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.
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