A viral video about the impending closure of a Beijing charity hospital treating children with cleft lip and palate has drawn fresh attention to a condition that affects about 25,000 newborns in China every year.

Since 2012, the nonprofit Smile Angel Children’s Hospital, in the capital’s eastern Chaoyang District, has performed more than 11,000 free surgeries on patients with the congenital defect, which can result in openings in the upper lip and roof of the mouth.

However, on Jan. 14, Li Yapeng — a former actor and the hospital’s legal representative — posted a video on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to reveal that the charity was in massive rent arrears and may be forced to close under a court ruling. He said the hospital’s rent had nearly doubled since 2019.

The video, in which Li also promised to continue helping child patients through other means, led netizens to donate 26 million yuan ($3.78 million) to the hospital within just days.

The Paper recently spoke with cleft lip patients whose long journeys of treatment and reconstruction have shaped their lives in distinct ways, as well as their relatives. Here, they share their struggle and how they are paying forward the kindness they received.

Li Minmin, 29-year-old patient

I was born with a cleft lip and palate in 1997 in the countryside of Chengdu, capital of the southwestern Sichuan province. My father rejected me, so it was my mother and grandmother who brought me home.

When I was little, even drinking water was a challenge, and I couldn’t speak clearly because of a large hole in the roof of my mouth. The other children wouldn’t play with me and sometimes bullied me. I had very low self-esteem.

Back then, I didn’t know surgery was an option. It was only in 2006, the year of my first operation, that I learned what the treatment involved.

My mom sold vegetables at a street stall. One day, she overheard someone talking about a celebrity-sponsored program that offered free surgeries for children with a cleft lip or palate. My mom immediately applied.

I was 9 when she took me for a health check, and soon after I had surgery to repair my lip. I don’t recall much about it. Smile Angel Hospital didn’t exist then; it was the Smile Angel Foundation (Editor’s note: In 2006, Li Yapeng and his then wife, singer-songwriter Faye Wong, founded the charity to support patients from low-income backgrounds) that covered the costs of that operation. I learned from my mother that Li and Wong’s daughter had the same condition.

When I saw other children like me for the first time at the hospital, I began to feel less alone. But I still felt profoundly insecure even after the surgery. I envied other people’s beautiful mouths and noses. It wasn’t just about my appearance; I also couldn’t speak clearly, and nobody wanted to be my friend.

At 14, I dropped out of middle school. One reason was my father, who was abusive and would often hit people when he got drunk. It was also because I felt deeply ashamed of my cleft lip and palate. I felt that none of my classmates liked me, so I eventually lost the will to study.

My mom found me a job washing hair at a salon. Most of the people there were her acquaintances, but I was unhappy. I barely spoke, felt lost, and just wanted to escape. Soon after, I moved to Huizhou (in the southern Guangdong province) and got a job in a toy factory, sewing backpacks and dolls.

Two years later, I returned to Chengdu and started working at a food company that specifically hired people with disabilities. At first, I kept to myself, but I soon discovered that many of my colleagues were incredibly friendly. Over time, I started to enjoy communicating with people.

I was always afraid of being rejected, but my coworkers at the toy factory and the food company never looked down on me for my speech impediment. Gradually, I came out of my shell.

Maybe it was leaving the place I grew up and experiencing new things that helped lift the weight of those suppressed childhood memories. I felt free and more secure.

Now I enjoy meeting people, and I’m slowly opening up. In 2010, I had two operations, roughly six months apart. I then had surgery to reconstruct my upper lip in 2015 — before that, I had no upper lip at all.

After my lip was repaired, I learned to do my makeup and started to feel like I looked presentable. Then, in 2021, I had nose surgery. My nose used to be large, wide, and flat, without much definition. After the surgery, my confidence soared.

My surgeries in 2010 and 2015 cost more than 30,000 yuan in total. Nose surgery costs nearly 70,000 yuan.

In time, I met the man who is now my husband. We got married last year. I used to be convinced I was flawed, but I’ve come to terms with things. No one is perfect, but everyone is equal. You have to open your heart, reach out to people, and embrace life — that’s how healing begins.

We’re now trying for a baby. I asked my husband, “What if the cleft is hereditary?” He said, “It’s fine. If it happens, we’ll just get it treated.”

Because of the help I received from Li and Wong, when the news broke about the hospital, my mom and I both donated money. I’ve never publicly shared photos of my younger self, but to stand up for the people who helped us, I wanted to share my story.

Yang Fen, father of a 16-year-old patient

During pregnancy, our baby always had his hands covering his head, so we couldn’t see his face on the ultrasound. It wasn’t until he was born in 2010 that we discovered he had a congenital cleft lip and palate. It felt as if the ground had fallen out from beneath our feet.

My wife and I were in our 20s. We had no money and no idea what to do. We went to so many hospitals, but they all told us they couldn’t perform the surgery. Then I started searching online and stumbled upon the Smile Angel Foundation. After verifying our son’s condition over a video call, they guided me through every step of the application process.

We needed a poverty certificate from our local government (in the southwestern Guizhou province), and we had to complete routine examinations, including blood work. When our son was 6 months old, we collected the certificate and hospital test results and traveled to the Smile Action Charity Hospital in Hangzhou (capital of the eastern Zhejiang province) for our son’s surgery.

Except for our travel expenses, almost everything was taken care of. Even my wife’s meals were covered by the foundation. I remember seeing many other families there with children just like ours, and they had also received support from the Smile Angel Foundation. We were so incredibly grateful.

Treating a cleft lip and palate requires multiple surgeries, and the foundation covered only the first operation. After that, the hospital told us that our son would need a second procedure when he turned 10 years old.

When my son was little, he didn’t really understand his condition or pay much attention to the fact that he looked different from other kids. But at age 8 or 9, when other children began asking him about his face, he started feeling confused. He said one day that he’d told them he’d fallen and gotten hurt.

That was when I decided to tell him everything. I said to him, “It’s not your fault. Next time, just tell them the truth. No matter what they think, you are still you.” He seemed self-conscious, but after that conversation, he never brought it up again.

We never felt any shame or rejection toward our son, but we decided not to have a second child. I felt it would be unfair to him. We might end up giving them more attention.

When our son was 10, I fell seriously ill. I couldn’t work for a year or two, and we struggled financially. That was when we were supposed to take him for his second surgery. But we owned a car and no longer qualified for financial support. Without the poverty certificate, the surgery was repeatedly postponed.

I’d also lost contact with the Smile Angel Foundation. It wasn’t until a few days ago, when I was scrolling through Douyin, that I learned the Smile Angel Hospital existed and that the foundation had continued all these years.

I used to work in a factory, but after my health problems I had to quit and set up a small roadside stall to make a living. It wasn’t until last year that we finally managed to save enough for our son’s second surgery. This time, we went to the Second Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University (in Zhejiang). It cost us more than 10,000 yuan. There are still maybe three surgeries left to go, and each may cost 10,000 to 20,000 yuan.

It’s not easy, but as long as everyone is safe and healthy, we’ll find a way.

My son’s 16 now. He has an outgoing personality and gets along well with his teachers and classmates. He loves basketball and is on the school team. Slowly, he has begun to accept himself from the inside. His cleft is still quite noticeable, but no one has ever brought it up with us. We just hope everyone treats him like anyone else.

For families like ours, we just hope to do our absolute best. The doctor told us early on that a complete recovery is impossible; there will always be scarring.

To be honest, I’ve never wanted to talk about any of this. If it weren’t for the news about the hospital, I would never have shared my son’s old photos. Those have been kept private on my blog for 15 years. I can’t even bear to look at them. I just hope the foundation can continue its work and help more families like ours.

Liu Qiaohang, patient in his 30s

I underwent my first surgery immediately after being born, as severe cleft lip and palate cases like mine can be life-threatening without early intervention.

I had additional surgeries to address various complications in primary and middle school, though none resulted in any fundamental improvement. My cleft was on the left side, completely blocking my left nostril. This forced me to rely solely on my right side for breathing, leaving me constantly short of breath.

