Late at night, Chiao Li-hua quietly opens the door of her father's bedroom. For fear that he might catch a cold, she adjusts his quilt gently. Her soft touch wakes him up, and in the darkness he squints to see who she is. She softly strokes his head. "It's me, Dad. Sleep tight!" She remembers her childhood. Wasn't it her father's strong, warm hands that patted her and soothed her through many nights when she was sick or thinking of her mother?

The daughter

When Li-hua was growing up, "mom" was always a vague figure to her. There were many questions in the little girl's mind about her mother, and she often sat on the beach, staring at the vast sea and asking herself, "Why don't I have a mother?" For as long as she could remember, she had always lived with just her father. In time, she gradually learned that she had been adopted. Her mother had left her and her father, Chiao, and had gone to central Taiwan to join her six children from a previous marriage. Before he passed away, Chiao entrusted his daughter to the care of his good friend, Huang. At that time, baby Li-hua did not know about the existence of her mother or her half sisters and half brothers.

Huang, Li-hua's foster father, was originally a member of the Chinese military. He came to Taiwan via Vietnam in 1953 when he was thirty-eight years old. After retiring from the military in Taiwan, he settled in a fishing village in northern Taiwan where he made a living by doing odd jobs for a construction company. Life was hard for a bachelor with a little daughter, but he raised Li-hua with much love. Whenever he had to work overtime, he would take her to one of the households in the vicinity of the construction site and ask the housewife to look after her until he could pick her up after work.

Little Li-hua often sat on a rock near the construction site, watching her father climb a bamboo ladder with a load of bricks on his shoulders. Every step made the ladder sway and rattle. Looking at her father in these precarious situations, the young girl felt frightened and helpless. All she could do was to pray for him, "Dear bodhisattvas, please protect my dad, who is the only relative I have." Under the dim moonlight, she could not see the perspiration on her father's face. But from seeing him wipe his face, she could sense how much he suffered and how hard it was for him to earn a living.

The father

Huang often poked fun at himself, saying that he was just a simpleton who could not read or write. But whenever he received his salary, he would go into town and buy a book for Li-hua. Asked how he knew what book to buy for his daughter since he was illiterate, he laughed, "I have no education, but I do have a brain." When he went to the bookstore, he would give his daughter's age and ask the sales clerk to choose an appropriate book. These monthly book purchases were Li-hua's happiest moments.

Since they lived by the seashore, there was always the threat of typhoons. Whenever a storm was on its way, the coast guard would sound gongs to notify residents and tell them to take refuge in a nearby power plant on higher ground. There were no clanging gongs one night in August 1972 when heavy rains and strong winds were beating the shore. Huang anxiously kept going outside to check the situation. Suddenly, he rushed back in and grabbed Li-hua's hand with only one word, "Run!" They rushed out to a nearby hill as fast as their legs would carry them. Standing on top of the hill, they saw a huge tidal wave sweep away the village below. Li-hua fearfully clung to her father's trembling hands while he sighed helplessly.

There was another night when Li-hua in her sleep seemed to hear the indistinct crackling of firecrackers. All of a sudden, she felt herself being wrapped up in a quilt and carried out in someone's arms. She instinctively struggled, but the arms held her so tightly that she was unable to free herself. When she was finally put down on the ground, she found her father standing beside her. Their house was on fire and he had risked his life to rescue her.

Keeping his promise to his dear friend, Huang cared for Li-hua, educated her and protected her. The neighbors who saw how well he treated her held him in high regard. The village elders often reminded Li-hua that she owed much more to her foster father than to her natural parents.

The mother

One day, Li-hua received a letter from her half sister informing her that their mother was ill and that none of her children was willing to take care of her. The sister asked Li-hua to convince her foster father to let her mother live with him.

Li-hua had mixed feelings in her heart. She had never seen her mother and hated her for having deserted her as an infant. She had had to rely on neighbors and her classmates' mothers to teach her how to do the daily chores of cooking, washing and mending clothes. Why had her mother abandoned her? The question kept lingering in her mind. She hid the letter under her pillow without telling her father. Two weeks later, her sister sent another letter, repeating her request. Li-hua thought of her mother being ill, and she began to feel sympathy for her. However, when she finally asked her father to take her mother in, he remained silent. How could a little girl understand her father's reluctance and embarrassment about living with a strange woman? She tried every method to get her father to agree, begging him one moment and quarreling unreasonably with him the next. At last, he agreed.

When her mother moved in with them in 1975, Li-hua was a junior high school student. Perhaps out of a sense of shame that these two parents of hers were living together but were not married, Li-hua decided to help them out. Unbeknownst to either of them, she took her mother's and her foster father's identification papers to the town hall and told the woman at the counter that she wanted to register the marriage for her parents. Surprised and confused, the woman pointed out, "It takes a magistrate and a witness to complete a marriage procedure, little girl." After listening to Li-hua's explanation, the woman thought it over and offered a solution: she would sign for the magistrate on the registration form, and Li-hua could serve as witness. "What a silly thing to do," Li-hua recalled with embarrassment. "But at that moment, I thought I had done the most important and meaningful thing in my life."

"Every mother in the world loves her children," Li-hua's mother once explained to her when she talked about how she had had no choice but to leave her when she was little. But Li-hua could not forgive her. She had asked her father to take her mother in out of a sense of obligation, because she was her daughter.

Her mother was not as sick as Li-hua had originally imagined, but not long after she came to live with them, she was accidentally hit by a boy running after a ball. She became bedridden, and in time she also became senile. For eight years, until her death in 1983, Huang took care of her every day, feeding her and changing her diapers without complaining. Since Li-hua had gone away to work in Taipei after graduating from junior high, her contribution was limited to helping out when she came home over the weekends. One time just as Li-hua was about to change her mother's diaper, her mother had a sudden bowel movement and some of it landed in Li-hua's palms. Li-hua was enraged and berated her mother. "I know I owe you so much," her mother whispered apologetically, like a child who had made a mistake. "I will bless you after I die." Li-hua felt guilty and her heart ached, but she did not know how to express her remorse. After they stepped out from the bathroom, Huang spoke tenderly to Li-hua: "It was your idea to bring your mother into our home. You take care of her just once a week, and yet you lose your patience. What do you think I have to do for the rest of the week?" Li-hua felt ashamed of her coldness to her mother. During the years Huang took care of her mother, she never had any bedsores. How much patience and effort he must have had to give her such good care.

The great vow

In 1984, when Li-hua got married and moved to Taipei, Huang insisted on staying on in the village, though they frequently visited each other. A former neighbor recently called Li-hua to say that her father had been admitted to a hospital in Taipei. In the emergency room, the doctor told Li-hua that her father had cancer and had anywhere from two months to two years to live. Though she was shocked to hear the news, she accepted the fact calmly. Three years earlier, she had become a Tzu Chi member and since then had often joined others in chanting for the dead. As a result, she had no fear of death. Her primary concern now was to diminish her father's pain and make him more comfortable.

Following Master Cheng Yen's words that "There are two things that cannot wait to be done: doing good deeds and paying respect to your parents," Li-hua spared no effort in looking after her father. Besides giving him daily care, she taught him about Buddhism and told him stories of other Tzu Chi members in the hope of bringing him inner peace. She also talked to him about donating his body for medical research. Perhaps because of the traditional Chinese custom that one should be buried as a whole person in order to have peace after death, he responded coldly. "It's up to you."

"Tzu Chi is like a sweet home in which many people helped me a lot," says Li-hua with much gratitude. During the time Huang was hospitalized, many of her Tzu Chi friends prepared meals for him and visited him to keep him company while Li-hua was at work. Earlier, Huang had not liked it when Li-hua spent too much time at Tzu Chi activities, but through these goodhearted Tzu Chi members he realized that his daughter was a kind, helpful person.

One day, when Huang asked Li-hua about his condition, she could not bear evading his question any more and told him the truth. Without anger or sadness, he asked calmly, "Why don't you take me to Hualien to visit the Abode of Still Thoughts, where Master Cheng Yen lives?"

As soon as Huang was released from the hospital after a two-month stay, they went to Hualien. While visiting the Tzu Chi College of Medicine there, her father--to Li-hua's sur-prise--asked to register for body donation. Fearing that he might regret this decision later, she asked him to take some time to think it over. "There's no need to think it over," he replied firmly. "It's a good thing to leave my useless body for the students." He signed the body donation form right on the spot, and then he knelt down before the statue of the Great Vow Bodhisattva and prayed: "Dear bodhisattva, I've decided to donate my body. Please make sure it happens that way." His resolution moved everyone there.

Though busy taking care of her father, Li-hua completed a series of training classes and was certified as a Tzu Chi commissioner in January 1999. She also helped her father to become a Tzu Chi Honorary Board member by making a major donation to be used to help the needy. Since Huang is still well enough, the two often participate in Tzu Chi activities together. He once told Li-hua that in return for her loving care of him, he hoped to be her child in his next life. "We don't owe each other anything," Li-hua told him, "because without you, I would not be what I am today."