Watch part two

Filmmaker: Bryan Seah

Chen Shangyi makes a living as a scavenger. One day he saw a crowd clustered around a white bundle at the local train station while he was hunting for empty soda cans and soy sauce bottles, he could not resist taking a peek. It was a baby, wrapped in a thin sheet.

"Everybody was just looking. Nobody would do anything," recalls Chen, who was 65, already retirement age, on that bitterly cold, snowy day 17 years ago.

"When I took her home, she was frozen stiff. My wife and I wrapped her in a burlap bag ... we started a fire. We fed her soup and put some old clothes on her, a while later, she started to wiggle." Chen named her Ling Ling.

Today, the sturdy 82-year-old with deep lines on his sun-baked face still makes a living as a scavenger in Dingxi, a remote Chinese town of 460,000 people on the edge of the Gobi desert. And he is still bringing home children - 42 in all, at last count.

Many were abandoned because they had been born with some form of physical disability. Over the years, Chen has developed such a reputation as a keeper of cast-away kids that even the local officials send them his way. They know Chen would not reject any youngster, no matter what imperfections the child had.

"Nobody else wants them because they are afraid of trouble," says Chen's 81-year-old wife, Wang.

"They think these children are dirty. But I pity them. They are human beings."

Disabled orphans

As the most populous nation, China is home to the largest disabled population in the world: about 80 million. Despite a 14-year-old anti-discrimination law that guarantees equal rights, society's attitude toward the disabled has been slow to change. Disabled access in public places is rare. Employment prospects are grim.

For some Chinese parents, the prospect of watching their disabled children experience a lifetime of stigma is too terrible to bear. According to recent media reports, Beijing police took in more than 400 children abandoned in the Chinese capital alone last year, about 80 per cent of them born with physical deformities, organ abnormalities or mental impairment.

In Dingxi, local officials say they send castaway children to Chen because they have no other way of caring for them. A new orphanage sits empty - it takes too much money to operate it.

Difficult times

Even when the children are doing well, it is not easy to support such a large family on the income of a scavenger.

Baby formula is expensive. So Chen and Wang mix it with flour. Food is expensive. So they often serve only plain rice. In recent years, they have met kind people who have donated money for some daily necessities and medical procedures, but the family still lives frugally.

But, now Chen worries that local officials may take his children away on the grounds that he is too old to be their caretaker. He believes a recent flurry of media reports about the children that suggested official negligence have embarrassed the officials.

Chen says he cannot trust the government to do what is best for the children. He said local officials continued to offer him abandoned children until only a few years ago.

"They'll have to kill me first before I'll let them take the kids away."