Speech was another challenge. The upper palate and teeth of a cleft patient have gaps, allowing air to escape. So effective speech requires professional therapy, ideally from early childhood. I speak normally now, but that’s the result of surgery and years of practice.

Money was tight when I was growing up, and medical technology wasn’t what it is today, so my early surgeries didn’t turn out so well. My cleft affected the muscles in my face, which made reconstruction complex. I was also born without a nasal septum, meaning I had to undergo more operations in my 20s.

I went through surgery after surgery. It left scars not only on my body, but on my mind. I was a thin, frail kid, and my face was different. It made me an easy target for the other children. I did well academically and got into the top schools in my area, but none of that mattered. I was still treated like an outcast.

For most of my childhood, I didn’t even know I had a cleft lip and palate. All my friends and relatives, my parents included, told me the same story: “You fell down the stairs as a baby and hurt your face.” Back then I had no nasal bone — my nose was flat and tilted to one side. I had scars on my lip, and one side was pure white. I looked like an alien.

The first time anyone new met me, they would inevitably ask, “What happened to your face?” My heart would sink every time. I never knew what to say. I grew terrified of meeting new people.

My eyes are actually good-looking, but the cleft made the lower half of my face look strange. In school, some girls found me attractive from a distance, but the moment they got close, they would pull away.

I developed severe depression. I would act out, sometimes flying into rages. My family found me a therapist, but it didn’t help.

I struggled with thoughts of ending my life. I was living with my grandparents, and the only thing that kept me going was the thought that I would follow them once they passed away. I’m an only child, and my grandparents adored me. Without them, I probably wouldn’t be here today.

In university, I started a business to prove myself. By my junior year, I had made some money, and my depression eased as I threw myself into work. I stopped fixating on my lip.

One day, while chatting with a business partner, he said, “You’ve recovered really well.” I was stunned and asked, “Recovered from what?” He replied, “Your lip.” That was when it hit me: I had a cleft lip and palate.

When I was little, my parents showed me a photo of myself. It was black and white, blurry, taken at an angle that hid my lip. “Look,” they said, “you were perfectly normal as a baby.”

It wasn’t until I was grown and decided to pursue further surgery that they broke down in tears and told me the truth. My mother had learned about the cleft during an ultrasound. The hospital advised her to terminate the pregnancy, but she refused. My parents had also tried to apply for funding from the Smile Angel Foundation, but they weren’t approved.

Eventually, I found experienced doctors and underwent many more surgeries to get to where I am today. After each surgery, once the swelling had gone down and the stitches removed, I would look in the mirror and barely recognize myself. It wasn’t until 2023, after my last nose surgery, that I finally knew what it felt like to breathe normally. Only then did I feel comfortable looking directly into a camera.

Later, I had a beard transplant to hide the scars. The follicles came from my scalp, and each hair contained stem cells that help repair the lip tissue. Now you can barely tell I was once a cleft patient unless you look very closely, as the shape of my mouth is still a little unusual when I speak.

But the shadow of my childhood lingers. A deep sense of insecurity remains. I often wake up in tears in the middle of the night. I’ve consulted many therapists, but nothing has worked. I find myself revisiting things from childhood — worrying about how people see me, and dwelling on the harm they caused. It weighs on me enormously.

I only found the courage to talk openly about this this year. As soon as the news broke about the Smile Angel Children’s Hospital, my phone started blowing up with messages. After looking more deeply into the situation, I decided to donate 100,000 yuan. My reason was simple: I don’t want others to endure my suffering. If money can ease the pain, I want the foundation to continue its work.

Li Yapeng once asked me, “Do you hope to be a role model for the many children with cleft lip and palate today?” I said yes and no. I do, because I want to show them what’s possible. But I also don’t, because I would never wish that kind of pain on anyone.

(Due to privacy concerns, Li Minmin and Yang Fen are pseudonyms.)

As told to reporters Zhang Cai’er and Ming Que.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Paper. It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Chen Yue; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header image: Visuals from VectorStock/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)