The five-minute short clip showed but a few things: several early wedding photos of Xie Qiuping and her husband followed by the photos of their son’s full-moon celebration and a few months after.
Each of the six or seven photographs was displayed for a full half minute.
Mostly, there was a voice-over narration.
Xie Qiuping fell in love with her husband when she was just a teenager. Apart from studying, he was her life.
She chose to marry young and settle into family life. At twenty-four, she bore him a son. What should’ve been a blissful life halted when Xie Qiuping was twenty-eight. That year, her husband was diagnosed with severe diabetes. They sold everything they had to fund his treatment for half a year, but it developed into renal failure and he died three months later.
He left behind a young Xie Qiuping and their three or four-year-old son.
The narration paused there, and the clip stayed on a scene inside a rented room where the program’s reporter was doing interviews and researches. Xie Qiuping was stroking their wedding photo on a red background where the couple appeared incredibly joyful, their dimples shallow, their smiles radiant with happiness.
The cramped room seemed even smaller with pots, pans and other daily necessities cluttering it up. Clothes were stuffed into a bag in the corner of the room.
A while after serious contemplation over their wedding photo, Xie Qiuping finally spoke. "A few days before he left, he was telling me to find someone else, there’s no need for me to waste my life on him and to find a good stepfather for our son."
"I was thinking at the time how could I possibly just find someone else after loving him for over a decade."
"But I didn’t tell him that. I wanted him to let go without any worries."
In the reporter’s interview footage, the woman’s voice cracked as she spoke, her head hung low, her eyes visibly red.
The rest of the clip was just the footage of the program team’s on-the-spot interview, with the display continuing to show the photos that Xie Qiuping had cherished, narrated by the voiceover.
After her husband’s death, Xie Qiuping started a life of juggling between taking care of her child and working part-time to pay off the debts accumulated from her husband’s treatment, as well as her son’s school fees.
When some children started pre-school at the age of three, Xie Qiuping’s son only managed to join kindergarten at five years old.
Xie Qiuping, the hardworking mother was always busy, rarely having time to teach her son essential safety precautions, let alone idle talk.
One time, when Xie Qiuping was mending clothes at home, her son didn’t return from playing outside their rented accommodation until dark.
Disturbed, she hastily dropped the clothes and rushed out to look for him. Despite her frantic searching, she was unable to find him anywhere.
She searched all night, covering a distance of roughly two miles, asking many people along the way and checked the few available cameras in their impoverished town, but she found no trace of him.
Her son had gone missing.
Two years after her husband left Xie Qiuping, her son disappeared too.
The narration stopped at this point, and Xie Qiuping, at the center of the stage, was holding back tears.
There’s always that one, or one-thousandth, or one-ten-thousandth of the population who, by some cruel fate, are trapped in a life of unimaginable misery, even though they’ve done nothing wrong.
"Ah, who would have thought Ms. Xie has such a past." The host curled his eyebrows in distress, his face plainly showing his pity and heartache.
"Well, it’s normal. Most people wouldn’t think my life could turn out so tragic." Xie Qiuping noted, and then added softly, "I’m here to continue my search for my son. I figured I might as well give it a shot while I still have a chance. Who knows, I might succeed."
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