Uncle never spoke of it again and never married another woman. The woman and her husband died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a shed. The end of this strange love story remains a mystery to this day, says Yige Caixiang. Young Ning Ning even called her an “old fox”. He treated her as if she were his own wife, handed her his weekly wages, and was happy to have a bowl of rice and a warm house waiting for him after a hard day’s work.īut over time she never divorced her husband and other family members began to see her as an intruder just out for his money to support their own family. Although she had a husband and two daughters, she spent a lot of time with Uncle and even cooked and cleaned for him. When Uncle was in his thirties, he met a married lady from a nearby village. “It’s only when they’re nearing the end of their lives that people realize that the greatest regret in life is always regretting the past.” When she married, he was able to help the young couple with the down payment for the new family home, into which he invested half his life savings. Uncle not only took care of his sisters but also an abandoned village girl named Ning Ning whom he adopted. One military chief even rubbed his back in the public bathhouse (“People in Beijing are good at rubbing their backs,” he later said).īut Uncle eventually returned to his village and was able to attend his sisters’ wedding reception and present them with complete sets of furniture he had personally made – a rare possession for a young rural bride in the 1980s. Once Uncle traveled to Beijing to visit the Mao Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square and ended up staying with a cousin who worked in the military doing carpentry work for the soldiers, with whom he soon became friends. He was never officially diagnosed and was unable to obtain a disability card. He was inspired to become a carpenter after seeing one at work on the family farm, so he also started the same job and was able to earn a living by going around doing carpentry jobs for villagers. The village teachers could not persuade him to come back to class.Īfter three years, Uncle stepped out of the yard with his crutches for the first time. Feeling depressed and hopeless, he did not return to school and spent weeks in bed. A doctor in a neighboring village “treated” Uncle with various injections in his bottom, after which Uncle lost the use of his leg and eventually became permanently disabled. One day when he was a teenager he developed a high fever. His uncle used to be the smartest boy in school, he says, and always got top grades. While showing footage of family and village life, Yige Caixiang narrates via voiceover from his uncle and chronicles his own journey to his family’s village, detailing the life of his mother’s brother. “This is my uncle,” is the vlogger at the beginning of the 11:30 minute video titled “ How uncle healed my mental friction after being back in the village for 3 days(回村三天，二舅治好了我的精神内耗) and introduces his elderly uncle and grandma standing in front of their house “which was built at a time when the United States didn’t even exist”. Uploaded by vlogger ‘Yige Caixiang’ the video received over ten million views in one day and became the number one video on the Bilibili platform. This portrait of his sturdy and resourceful “uncle” touched the hearts of many netizens and went viral overnight.Ī Video posted on Chinese video sharing platform Bilibili on Monday, July 25 has gone viral on social media for the inspirational story it tells about a resilient villager who became disabled as a teenager.

Chinese vlogger Yige Caixiang (衣戈猜想) posted a short film on Bilibili about his disabled uncle who lives in a poor rural area in China.

A story about my uncle ending