Game-addicted Chinese mom burns, abandons daughter

Warning: this story is likely to make you very angry.

Back in the winter of 2009, Mr. and Mrs. Zhu were a happy family. The couple, who were living in Anhui at the time, had just given birth to their first child, a daughter named Qian Qian. They had plans to move into the city and make a better life for themselves. Things were looking up.

Five years later, Mrs. Zhu was nowhere to be found. Mr. Zhu was arrested for stealing crackers and a few dollars from a food truck. And Qian Qian was living in conditions that can only be described as horrific. At the center of the family’s decent into nightmare: online games.

(See: Two young Chinese gamers killed in fight over internet cafe broadband speed)

After the family moved to Wuxi in 2009, Mrs. Zhu got into online games, and fairly quickly became addicted. Things got very bad very fast. When Qian Qian was only two years old, she accidentally stumbled into her mother’s computer cord, disconnecting the power and abruptly entering her mom’s gaming session. Flying into a rage, Mrs. Zhu poured a cup of scalding water onto her young daughter, causing permanent scarring on her stomach and one leg (pictured below).

In July of 2013, Mr. Zhu came home from work one day to find that Mrs. Zhu had disappeared, presumably to play games, leaving Qian Qian home alone. She couldn’t be found and she never returned, so Mr. Zhu and his daughter were on their own.

Unfortunately, that’s not where their bad luck ended. Zhu lost his job. Relatives wouldn’t or couldn’t help out looking after Qian Qian, and a serious illness quickly drained away their savings. By 2014, father and daughter were living in a filthy underground garage, subsisting on scraps of food from the garbage. Their home, such as it was, is pictured below.