A philanthropic man in China who has never married nor had his own kids, has emerged as a “father” to more than 700 of the country’s children.
Wang Wanlin, 80, from Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province has been providing shelter to wandering children he found on the street since 1979.
Wang met his first “son” on the street one evening when he was 34.
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The 15-year-old child was shivering in the cold weather, and told Wang he just escaped from an exploitative coal mine in another Zhejiang city.
He said he was tricked into going there from his hometown in Jiangsu province north of Shanghai. Wang took him home and bought him a train ticket a week later.
For Wang, the child’s rescue was also a salvation for himself.
As a teenager, he had a promising future after being admitted to a government-affiliated singing and dancing troupe.
His life changed when a neighbour wrongly accused him of stealing a wristwatch.
He was forced to admit the crime at a police station and sent to a farm in a remote area to perform reform through labour for 16 years.
Wang was released in 1978, and was fortunate to meet a packaging factory owner who was willing to “pull him back” by giving him a job.
“His life might have fallen into the darker side if he had met bad people at a young age. I needed to pull him back,” Wang recalled of the encounter with his first “kid” in an interview with Phoenix TV.
Wang has been searching for homeless young people on the street ever since, offering his flat as their shelter and using his own salary to buy them food and train tickets home.
All he asked for in return was a letter to report their safety after they arrived home.
He also fostered dozens of hardship-hit kids who could not return home. His flat sheltered up to 20 children at one time.
One of them was Yu Hui from a poor rural family in nearby Anhui province in eastern China.
In 1998, at the age of 12, Yu sneaked onto a train to “earn money to improve his family conditions”, but met a group of kids who forced him to steal.
Yu managed to escape from them and wandered to Hangzhou. While he was rummaging for food in a rubbish bin, Wang approached him, and showed him a news report of his deeds to win his trust.
Wang first took Yu to his home and bought him a train ticket to his hometown.
Then, on learning Yu had to drop out of school to work, Wang asked his parents to send him back to Hangzhou to go to school.
Yu initially insisted on working, thinking that was “the only way out” for a countryside boy, but was moved by Wang’s persistence and studied at a vocational school until he was 19.
Yu worked in Shanghai for years, and made money to build a two-storey house for his family, the best dwelling in his village.
In 2022, after learning Wang was living alone without anyone looking after him, he moved back to Hangzhou to live with him.
Yu, now the managing director of a beauty parlour, gave meticulous care to his “father”.
Knowing he had the habit of storing food even after they expired, Yu often secretly changed them to the same product with a newer date.
Wang has kept the letters and photos from the 700 kids he has taken under his wing.
Knowing how much he missed the kids, Yu posted a video last year searching for them, but soon took the video down as Wang did not want the online observers to call them “ungrateful”.
Wang’s deeds have moved many online.
“Wang is a man with a great heart, and so is his ‘son’ Yu,” said one observer.
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