Xiao Luo, Run—A Year-End Transoceanic Phone Report

小罗快跑---越洋电话年终特别报道

by Wuyang (五羊)

【Editor’s Note： Xiao Luo, born into poverty in rural Guizhou, China, has lived a life marked by extraordinary adversity. Blind and partially deaf due to childhood neglect and abuse, he began wandering as a child, surviving on the kindness of strangers. In 2007, a Christian charity, Thanksgiving Studio, offered him refuge and education, sparking his dream of a better life.

Determined to escape a system that marginalized him, Xiao Luo pursued higher education and dreamed of going to the United States. Facing obstacles at every turn—from government crackdowns on NGOs to social discrimination and financial barriers—he embarked on a harrowing journey through Southeast Asia in 2023. Supported by churches and a Jakarta seminary, Xiao Luo clings to hope, driven by faith and the possibility of regaining sight through a corneal transplant in the U.S. For Xiao Luo, America represents not just a dream but the promise of light and dignity.】

This is a story about “run” (润). More precisely, it’s a story about escape—fleeing one’s family, hometown, and darkness. The protagonist is Xiao Luo (小罗), whose full name is Luo Renchun (罗仁春). He comes from a low-income rural area in Zhijin County of Bijie City, Guizhou Province, China, and once was a “left-behind child.” He is a Christian in the process of “running,” a blind man who has roamed Southeast Asia for over a year, harboring the dream of reaching the United States.

In June 2024, a friend introduced me to Xiao Luo. After several conversations, I set off for Jakarta, Indonesia (印度尼西亚), in mid-November and finally met him. At the time, he was enrolled in a seminary founded by a group of mainland Chinese Christians.

I. Recklessness (莽)

In May 2023, holding a Thai tourist visa obtained in China, Xiao Luo, with years of an “American dream” in his heart, flew from Kunming to Bangkok and began his wandering journey across Southeast Asia.

He had done some basic homework. Thailand is relatively affordable and offers a more straightforward visa application process. More importantly, Bangkok hosts an office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Just two days after arriving, he applied for political asylum and successfully obtained his Thai refugee card a month later.

But what could he do next?

Thousands of Chinese refugees in Thailand clutch similar refugee cards while waiting to head toward a “new world.” When would his number come up? More pressing still was the question of day-to-day survival. With limited funds, how could he manage in this unfamiliar country, this unfamiliar world? With no concrete plan, Xiao Luo took off like a headless fly, weaving through churches, schools, nursing homes, hotels, and casinos in various Southeast Asian countries, roaming without a clear destination.

“We took the train from Bangkok to the Thai-Cambodian border. At customs, we needed a Cambodian visa on arrival. It should have cost only twenty dollars, but they charged us fifty. The staff deliberately led us to a so-called special service window. First, they told us to hand in our passports and pay twenty dollars. After we paid, they took us to another window to pick up our passports and visas—where they demanded another thirty-dollar service fee. It was just part of their routine.”

A similar situation happened on the way to Laos. “On December 22, 2023, we took a bus from Phnom Penh to a Cambodian city near Laos. When we went through Lao customs for a visa on arrival, it should have been twenty dollars for Chinese nationals. But they said the visa fee was forty, plus a service fee, plus a tip. Altogether, it came to sixty dollars. My friend tried arguing with them, to no avail.”

Alongside such cold and frustrating experiences, Xiao Luo encountered much warmth and kindness during his wanderings. Because he is a Christian, he received generous help from various churches and fellow believers. At one Malaysian Chinese church, a pastor even helped arrange temporary work that included room and board, allowing him to stay at a local nursing home for several months. However, without valid work papers, he had no long-term way to support himself, and so he moved from place to place across Southeast Asia, sometimes with hardly enough to eat.

By late April 2024, after multiple entries into Malaysia, the Malaysian immigration authorities served Xiao Luo with a final warning to leave the country by a set deadline. Faced with a dead end, he received help from the aforementioned seminary in Jakarta, founded by mainland Chinese Christians. The seminary welcomed Xiao Luo free of charge and provided him with a badly needed residence visa, room, board, and a systematic Christian theological education.

