Cute and surreal at the same. Yet if 2020 hadn’t happened, we would probably find this tale too incredulous to be real, too downright bizarre to be true. A 7-year-old girl, standing before HAZMAT-clad nurses, dancing.
Had lunacy gripped Nanjing? Were the nurses there to perhaps cart her off for an unspecified and no doubt terrifying psychological examination of some kind? No, the little girl was simply expressing her gratitude, in her own special way.
And now, the touching scene has gone viral.
The video was shot at 07:00 on 8 August, after Yi Yingjie and He Yuxue, members of a medical team supported by Nanjing Stomatological Hospital, went to Yangshuwan Community in Lukou Subdistrict of Jiangning, to once again perform NAT testing.
That which greeted them brought them to tears. A masked-up little girl, barely a metre tall, stood in the gateway of her rural home, and began her routine for the two nurses.
In an article published today by the Yangtze Evening News, the little girl’s mother said that the child saw many “angels in white” working hard every day on the internet. So she especially understood the medical staff who carried out the NATs and wanted to dance for them to express her gratitude.
The girl’s dance, which is almost a minute long, can be watched via this link.
Yi spoke with reporters. “I felt very warm at that time. Tears kept welling up in my eyes”, he said. Seeing the little girl dancing, his testing partner also felt very happy and wanted to cry. Although very busy during this period, as medical staff, she said all her efforts have been worth it.
Before leaving, she kindly told the little girl, “Thank you. We will continue to work hard. You should wash your hands and frequently ventilate your home. Don’t go out”.
Other than an occasional, “You’re doing great job”, nurses such as Yi and He receive little more than more grunted thanks for their unremitting efforts. But it’s the scenes like this that played out in Nanjing on Sunday that help keep us human and the nurses hard at it. And remind us that we haven’t gone completely bonkers.
