In death, a two-year-old girl offers a lesson in humanity

Like morticians who have been at their jobs too long, journalists sometimes become inured to death. The steady stream of “bad news” that one deals with in the line of duty – be they assassinations or even just road accidents – and the cool professionalism that is required to be summoned up even in such trying situations renders some of us less than sensitive to the very human emotions associated with death. Empathy is something of a luxury when you’re on a stiff deadline. Emotion is an absolute interference, a static noise that’s best blotted out.

I remember how, as a journalism student in Delhi in 1984, I rushed over one October morning to the All India Institute of Medical Science, where a Prime Minister, who had been shot at by her security guards barely hours earlier, was being operated upon.

Flashing a fake ID at the security gates, I gained admittance – and remained at the hospital for hours, tagging along with the real journalists who were on the job - or just gawking at the stream of VVIPs and politicians who were trooping in. I was in a wonderland of newspersons, and I don’t reckon I was particularly disturbed by the thought that the Prime Minister lay dying inside.

But every once in a while, along comes news of a death that leaves your heart bowed down with the weight of woe. One such death, which happened overnight, has had me grieving all morning.

No, I don’t mean the bloody killing of an Arab dictator and Africa’s longest-ruling despot . As a news junkie, I was if anything turned on by that one.

The death that has had me reeling all morning is of a two-year-old girl, a stranger who, barely a week ago, I didn’t know existed. And even today, having never met her, she’s only an idea. Yet, in the week gone by, it’s fair to say that the tragedy that befell her has struck a deep and sympathetic cord in anyone who’s heard her story.

I refer, of course, to Wang Yue (or ‘Xiao’ Yueyue as she was better known), the two-year-old toddler who was run over (twice) in a busy and prosperous town in southern China a week ago – and was left bleeding for more than 10 minutes by the roadside, pointedly ignored by passersby, until a 59-year-old scrap recycler came upon her. ( More on that incident, including the deeply disturbing surveillance camera video, here .)

Little Yueyue passed away a little after midnight. For a week, she lay in the intensive care unit of a Guangzhou hospital, but despite receiving the best medical attention, she succumbed to her grievous injuries.

In the week gone by, Yueyue’s tragic story – and particularly the fact that many passersby did not help her as she lay dying - has had all of China outraged and in anguish, leaving millions wondering if in the frenetic pursuit of riches, many Chinese citizens have lost the very essence of humanity. On social media platforms in China, a society in collective shame is invoking the phrase “We are all passersby”  to take personal ownership for the failure to protect Yueyue.

Some of the general apathy in emergency situations in China, as we noted, can be traced to worries about legal liability that Good Samaritans may be subjected to. In any case, it isn’t just China that is witnessing societal decay and an erosion in moral values.

But tragic as Yueyue’s story is, and high though the price she has paid, some elements of the narrative, which has been reported all around the world, offer some hope that her life, brief though it was, will inspire a societal revolution, a moral reawakening – and a general reorientation in the way millions of people (in China and elsewhere) look upon their lives and the priorities they assign in it.

Cities and towns across China are now actively considering laws to protect Good Samaritans from legal liability if they intervene in cases such as this. And although it can be argued that it shouldn’t need a law for people to summon up reflexive goodness of heart in emergency situations, it’s a legislative legacy that will honour Xiao Yueyue’s memory for eternity.

And as much as the apathy of passersby has occasioned much societal heartburn, the episode also showed up the selflessness of an aged woman who intervened out of empathy – and who is today being feted as an icon.

On a more personal level, with the waves of grief that she’s triggered in even one so hardened as I, little Yueyue gives me reason to hope that perhaps I’m occasionally still capable of a little empathy – and therefore not entirely beyond redemption.

Farewell, Xiao Yueyue. May the angels protect you and nurse you in a way that we humans singularly failed to…