CHANGSHA, Nov. 19 (Xinhua) -- Zhang Wei, 44, says she has 126 children -- one biological and 125 through fate.
Zhang, director of an orphanage in Jishou, a city tucked away in the mountains of central China's Hunan Province, sees her 125 children every day, but her biological son, who has been sent to study in a boarding school, just once a week.
Just before the UN Universal Children's Day, which falls on Tuesday, she visited 11-year-old Zhang Jian's home in Paichou Village.
The boy lost his father when he was just eight months old. His mother ran away and was never heard from again. His grandmother fed him rice soup and brought him up on her own. When he turned three, he began collecting trash on the street alongside his grandmother.
The poor boy was timid and quiet, until he met his "mother" at the orphanage.
Most of the children are very small, and not accustomed to the strange surroundings. In order to let them fall asleep, Zhang comes to their bed every night to lull and tuck them in. When she is done, it is often after midnight.
The children are all from nearby counties and villages. Orphans in China are usually raised by their grandparents or distant relatives, with slender subsidies from the government. Some families are simply too poor or too old to raise children on their own.
In 2015, Ci'ai (literally meaning tenderness and love) Orphanage opened. Zhang, who used to work in a social welfare institute and has a master's degree in ethics, was chosen as the director.
She has devoted all her time to the orphanage ever since. To better understand the children, she has visited families of each and every child, no matter how far away their homes were.
Long Yijia was among the first batch of children admitted to the orphanage. She had lived with her younger sister and their grandmother, who was already 70 years old, in a ramshackle wooden house in a remote village in Baojing County.
When Zhang visited, she couldn't communicate with the grandma, who only spoke the local dialect. The sisters were orphaned when they were little. After three years in the orphanage, Long gained weight, grew taller and wore clean clothes, striking a sharp contrast with her sister.
After learning that her greatest wish was for her younger sister to live with her in the orphanage, Zhang knocked at the door to ask for the grandma's permission. The younger sister, eight years old, was excited to meet her new mother.
But for her own son, meeting mother is not such fun.
In a class essay, her son wrote: "You are always impatient with me, even yell at me when I do something wrong, but so nice to them no matter what they do. You gave away my favorite toys to them, even brought them to dine at KFC!"
For the past three years, she has never had the time to attend the parent-teacher meetings at her son's school. When her mother was hospitalized for cancer, she was not able to care for her.
"You are just too busy being a mother to 100 or more children, but forget to be a mom to your own son," a friend of Zhang once told her.
Zhang is saddened and even a little guilty when she thinks of her own son. "I believe one day he will turn around and understand me. I know him," she says
Thanks to her care, 26 children have been transferred to study in local vocational schools or ones in Changsha, the provincial capital, and even as far as Guangzhou, to prepare for their future careers.
But her son is starting to slowly understand. "I want to thank you for bringing their world to me. I felt happy when you took me to celebrate New Year's Eve with them at the orphanage and praised me for being more loving," he wrote.
