When tragedy strikes, family members need to stick together. But this is not always the case. After Tian Haicheng from China became paralyzed in a car accident, his wife of seven years abandoned him. Thankfully, not everyone turned away from him. As reported in Chinese media, Tian was left paralyzed from the chest down after a taxi he took crashed into a ditch in March 2016. His wife left months later taking their eldest with her. According to Tian, “She told me on the day that she was going to stay in her mother’s home for a few days. But she never returned, and she took our son with her.” All Tian has was his daughter Jia Jia who stayed with him and has been taking care of him ever since.
Jia Jia gets up at 6 am every day and massages her father's muscles for half an hour. Before she goes to school, she also brushes his teeth and washes his face. While she's out studying, her elderly grandparents, both of whom are farmers, look after her father. After she comes back, Jia Jia feeds Tian his dinner and helps him move around the house using a DIY mobility device. She even shaves her father's beard. “At the beginning, I didn’t know how to shave and I cut dad’s face and it bled,” she said. “But dad said it wasn’t painful. Now, I’m very good at shaving his beard. My grandmother says I shave it very clean.” Jia Jia says she doesn't miss her mother at all because she doesn't look after her dad. She does, however, miss her brother, saying that “I used to be very close to him.”
So as to document his daughter's selfless work, Tian set up an account on China's live-streaming app Kuaishou. Currently, over 480,000 people are following their daily struggles. Take a look:
