Compiled by DIVYA THERESA RAVI, C. ARUNO and R. ARAVINTHAN
HE wanted to teach his two children perseverance, so they walked 800km from Shenzhen to their hometown in Hunan in a journey that took a month to complete.
China Press reported that bus driver Wu Guang, 41, had been concerned about his eight-year-old son, who tended to be a quitter, while his 10-year-old girl was overly dependent on her parents.
They began their walk on July 17, covering 8km that day before stopping to spend the night at a hotel.
Subsequently, they would walk at least 23km daily. One day, they even covered a distance of 36km.
He would also get his children to take turns deciding how to spend their daily allowance.
The two gradually learnt the value of money and how best to divide their allowance, Wu said.
At 1.30am on Aug 17, they finally arrived at the Changsha railway station in Hunan.
Wu’s wife, known only as Wang, was there waiting.
While initially against the idea, she eventually gave in after seeing how excited her husband and children were about the journey.
“Even so, I was worried sick every single day,” she said.
According to Wu, the children have since become more independent and responsible, and now help out around the house.
> A 15-year-old girl in Henan, China, who had a habit of chewing on her hair, had to have a 2.4kg hairball removed from her intestines after falling ill, Sin Chew Daily reported.
Known as Nini, she is 160cm tall but weighed only 35kg.
She had stopped menstruating earlier in the year, complained about stomach aches and had a poor appetite.
Eventually, her mother took her to a hospital. Doctors suspected that a foreign object was lodged in her gastrointestinal tract.
A scan revealed a large mass of hair the size of a small watermelon in Nini’s intestines, causing it to swell to twice its normal size.
Doctors carried out a two hour-long surgery to remove it.
Nini’s condition improved immediately afterwards. Her appetite returned and she was discharged on July 19.
Apparently, she had started chewing and eating her own hair when she was nine years old.
The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.
