Sponsored Through School, She Gave Up Her University Place to Nurse Her Sick Mother
A Tibetan student sponsored for four years by the actress Tang Yan won a university place this month — then gave it up to nurse her seriously ill mother and a young nephew. Tang Yan's reply, promising to keep supporting her if she ever returns to study, spread across Weibo and reopened a familiar question: who pays when a family's care work falls to a daughter?
The news arrived, as charity news on Weibo tends to, through an intermediary: a blogger who writes as Sangdong Youyuan (桑东有缘) and acts as the go-between for Tang Yan's student sponsorships. His end-of-summer report, posted at the end of last week, ran like a roll call of good news. One girl the actress Tang Yan has sponsored since senior high school is now in her third year of university. A second student, supported by Tang Yan for the past four years, had won a university place of her own. Then the report turned. That second girl was not going to enrol. Her mother is seriously ill, a young nephew needs someone to look after him, and she had decided that caring for them would be her job. In her note to her sponsor, she wrote that she felt she had let down the person who helped her.
The post was liked more than 50,000 times by Sunday, and it might have stayed a quiet charity update. What turned it into a nationwide conversation was Tang Yan's reply, which Sina Entertainment republished as a story of its own.
"I was sorry to hear it, but I understand the weight she is carrying at home," the actress wrote. "University is an important road in life, but it is not the whole of it (大学是人生一条重要道路，但不是全部). To see the goodness in her heart, and the strength with which she faces her life, is to watch her grow — and that comforts me. This is only a moment, not her whole future. Please tell her that while she looks after her family, she must be kind to herself too, and not give up hope. If she ever wants to study again, I will still support her as I can."
To a reader outside China, the girl's choice can be hard to parse: who turns down a university seat? The answer lies in how much the gaokao, the national college entrance exam, is made to carry. An admission place is treated as the single decisive gate between a rural childhood and the urban job market; families plan their lives around it, and stories of students missing it by a point or two are a staple of Chinese news. Surrendering one voluntarily, to nurse a sick mother, reads on Chinese social media as both self-evidently right and quietly devastating — the right thing to do, done by a daughter, at the exact moment education was supposed to change her life.
The detail that a young nephew is also in her care struck readers as its own measure of the situation: when a parent falls ill in a family with no one else nearby, the work defaults to the children, and this time it defaulted to a daughter at the threshold of university.
Sponsorship of this kind is a familiar idiom of celebrity giving in China. Donors — often actors or athletes — pay school fees and living costs for rural or Tibetan students, usually routed through trusted bloggers who report back each term; the transfer record the blogger published, with Tang Yan's note wishing the child progress in her studies, is what that looks like in practice. Tang Yan, one of the country's best-known television actresses, keeps this giving largely off her public image; her most visible philanthropic turn last year was being named the first ambassador for a national infant respiratory-health campaign.
Her reply closed with the door left open: if the girl ever wants to study again, the support is still there. What the exchange could not fix is the arithmetic that made her choice necessary — a seriously ill mother, a young nephew, and no one else to care for them.