"Do to others as you would have them do to you."
"Be compatible with love."
These are two family mottos of Zheng Meilan, a rural preacher from Shangrao, Jiangxi Province. They are also a good testimony of her life.
Zheng lives in Linghu Village, Lingxi Town, Xinzhou District, Shangrao, with her husband and two children.
Her foster parents, an old couple with dementia, stayed with them, too.
Zheng has cared for her parents for more than a decade. Last September her adoptive mother died, leaving her father alone.
Sister Zheng, originally from Meizhou, Guangdong, migrated to Jiangxi with her adoptive parents at one year old. She became a Christian at ten when her mother was nearly sixty. Her adoptive parents, who were her aunt and uncle, had a son who died of disease when he was a little boy. Then they adopted some children, but the children were taken away by their biological parents when they grew up. They felt disheartened. When the wife decided to adopt Zheng at 50, the husband disagreed with her, and even separated from her, so Zheng lived with the wife only.
When Zheng was a teenager, her birth parents wanted her to live with them in Guangdong, but she was loath to part from her adoptive parents.
Zheng started to support the family at 18. Two years later, knowing that the adoptive father they had lost contact with since adopting her had a car accident, she brought the injured father home in a wheelchair.
In 2010, her parents suffered from Alzheimer's disease. Zheng had to resign her kindergarten teacher job to look after them. In March 2017, she was selected for the "China's Virtuous People List" for her filial piety. Zheng was awarded "Excellent Mother Moving Shangrao" by the city's women's federation on May 10. Online media like JXNews reported her deeds.
Apart from taking care of her foster parents and her family, she is a member of a local women's literary society as well. She also serves as a volunteer Christian preacher.
She says that three organizations are very important to her: the church, the alumni association, and the literary society. "The church is my family and my father's household because God is my heavenly father and Jesus' bleeding love attracts me to follow him! I treat the alumni association as a sweet memory and our friendship is the purest! The literary society is like my parents' home where people with the same hobby gather. Their kindness and fraternity let me feel coziness in my parents' home!"
- Translated by Karen Luo
