Chinese Tomb Raiders find home

A vagrant woman and her young son lived in a tomb in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, for nearly three years before police found them and contacted family members in Jiangxi Province.

Zeng Liuying, 48, said she couldn’t afford railway tickets to her hometown, didn’t know how to write a letter and didn’t have phone numbers of her relatives, a newspaper report said.

Zeng left home alone in 1993 after a quarrel with her husband, who was reportedly addicted to gambling. She traveled to Huizhou and found a job in a clothing factory.

Three years later, she had her son sent to Huizhou to live with her and enrolled him in a local school.

Soon, however, her foreman fired her after she refused to marry his brother, according to the report.

She tried several jobs in the city but was sacked repeatedly, allegedly because of the foreman’s intervention.

She used up her savings and her son, now 16, was forced to drop out of school in the fourth grade.

Since then, the mother and son had to live on food passengers dumped along a railway line. They wore discarded clothes they found.

About three years ago, they moved into the tomb, about four square meters, in a graveyard.

Late last month, a railway policeman came across Zeng when she was scavenging along the railway line and learned of her plight. Officers contacted her family in Suichuan, Jiangxi.

Two relatives came to Huizhou and took Zeng and her son home.

(去广州)

By Sun Tzu on 24-12-2006