My Loving Father and Mother

In the depths of winter, a newborn girl was abandoned beside a garbage heap battered by wind and snow, simply because her biological parents wanted a boy. A kind, poor couple who made their living scavenging found her. With trembling hands and hearts burning with love, they pulled her back from the brink of death and named her Shen Nian'en. From then on, their crumbling shantytown was home to a family of three. Her adoptive parents poured their life’s savings and all their love and warmth into Nian'en, using the meager income they earned from scavenging. Clever and sensible, she blossomed amid hardship, like a white lotus stubbornly growing from the mud. After eighteen years of hardship and sacrifice, the girl became the province’s top scorer, with both Tsinghua and Peking University vying for her. When she suddenly became famous and shone like a star, the biological parents who had abandoned her appeared out of nowhere, weeping as they described the “difficulties” they faced back then, hoping to claim the fruit of someone else’s labor. Faced with their harassment, Shen Nian'en fixes them with a blazing gaze and says each word with steely resolve: “My father is the man who held me against his chest to warm me on that snowy night! My mother is the woman who picked up countless empty bottles just to buy me a dictionary! My admission letters from the country’s top universities were earned with their youth, health, and dignity! What gives you the right?”