Preamble:
"Why endure this long torture and waiting?"
When Xu Qinqin finally removed the surgical cloth strip on her face and saw herself in the mirror with her nose finally reappearing, she burst into tears.
At this moment, she finally understood that years of waiting and patience were worth it.
The cruel arrangement of fate
On a winter day in 1996, in a remote mountain village in Guang'an, Sichuan.
It was a difficult year for many families, as many of the village's laborers went out to work, leaving only the elderly, the weak, the sick and the disabled.
A poor peasant family in the village just gave birth to a daughter, named Xu Qinqin.
This is the sixth child in the family.
In order to earn money to support her family, the child's mother, Ms. Lin, has to work in the fields during the day, often leaving Xu Qinqin, who is still an infant at home.
Ms. Lin's health was weak this winter, and she worked hard in the fields with Xu Qinqin in her arms, and only went home to nurse at noon.
After breastfeeding, she was exhausted and decided to rest for a while before doing housework, so she put the baby Xu Qinqin in swaddling clothes on the small wooden bed in the house, and walked out lightly.
The winter was particularly cold and long, and many of the rats in the village became extremely ferocious due to a lack of food.
The walls of this rustic mud house have long been a rat-infested "base".
On this day, perhaps smelling the aroma of breast milk, a huge mouse suddenly crawled out of the base of the wall and jumped onto the small wooden bed where the baby was lying.
The soft flesh of a baby is a breeze for it.
Hearing only a shrill cry, the mouse had already bitten out a big hole with blurred flesh and blood, which was Xu Qinqin's nose.
At this time, the eldest daughter of the family came back from outside and scared away the mice, but she was also a step too late.
Ms. Lin hurriedly carried Xu Qinqin to the town's health center.
After examination, the doctor reluctantly told him that the baby's right eye and nose were incurable.
What's more, the virus carried by the rats is likely to kill this weak life in the days to come.
Ms. Lin hugged her injured daughter and cried bitterly.
More than a month later, the sky is endless, and the baby is lucky to have passed this life and death hurdle, but her distorted little face will be the pain that will accompany her for a lifetime.
Ridicule and bullying by classmates
When she was in elementary school, Xu Qinqin was not taken care of alone because of her appearance, she was just an ordinary female student.
However, her classmates never looked at her kindly.
No one wants to stand next to her during recess.
After school, no one asked her to play with her.
There will even be vicious classmates who find various reasons to bully her, such as deliberately pushing the textbook on the footstool to make her fall, or hiding her stationery.
What makes Xu Qinqin most uncomfortable is that teachers often turn a blind eye to these behaviors.
When she was a child, Xu Qinqin was very inferior and painful, and she began to think that she was ugly and ugly.
Every time I look in the mirror, I can't stop crying.
The mother felt sorry for her daughter, but there was nothing she could do.
She began to try to keep Xu Qinqin at home and minimize her time at school, for fear that her daughter would be bullied at school.
But soon, as the family fell into a more difficult situation, Xu Qinqin had to go to school as usual.
This continued until she was in sixth grade, the year her father died of illness.
The family's already poor family situation was even more difficult at this time, and the mother took on the burden of living for several children alone.
Xu Qinqin took the initiative to drop out of school and stay at home to help her mother with housework and take care of her younger siblings.
She dismissed the idea of studying and began to Xi being alone.
A difficult part-time job
After a short and painful childhood, Xu Qinqin had to work odd jobs locally to make ends meet.
Her first part-time job was the largest vegetable market in town.
During the day, she helps wash buckets and buckets of dirty cabbage leaves and picks up edible cabbage leaves, and at night she cleans up and disposes of mountains of vegetable waste.
Due to her appearance, many stores are reluctant to let her face customers directly.
As a result, she could only choose such the lowest level of manual work.
After working in a vegetable farm for three years, Xu Qinqin moved to a construction site.
Here, her job is to move cement, bricks and stones.
The sun was scorching on the construction site, and her skin was tanned and covered in dust.
What makes her even more sad is that some black-hearted bosses will find various reasons to deduct her salary.
In these long years, Xu Qinqin had few friends.
Her terrible face has become a heavy shackle for her to gain a foothold in society.
Newly married and divorced
When Xu Qinqin was 25 years old, someone in the neighborhood introduced a widower who was eight years older than her.
This is a doctor who runs a maternity hospital in the town.
It may be that he has not been married for a long time, and he is not very demanding.
Under the repeated urging of her mother, Xu Qinqin married this man.
After getting married, Xu Qinqin moved into a three-bedroom house in the center of the town, which was an unprecedented decent life for her.
However, her husband has always been cold to her, and even showed obvious disgust.
After dinner, Xu Qinqin would take the initiative to clean up all the dishes and dishes, for fear that her husband would think she was dirty.
After only two years of marriage, without warning, this doomed marriage ended in divorce.
The reason for the divorce proposed by the husband is very simple, that is, "emotional discord".
When Xu Qinqin returned to her parents' house with her simple suitcase, she said to her mother: "Maybe I am destined to be lonely for the rest of my life."
After the divorce, she went back to the town to work.
I can only earn 1,500 yuan a month, and life is very hard.
The Internet meets true love
One day in 2017, Xu Qinqin met a man named "Lin Qiang" on QQ Space.
The two chatted very speculatively, and Xu Qinqin also told each other about her lack of nose.
To her surprise, Lin Qiang did not have any disgust because of her appearance, he said that he liked Xu Qinqin's inner soul.
It was these words that gave Xu Qinqin, who had been single for a long time, a great comfort, and since then she has taken the initiative to maintain an online chat with Lin Qiang.
A month later, Lin Qiang took the initiative to ask the two to meet.
Lin Qiang is 3 years younger than Xu Qinqin and is a taxi driver in the village.
After the two met, their relationship quickly warmed up, and they quickly confirmed their relationship.
After another two months, Lin Qiang resolutely decided to propose to his parents to marry Xu Qinqin.
Mother Lin was very opposed to this marriage at first, one was that Xu Qinqin was already a second-married woman, and the other was that her appearance was really unacceptable.
Lin Qiang defended that he would not marry her, and said that he would rent a house in the town to live with his wife.
In the end, Mother Lin could only agree to get married.
In February 2017, the two registered as a legal husband and wife.
After marriage, although Lin Qiang is busy with work, he will try to find time to accompany Xu Qinqin.
He knows that he is Xu Qinqin's closest and most dependent person in the world.
In the more than a year since he got married, Lin Qiang has never felt ashamed or regretted because of his wife's appearance.
Pluck up the courage to have plastic surgery
Lin Qiang's thoughtfulness made Xu Qinqin feel unprecedented happiness.
However, whenever the family of three went out to play, the strange or disgusted gazes of passers-by still made it difficult for her to ignore.
She fears that her own children will suffer from these white eyes in the future.
So, she mustered all her courage and decided to have plastic surgery to try to fix her nose.
The cosmetic surgeon informed Xu Qinqin in advance that it would be a difficult "surgical marathon".
She needs to collect tissue from the skin of her arms and legs and repair the skin of her nose one after another.
There were 4 major surgeries in total, and each operation took more than 5 hours.
Even more difficult was the recovery process, which required a lot of perseverance for her to get through.
Lin Qiang took care of his wife meticulously and began to look for various part-time jobs to increase his income.
To finance his wife's surgery, he worked 15 hours a day and slept less than three hours.
In March 2017, with the help of public welfare organizations, Xu Qinqin officially started her first operation.
After a long journey, a new life has been waited
From March to September, Xu Qinqin completed a total of 4 major surgeries.
She had to stay in the inpatient unit of the hospital for half a year.
These days she had a hard time, the pain in the postoperative wound was unbearable, and she even had the idea of giving up at one point.
Fortunately, Lin Qiang is always by her side.
He amuses her and tells her interesting things in life, so that her mood will not be low all day.
Finally, when she took off the bandage of her head for the last time, she saw her new self.
Although this "new nose" is still not good-looking, it is the hope of a new life in her heart.
At this moment, Xu Qinqin finally understood that this long and painful wait was worth it.
Years of forbearance and torture came to naught at this moment.
She can finally really stand up in the sun; She can go back to her normal job and no longer be discriminated against.
She could even consider having a healthy and happy child with her husband.
This is probably the future she has been dreaming of for years.
Epilogue:
We often complain about the unfairness of fate and anxiety about the future, and Xu Qinqin's story tells us that as long as our hearts are strong enough, we can still stand up and meet a better tomorrow when we encounter difficulties and tribulations.
Let us be like Xu Qinqin, never give up, and persevere until the last moment to see hope.