father stays at home inHunan Province with barely any earnings.
They have no choice but to soldier on, of course, and find cheer in any kindness that comes their way.
Once when their computer crashed and they turned to a repair shop, a technician shared his techniques and left them a system disc, so Xianhua can now take care of computer troubles herself. A couple who owns a furniture shop made them a special stool to help them type at the computer more easily.
Two college students offered them 2,000 yuan but "we declined with gratitude," Yanjun said.
"What we want most is not money. We just want to be treated like normal people."
(China Daily 03/21/2007 page18)
