An 85-year-old Taoyuan resident was honored on Friday with a Filial Piety Award for looking after his elder brother’s centenarian wife to repay the kindness she showed in raising her brother-in-law when he was young.
Chou Ting-li (周鼎立), the oldest of the 30 winners of this year’s Filial Piety Award, was brought to Jiangxi Province by his elder brother and his wife when he was 11 years old because the family’s hometown in China was plagued by drought and pestilence.
He later came to Taiwan with the army unit in which he was serving.
Chou said all of the clothes he wore during his childhood were sewn by his sister-in-law, who is now 100 years old and has been suffering from dementia for eight years.
Chou said his sister-in-law’s physical condition has worsened as she has gotten older, and he moved to Taoyuan from Greater Tainan to live with her and also hired a full-time caregiver to attend to her.
Despite his age, Chou said he was still healthy and felt like he was in his 30s or 40s.
The youngest recipient of the award this year was 14-year-old Wang Chi-lung (王志龍) from Changhua County. Wang’s father survived a heart attack in 2009, but his recovery did not go well and he had to have his right foot amputated.
Since then, Wang has become his father’s “right foot,” helping push his father’s wheelchair when they visit doctor, emptying and cleaning his father’s chamber pot and bathing him.
This year was also the first time one of the award recipients was a foreign spouse of a Taiwanese national.
Pan Yu-lien (潘玉蓮), an Indonesian native, has been the primary income earner for her family since her husband became paralyzed after a severe illness. Despite the challenge, she has not brushed aside her responsibility, instead assimilating herself into Taiwanese society and looking after her parents-in-law and raising her children.
The 30 awards went to 19 male and 11 female recipients, with 11 winners aged 20 or younger and five aged 60 or older, according to Ministry of the Interior data.
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires