Lessons From Caring For A Rescued Abused Child In Yunnan: Practical Tips For Caregivers
It was 7:12 a.m. when the blue ceramic bowl of rice congee slipped out of Xiao Wei’s hands and hit the linoleum of my kitchen floor. The bowl didn’t break, but congee splashed everywhere, soaking the frayed edge of my cotton doormat and the toes of my fuzzy socks. He didn’t move to clean it up. He just backed up to the door frame, shoulders hiked all the way up to his ears, arms wrapped tight around his torso like he was trying to make himself smaller. His knuckles were white.
I’m a first grade teacher based in Kunming, and my own son just left for boarding middle school last fall. My cousin works at a local child protection NGO, and she called me last winter asking if I could take 7-year-old Xiao Wei short-term. They’d pulled him out of a remote mountain village a few hours north, where his alcoholic father had beaten him regularly and locked him in a storage shed when he left to drink for days. No local relative wanted to take him, and they were waiting for long-term placement to go through. I thought I was ready: I’ve worked with kids from low-income backgrounds, kids with quiet behavior struggles, I know all the basics. But when I stepped forward with a paper towel to clean up the congee that morning, he flinched so hard he stumbled over the threshold and sat down hard on his butt. That’s when I realized everything I thought I knew was wrong.
The first two weeks, he never spoke more than two words at a time. He wouldn’t eat if I was in the same room. I found a three-day-old steamed bun hidden under his mattress when I changed the sheets, and half a pack of hard candies tucked in the toe of his rain boot. I’d read about food hoarding before, but reading about it in a training handout is nothing than finding it yourself, crumbly and a little moldy, tucked where a kid thinks no one will look.
The first change I made was stopping all my forced attempts at connection. I’d originally thought if I just offered enough hugs, said “I’m here for you” enough times, he’d open up. But that just made him hide in his room for hours after. Now, I just do my own thing around the house. If he’s sitting on the couch watching cartoons, I sit on the other end folding laundry, and don’t talk to him unless he says something first. If I need to walk past him to get to the remote, I say “I’m grabbing my remote, coming past” before I move, so he doesn’t get surprised. No more sudden movements, no unannounced touches. That small shift changed everything. Within a week, he stopped locking his bedroom door when I was home.
For food, I don’t comment on how much he eats, I don’t stop him from taking extra, I don’t nag him about hiding bits of snacks around his room. Once a week, when he’s at after-school art class, I go through his space and throw out any old food that’s gone bad, and leave an extra pack of his favorite sesame crackers on his nightstand. If he mentions it, I just say “I thought you might want fresh ones” and leave it at that. I don’t give a big talk about how he doesn’t need to hide food here anymore. That kind of trust takes time to build, not one big talk to fix.
When he joined my school’s after-school program a month in, I shared a few small rules with the other teachers that work with him. Don’t change your voice when you talk to him – if you normally talk at a normal volume, keep doing that. If you need to raise your voice to get the whole class’s attention, just glance over and give a tiny wave first, so he knows it’s not directed at him. If he flinches when you reach for something, don’t make a big deal out of it, don’t apologize over and over. Just say what you’re doing, step back, and move on. Making a fuss only makes him more anxious.
Once, the PE teacher blew a whistle really loud right next to him, and Xiao Wei crawled under the bleachers and wouldn’t come out for 45 minutes. The other teachers wanted to go coax him out, pull him out, reassure him. I told them to just leave a water bottle by the entrance and wait. He came out on his own when he was ready, and no one said a word about it the rest of the day.
Two weeks ago, he came and sat next to me on the couch when I was mending an old jacket. He didn’t say anything for ten minutes, then he held out his hand and gave me a dandelion he picked on the way home from school. That’s the first time he initiated any kind of contact with me. I just said “thank you, it’s pretty” and stuck it in an empty jam glass on the coffee table. It’s still there, all wilted, but I haven’t thrown it away.
The long-term placement is still moving through paperwork. There’s a couple in Chengdu that want to adopt him, they’ve passed all their checks, but the process moves slow in rural China, so he’s still with me. Some days are still bad. Last weekend, a man on the street yelled at his dog for running off, and Xiao Wei grabbed my hand so hard his nails left marks on my palm, and he wouldn’t let go until we got through the front door. I didn’t ask him what was wrong. I just washed our hands, made us fried rice, put on his favorite cartoon about a blue cat, and that was that.
I get a lot of questions from new caregivers and first-year teachers asking what you need to do this work right. People think you need years of special training or endless amounts of some special quality. But most of what I do is just small, boring stuff. Announce your movements before you make them. Don’t push connection faster than the kid wants to go. Let bad moments pass without making them a big deal. It doesn’t fix everything overnight. There’s a lot that’s still uncertain, a lot I still get wrong. But right now, he sleeps through the night most nights, he comes to dinner without me leaving the plate outside the door, and he brings me dandelions sometimes. That’s enough for now.
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