A dedicated husband, a determined man

Thirty-three years ago, Xie Yanxin promised his dying wife he would take care of her elderly parents and mentally challenged brother. But he never thought fulfilling his promise would make him a national icon for humanitarianism.

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Xie Yanxin

"I made a promise and I had to keep it. You have to follow your conscience," Xie, the 55-year-old retired electrician from Henan province has told Renmin Net.

But he was not born with the Xie family name. So how did he get it? He had only been married for a year when his wife died after giving birth to their daughter. To show that he meant every word he had promised his wife, he dropped his family name of Liu and adopted that of his in-laws who live in Huaxian, Henan province.

Last night, Xie was honored by China Central Television (CCTV) as one of the 10 "People Who Moved China". Began in 2001, the annual awards have become one of the country's most publicized events, for they honor the moral strength of ordinary people.

Xie has dedicated himself to nursing his in-laws, and working hard to support them. Keeping the promise became a bigger challenge when a stroke paralyzed his father-in-law in 1979. Since then, Xie has fed, massaged and washed the old man every day ever since.

To make life easier for his bed-ridden father-in-law, Xie has borrowed more than 100 fantasy novels from the local library and read them out to him every night.

His mentally challenged brother-in-law, too, depends on Xie for everything.

Taking care of the family took up so much of Xie's energy that he had to send his five-year-old daughter Liu Bianying to his own parents.

To this day, Xie remembers the sound of his daughter crying as she watched him walk away from her without looking back. "It's not that I'm cruel, I just couldn't turn back," he says.

Now a mother herself, Liu says she can understand her father. "I don't blame him he taught me to be honest, pious and frugal."

There were times when Xie was forced to collect throwaways at markets. He pickled the vegetables he used to get so that they would last longer, and the entire family dined on them till he found work in a coal mine in Jiaozuo in 1983.

The exhausting work earned him only 400 yuan a month. The first time he got paid, Xie bought a radio so that his father-in-law could listen to his favorite local opera.

In 2003, Xie suffered a brain hemorrhage that slowed down his reflexes. He lost much of his long-term memory, too.

His daughter cannot fight back the tears when she remembers the tough days, but Xie takes the misfortune lightly. "Others eat a little better, we eat a little worse; others dress a little better, we dress a little worse. Life goes on," he says.

"Without him, the family would have collapsed a long time ago," says Xie's mother-in-law.

With the help from his employers and neighbors, Xie managed to keep the family together through it all. In the first decade after his wife's death, he refused to remarry because he felt he couldn't just walk away from his responsibilities.

When he eventually did start his own family again, his second wife agreed to take care of his previous in-laws. （By Xu Chunzi (China Daily)）