II. Blindness (盲)

Of course, this wasn’t Xiao Luo’s first time wandering in unfamiliar darkness. More than twenty years ago, when he was just seven, he began leaving his village for nearby towns and the county seat, embarking on a journey fraught with risk and uncertainty.

His early childhood, prior to turning seven, can only be described as grim. Born in a mountain village in Niuchang Town of Zhijin County, Bijie City, Guizhou Province (贵州省毕节市织金县牛场镇), Xiao Luo was only two months old when his parents divorced. His mother then left town. When he was two, his father remarried and soon went off to work away from home. At age three, his stepmother stabbed his right eye, and coal residue rubbed into his left eye went untreated. Both eyes ended up blind. Then, at age five, he developed an ear infection in his left ear, and that, too, went untreated, leaving him deaf in one ear. Thus, of his four main sensory conduits—two eyes and two ears—only his right ear still functioned.

His life continued to unravel.

When he was five, his stepmother left after giving birth to three daughters. A year later, his grandmother, who had been caring for him, passed away. His grandfather, burdened with the care of both Xiao Luo and his bedridden younger sister, could not manage. That winter, when Xiao Luo was seven, his bedridden sister froze to death at home. It was the last straw. All alone and in the dark, Xiao Luo began running away.

He ran to Niuchang Town, other towns, the county seat of Zhijin, schools, plazas, and department stores, begging all along the way and telling anyone who would listen about his tragic childhood. Some locals took pity on him and turned him over to the Civil Affairs Bureau, but that office had no intention of helping. Instead, they merely issued him a document akin to a permit for begging, officially certifying his misfortunes.

In 2007, the life of this blind young drifter finally took a turn.

Near Fifth Middle School in Zhijin’s South Gate area, a Christian woman noticed Xiao Luo. She asked him what he was doing, and he habitually showed her his government-issued “begging permit” as proof that he was officially allowed to beg. But this kindhearted woman took him home and contacted an organization called the Shenzhen Gratitude Studio (深圳感恩工作室), asking its head to come learn more about his situation.

That benevolent woman volunteered for the Shenzhen Gratitude Studio, which is part of a U.S.-based nonprofit charity called Gratitude Studio (感恩工作室).

Steven Su (苏大文) is the China Executive Director of Thanksgiving Studio. He immigrated from Taiwan to California in the 1980s and launched a successful business in the 1990s. After coming to Shenzhen for business in the 2000s, Su discovered many left-behind and out-of-school children in Zhijin County, Bijie—an official poverty-alleviation partner for Shenzhen. Returning to California, he gathered like-minded Chinese Christian friends and founded Thanksgiving Studio, raising funds within the local Chinese community. Through tuition assistance, orphan support, free medical services, and English summer camps, they helped disadvantaged children and teenagers in Zhijin County, Bijie.

For the first time in years, Xiao Luo finally found a place to rest. Thanksgiving Studio soon decided to sponsor his schooling. After considerable inquiries, they sent him to Guiyang School for the Blind (贵阳盲校). At the age of twelve, he finally received a formal education.

He began a more orderly life. Even though bullies in school sometimes picked on him, it made little difference to someone who had once wandered with a government-issued begging permit. At least he no longer had to sleep near a mud stove at night in constant fear. He had classes to attend, a dorm room, food, and grandparents, uncles, and aunts from the local church who visited him on weekends and truly cared about him.

When he was fourteen, his birth mother—who had been on his mind for years—reappeared in his life. Though she had not revealed her true identity for over a year, Xiao Luo had already learned the power of forgiveness.

“After I accepted Jesus, I realized that harboring hatred toward them for a long time would only do harm. As long as I can live as a decent person from now on. Maybe at that time, due to their background, cultural limitations, or rural ways of thinking, they did what they did.”

That same year, Xiao Luo was baptized at fourteen and became a Christian.

III. Bewilderment (茫)

In 2012, when Xiao Luo was in fifth grade at the Guiyang School for the Blind, Shenzhen Gratitude Studio received notice from the local Stability Maintenance Office ordering him to leave Guizhou. The organization had to shift its focus to Langzhong, Sichuan Province.

