Grandma A-Jin

The first time we met Grandma A-Jin, it was raining. In Taiwanese she said, "My heart is so bitter, I can't put it into words." It took a long time before she was willing to tell us her story.

A-Jin was born in a small town in southern Taiwan. As young girls, she and her sisters were all sent to other families as child brides. When she was seven or eight, her adoptive parents passed away one after another, and she had no choice but to return home — only to find her mother did not welcome her, threatening her with a knife to make her leave. She walked a long way to seek refuge with an aunt, spending her days caring for children, gathering firewood, and drawing water from the well.

"Why did my mother give me away? Why did she drive me out?" Her mother's rejection wounded her young heart deeply, and even after seventy years, she still cannot let it go. Seeing A-Jin's tears, we comforted her with Scripture: "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast... though she may forget, I will not forget you" (Isaiah 49:15). The pain of being abandoned by a parent can be healed in the love of God.

A-Jin is now in her seventies, possibly the oldest sex worker among the women of Wanhua. Her husband passed away forty years ago, and her three sons all live with varying degrees of disability. She says with a sigh, "I have nothing to leave my sons, so while I can still work, I'll help them as much as I can."

Though she often eats nothing but cereal or salted egg with rice for her meals, she is warmly generous with friends — once she boiled some eggs and insisted we take two. May God Himself become her refuge and her support.