BEIJING (SCMP): A Chinese woman who rescued a drowning girl from a hotel pool while wearing a qipao and a facial treatment mask has been dubbed “mask qipao superwoman” on social media.
The little girl got into difficulties in the indoor swimming pool of the hotel in Xishuangbanna, southwestern China’s Yunnan province, on Feb 10.
She was pulled from the water and initially showed no signs of life.
The woman who intervened, Peng Lingmin, from the southwestern province of Sichuan, was relaxing by the pool while wearing a qipao and applying a facial treatment mask.
She dashed to help the girl and resuscitated her.
Peng’s sister, whom she was travelling with, filmed the incident and called an ambulance.
The girl began to show signs of life five minutes into Peng’s resuscitation.
Peng said the girl’s mother sent her to the pool to play by herself with a float ring, but she fell out of the ring.
Hotel staff were not present at the time because they were occupied elsewhere.
Peng said the youngster was recovering in hospital.
She said she had not received CPR training, but as a mother of a young child, she had been paying attention to emergency treatment measures on social media.
She said her brain was “blank”at the time of the incident and she simply acted out of instinct.
“My hands only started shaking when I heard her cry,” Peng told the Chinese media outlet Fengmian News.
Peng and her sister continued their trip after the incident.
While still travelling they received a 5,000 yuan (US$700) reward and a digital certificate from the Alibaba Foundation. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.
Peng said she now understood the importance of receiving proper CPR training and called on schools, companies and communities to arrange more training.
She also pleaded with managers of public pools to prepare lifeguards and first aid equipment.
“Thank you, mask qipao superwoman,” one online observer said.
“The hotel should be punished for not having a lifeguard at the pool,” said another.
Each year around eight million people die from cardiac arrest out of hospitals in China, according to data provided by China Charity Federation.
China has an alarmingly poor out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rate of only one per cent, compared with around 10 per cent in the US and eight per cent in Europe.
Only one per cent of China’s population have first aid knowledge, according to a 2021 report by Chinese Journal of Public Health Management. - South China Morning Post