“You’re an outside group with a religious background, working especially with children and teenagers. Naturally, that goes against state policy and national security,” said Steven Su.

After 2012, the Chinese government tightened its oversight of social organizations, hoping that stricter policies would ensure social stability. Foreign NGOs were seen as a potential threat to public order and national security. It is hardly surprising that faith-based NGOs from the United States, like Thanksgiving Studio, bore the brunt of the crackdown.

As NGO regulations tightened across the mainland, Thanksgiving Studio, which had been active in Guizhou and Sichuan for more than a decade, gradually came to a standstill after 2018.

Xiao Luo’s sponsorship was transferred to the Zhijin County Federation of the Disabled to continue his schooling. But four years later, the county federation grew reluctant to cover the tuition and living expenses it had once promised for Xiao Luo’s further education. Out of options, he reached out to a massage vocational school in Kunming, which waived tuition for blind students and offered a 2,000-yuan stipend each year.

After graduating from vocational high school, Xiao Luo wanted to continue studying. In 2017, at twenty-one, he enrolled at the Henan College of Acupuncture and Massage (河南推拿职业学院) in Luoyang, a government-funded junior college specializing in acupuncture and massage. Faced with the high cost of tuition and living expenses, he took another chance and contacted Thanksgiving Studio, which was nearly defunct. Through a closed-door meeting of its board, Steven Su decided to fund Xiao Luo’s schooling once again.

While attending this junior college in Luoyang, Xiao Luo continued studying English and even started an English-learning club on campus. He dreamed of going to the United States to further his studies. In 2018, an American Chinese friend he met online suggested he try applying to the University of the Ozarks in Arkansas, a Christian-affiliated institution that might admit international students with disabilities. Xiao Luo emailed the university and received a reply asking for academic records and recommendation letters. He approached his principal for a letter, but the principal refused: “Your major is massage therapy—no need to go to America. Just find decent work in China.”

In darkness, Xiao Luo could feel the concrete walls separating his aspirations from reality. The American dream appeared to be another layer of a more complicated pursuit. What does a better life even mean? And does someone like Xiao Luo—a blind man saddled with multiple marginalized identities—deserve the richer, more independent, more dignified, more faith-infused life he hopes for?

With no clear answers, Xiao Luo stepped into society and received his response from the real world:

Back in his home village, people canceled his minimum living allowance on the grounds that he had been attending school elsewhere.

After completing his internship in a rehabilitation unit at a Shanghai nursing home, his coworkers told him, “You’re blind. This job isn’t right for you. You’d be better off working at one of those small street-corner massage shops. If you stay here, what are we， who are not blind, supposed to do?”

While working at a massage parlor in Xiacheng District, Hangzhou, he was found by local police for “checking on his residence permit,” though they were actually after his phone because of complaints he had posted on Twitter.

During Shanghai’s pandemic lockdown, he was trapped at the massage shop in a shopping center for more than twenty days, unnoticed by anyone, living off instant noodles.

In 2023, he made up his mind to leave. The American dream he had carried for over ten years had to be realized somehow. But how, exactly, he couldn’t yet say—much like the time he left home all alone two decades earlier. At least, he had to get out first.

After a year of turmoil in Southeast Asia, he finally found a place that could be called his “landing spot,” maybe even a “home.” At the seminary in Jakarta, he has three meals a day, a bed, and teachers and classmates who look after him. He can post videos on YouTube and chat sporadically on Zoom with friends scattered around the world. His teachers say they’ll do whatever they can to help him get to the United States—perhaps even for eye surgery.

Indeed, he still has a more tangible American dream. When he was in his early teens, an American medical team sponsored by Thanksgiving Studio came to Zhijin County, Bijie, to offer free medical services. A Chinese-American doctor examined his eyes and told him that a corneal transplant might be the only way to regain sight in his left eye.

He wants to go to America, where he believes real hope and light await.

December 31, 2024

This translation is an independent yet well-intentioned effort by the China Thought Express editorial team to bridge ideas between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. The original text is available here:

https://www.voachinese.com/a/7919005.html

Kindly attribute the translation if referenced.