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Seven years ago, in China’s Hunan Province in the town of Zhongsha, a boy called Huikang was born. His mother, Yi Lianxi, burst into tears the moment she saw her son’s face.
Despite having gone through all the necessary, routine scans during pregnancy, Yi wasn’t told that her son would be born with a disfiguring birth defect on his face.
Huikang’s face is deformed. A huge transverse facial cleft under his cheeks makes him look like he’s wearing a mask – or has two faces. There are huge gaps that lead from his mouth to his ears.
It wasn’t long until Huikang earned the unfortunate nickname “mask boy.”
“My whole body went numb,” Yi recalled of her son’s birth. “I saw the child was crying, and I cried too. I felt my heart had broken. Why would this happen to me?”
The now 30-year-old mother continues to be devastated by her son’s appearance because she had no idea that her son would turn out this way, and there was nothing she could do about it at this point.
In the past seven years, Huikang and Yi’s story has been reported and shared widely around China.
Strangers and media platforms around the country constantly offer the family their sympathy, who not only have to live with the psychological effects of Huikang’s defect – but also the mounting medical bills as they visit doctors in hopes of finding a way to give the boy a more “normal” appearance. Various fundraisers have been held over the years to support the family.
Doctors, however, are uncertain they can be successful. “Not only his soft tissues were damaged, broken and moved, his temporal bone, cheekbones, sphenoid bone and upper jaw were all damaged.”
In 2010, the family finally raised enough money to pay for surgical operations that would, hopefully, restore Huikang’s face.
Although the two procedures both happened at least six years ago now, doctors are waiting another four years before they make any statement about how successful these operations were.
We hope that this little boy will soon have a chance to a normal life.
