and regardless of who is born, all children are considered equal.
But there are places in the world where gender continues to make a huge difference.
In the 80s, China began a policy according to which there should be only one child in each family, which led to many abortions related to the sex of the child, and to the fact that parents abandoned their children.
In China, girls are not as desirable as boys.A boy is usually more likely to find a good job with a high salary.
Because of this way of thinking, it has generated many social problems in China, because of which society treats women more negatively than men.
Many couples who gave birth to daughters, after the “one child” policy was introduced, decided to place them in orphanages.
But not all people did that. In the worst cases, the parents even killed the child, but most often they were simply left in the woods or on the street – in a shoe box.
One person who refused to sit on the sidelines and watch this happen in front of his eyes was Yu Shangzhong.
According to Asian news, Yu Shangzhong and his wife adopted their first daughter thirty-five years ago when Yu was forty years old.
Four years later, Yu found an abandoned child left on the street. The baby was in a shoe box, and Yu’s heart wouldn’t let him leave her there, so he brought her home.
Yu and his wife adopted a child, and in the following years the couple adopted twelve more abandoned daughters.
Two younger daughters were also abandoned in a shoe box.This happened in 1998. They were born a week apart.
Yu and his wives, who live in Wenzhou, in Chekiang Province.They helped a lot of children, but life was not easy for them.
Only Yu had a chance to work, and had to do his best, working part-time to feed his family.Food was a real problem for them.
“We had tough days. When I was a little girl, my mother would carry me on her back, collect food leftovers from the street or even begging for money from people”, his older daughter Yu Xaeisong told the South China Morning Post. “People would give us money and old clothes”.
Due to the difficult conditions in which they lived, Yu and his wife decided to find another couple who could adopt his older daughters.
This would give the daughters better living conditions.Four of the daughters are currently studying at university, where they receive limited financial support from the government.
Five daughters still live with Yu and his wife.
The painting of one of the talented daughters is embroidered in Chinese style and it has 5 Chinese letters that mean “a peaceful family will prosper”.
After everything the family has been through, they prefer to look to the future with optimism and hope.
And on Yu’s 70th birthday, his daughters bought him a gold ring to express their appreciation for him.
This story is a wonderful reminder for how lucky some of us are for living in some areas in the world.
And it’s hard not to feel amazed by Yu’s commitment to help these abandoned daughters, who are now his daughters!.