7-year-old orphan found working as a ‘delivery man’ in Qingdao
The boy has now been moved to a welfare center, while authorities try to find him a permanent home
A hard-working “delivery man” has been forced to give up his job, owing to the fact that he is only 7 years old.
Li Changjiang moved to Qingdao after his father died and his mother remarried, being taken to the city from his hometown of Zaozhuang in Shandong province by his dad’s former colleague, Yan Shifang, some three years ago.
The two lived inside a makeshift building at a local branch of the courier giant STO Express. There, Changjiang began accompanying Yan on his rounds and helping him make deliveries. Soon, the boy started going out on his own, becoming well known in the neighborhood, delivering around 30 packages a day during this winter.
When a reporter asks Changjiang if his life is not hard, the boy replies with a smile: “It’s not hard, I want to do it!”
Apparently, it took quite a while for someone to finally realize that there was something seriously wrong with this situation. When Changjiang delivered a package to a man named Wang Qiwei on Sunday, Wang was shocked. He snapped some photos of the kid and invited him inside to warm up, noticing that his hands were turning red from the cold. Changjiang took interest in a chess board inside the apartment and Wang began to teach him the game.
Afterward, Wang shared the photos on WeChat, quickly drawing attention and concern from netizens across the country on Chinese social media, followed soon by government intervention.
On Monday, Changjiang was moved into a local welfare home for children while authorities carry out an investigation into his situation, including figuring out where his mother has disappeared to, according to The Paper.
Because of all that he has been through, the little boy said that he couldn’t even remember the exact date of his own birthday. To mark the start of a new chapter in his life, the welfare center decided to throw Changjiang a 7th birthday party on Monday — the first such celebration of his life.
Hopefully, the next time you hear of little Changjiang, it will be as a chess grandmaster.
His story comes just after another of China’s “left-behind children” moved the hearts of netizens with a little boy in rural Yunnan arriving at his impoverished primary school with his hair covered in ice after walking 4.5 kilometers to class in the freezing cold.
In less than one week, about 3 million yuan has now been donated in support of Yunnan’s little “Ice Boy.”
[Images via The Paper]
