Seared by the eyes that say 'Please love me'

An orphan's broken life is made whole in the lap of a stranger

As the mother of a 22-month old, I am just beginning to get the knack of how to steal a kiss from my headstrong, indefatigable daughter. Often I chase her around our apartment entreating her with a simple request: "Give Mum a kiss, just one kiss." Sometimes she suddenly stops, spins around and then gauges my face as if to determine whether there is enough sincerity to warrant my request being granted. Then, slowly, she leans forward and tips her head upward The kiss is sweet but fleeting, like a kiss from the tip of a fledgling's beak. Within seconds she will have wriggled herself free of my grip and be running again. You get the feeling she is doing charity, out of pity for her poor mother.

That is why I felt utterly unprepared, even shocked, when a 10-year-old girl grabbed me by the arm and asked, "Could you kiss me, Auntie?" My photographer colleague and I were nearing the end of an interview at an orphanage in southeastern Beijing. Sensing that we were about to leave, the girl, who had been playing around on floor mats beside me, suddenly popped the question.

Her voice was so tender, as were her fingers. But there was a resolve in that voice and in that grip that made it impossible for anyone to say no. After gaining my consent, she dived into my lap like a duckling into a summer pool. Resting her head on my leg, she smiled broadly at the camera, with a smile so infectious that nothing about her life - abandoned at birth, multiple disabilities affecting legs and spine, and constant pain - seemed relevant.

In the days that followed, the face of that girl surfaced repeatedly in my mind, refusing to be drowned, with the same buoyancy associated with any zestful young life. How strong should a longing become for it to trample any sense of timidity and shyness a child may have towards a strange adult? The answer lies nowhere else but in the eyes of someone like that girl, where the temperature reaches boiling point.

The heart of anyone who dares to look into those eyes would be seared, and for them the words of Jenny Bowen, a 69-year-old from the United States, would no doubt resonate: "It's every child's birthright - to have somebody who cares."

Having adopted two Chinese girls, Bowen founded a group called Half the Sky Foundation to help raise the awareness in China that orphaned children "need not only to be clothed, but also cherished".

At the Beijing orphanage, which the foundation runs, children are the apples in the eyes of Liu Shan, the director. Asked to recount one moving experience, she said that as a nanny, she had once spent 10 days with a boy in an orphanage in southern China.

Before she left, the eight-year-old, who suffered congenital hydrocephalus, drew her a horse.

"He said to me, 'You can ride the horse to find me. If you are not coming, I'll ride the horse to find you,'" Liu says.

With orphaned children, the fact that you are reaching out to touching their lives is often felt acutely, since few people bother to do so. In a way, they are fields that have just been covered in a heavy blanket of snow. Anyone who sets foot on them cannot but leave deep marks.

Last year an orphaned Iraqi girl, using a piece of chalk, drew on the ground an enlarged image of her late mother and then curled up in her bosom and went to sleep. In another, warless corner of the world, that longing for motherly love has also been expressed in art, in an equally, if not more, forceful and heartrending way.

As I was interviewing people I heard of an 18-year-old girl who lives with cerebral palsy and has grown up in several orphanages in southern China. Sleeping with 20 others in the same dormitory, she would get up quietly in the night and start gnawing pictures on the window curtains, with her teeth. This was discovered three years ago, when a nanny came in in the early morning to discover a standing Buddha on the curtain, lit from behind by the twilight. "The nanny was scared out of her wits," says Kong Nianhua, who works in the orphanage. "It soon became frequent. The images are mostly cartoon ones like Hello Kitty and Bugs Bunny that she has seen on TV. In their expressions each of the images is absolutely distinct. And the impression of her teeth on the cloth needs ironing to be smoothed out."

One year ago the girl's favorite nanny left. About a month later, Kong went to the dormitory late one night and found the girl sitting in a corner of the room weeping silently.

When he returned the next morning she was asleep. A summer breeze was playing hide-and-seek with the window curtains, on which a portrait of the girl's beloved nanny was imprinted.

(China Daily European Weekly 03/13/2015 page25)