Post Square 12.31.13 ~ Mama Who?
A synopsis of a story
in the Washington
Post by William Wan
I was hoping we might have an upbeat subject to close out
the year, and this project, but the cover story in the Post for this day is
sad.
More than 61 million children in China (I still can’t quite wrap my
brain around that number) don’t live with their parents. Poor villagers have
moved to cities, fueling the country’s growing economy, and leaving their
children behind to be cared for by grandparents and other elderly relatives.
The workers already living in the city find that with the high cost of living
and the long hours at their jobs, they can’t keep their kids with them, either.
Wu Hongwei left his tiny village in the mountains at age 16
to find something better than doing back-breaking labor making 3 dollars a day.
He went to the city of Zhangzhou
were he was trained by his uncle to be a barber. Years later he took his trade
to Zhuzhou, where he found a good-paying job. Wu met a young woman, married her,
and they had a little girl. Wu’s wife, Wang, quit her job to care for the baby
and he worked overtime cutting hair. They were able to make ends meet at first,
but as the child grew so did their expenses and Wang was forced to go back to
work. With the high cost of living and both of them working long hours they
found they needed to make the decision to take the baby to Wu’s village to be
cared for by his parents.
When they can, Wu and Wang make the 14-hour journey by bus,
then train, then motorcycle to see their daughter, now 2. She doesn’t know
them, though, and feels more comfortable with her grandmother.
The grandmother says that living in the country is good for
the child. The food is clean and the air isn’t polluted, as it is in the city,
but there is no future for her in the village.
The parents are working on a plan to overcome the financial
obstacles and bring their daughter back home to be raised by them.
Drawing from a detail
of a photograph by Xiaomei Chen
In the upper right corner is the knee of Beibei, the child
whose parents are featured in this story. She’s climbing over a structure that
is holding some logs. I chose two pencils at a time and used the darkest one to
shade each log shape and the lighter one to fill it in. I went over the whole
background with white pencil. I repeated all the colors in the background to
fill in the design on Beibei’s pants.
That’s it! The last day of 2013 and the last drawing for
this project. I’d love to see you at the opening on Sunday, but if you can’t
make it, wish me luck. I do have some new things in mind that I want to
experiment with in the new year. I’ll keep you posted!
