Her home - sparsely furnished wooden farmhouse with bare cement floor and rusty zinc roof. She tends to her farm and she harvests what she can for sale at the morning market in Sungai Pelek, Sepang. She cycles 3km to the market on a nearly two decade-old but trusty bicycle with her crop of ladyfingers, spinach and sweet potato leaves, which will earn her RM20 to RM30 daily.
The bicycle has seen better days, and so has her humble abode of 56 years. Yang is not poverty stricken, nor is she neglected by her adult children, who have done well for themselves. The true salt of the earth has a clockwork routine as she works the land in the morning with a pick, shovel and hoe, sells vegetables at the market, and stitches floor mats in the afternoon before returning to work on the farm again in the evening.
She does all these, not out of need, but in order to raise enough money to donate to charity. Although she doesn’t fit the image of a typical philanthropist, Yang is without a doubt an exemplary benevolent old woman, who gives credence to the oft-said statement that the poor are often the most generous people because they know what it is like to be without anything.
Yang has given all her disposal income in the last 10 years to charity. She has donated over RM40,000 to more than 10 charitable, educational and religious groups including schools and dialysis centres, apart from down-and-out individuals desperate for help. “My next plan is to donate RM3,200 to a local dialysis centre, and I am saving up for that day.
I am only able to save at most RM200 monthly, I still have a long way to go to meet my next target,” she tells The Heat. The dice of life was not cast favourably for this old woman with a heart of gold. In spite of, or rather due to, her impoverished childhood, Yang has always been a generous soul.
Her migrant parents left China in the early 1900s in search of a better life and settled in Port Dickson, but the opium smoking habit of her father stood in the way of that dream.
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