Same Tough Start, Radically Different Lives
According to my caretakers at the orphanage, Chunchun arrived a few years before I did, when she was a baby. They estimate that I was around three or four years old at the time of my arrival, howling and screaming at the top of my lungs. I had been abandoned by my biological parents a few days earlier, and spent the intervening days on the streets.
During the eight or nine years I lived at the orphanage in Chenzhou, in southern Hunan province, Chunchun was always there sitting on her urine pot. The urine pot was a round, flower-patterned enamel can, and she sat on it because it was difficult for her to use the restrooms. Chunchun was never diagnosed, but I believe from our similar symptoms that my friend suffered from post-polio complications, including scoliosis, like me.
—Ming Canaday
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11.15.16