In recent days, the historical drama “Lan Xiang Ru Gu” starring Tan Songyun and Liu Xueyi has sparked a wave of viewership frenzy. Aside from the main characters receiving much attention, actress Song Fangyuan, who plays the maid “Xiao Lian” in the drama, has captured the spotlight due to her real-life identity of being abandoned by her biological parents at the tender age of 5 months old, triggering sympathy and heated discussions among netizens.
Song Fangyuan had previously revealed on a program that she was abandoned by her biological parents when she was just 5 months old. Fortunately, her elderly and kind foster parents found her on their doorstep still in swaddling clothes and took her in to raise her.
Despite her foster parents having modest means, with her foster mother once peddling vegetables on a tricycle and her foster father running a bicycle repair stall, both now in their seventies, they have always treated Song Fangyuan as their own and supported her pursuit of her performing arts dreams.
In tears, Song Fangyuan once said to the camera on a program, “Mom and Dad, thank you very much for choosing to keep me back then, thank you for unconditionally supporting me from behind, I love you.”
In fact, Song Fangyuan had pondered about finding her biological parents. At the age of 20, she had checked the original abandoned infant registry through the civil affairs department, but the clues only led to a brief record at the local police station that year, with no contact information or further tracking record. She did not continue to dig deeper, stating, “It’s not that I don’t want to know, but I’m afraid that knowing might disrupt the peace of the family I have now.”
Song Fangyuan revealed that her foster father had a sudden stroke, his health deteriorated significantly, which became her driving force in striving hard in the entertainment industry. Tearfully, she expressed her greatest hope of being able to provide a good life for her elderly parents as soon as possible, “I’m afraid it’s too late” to repay their nurturing care. This filial piety has deeply moved countless netizens.
Now with the drama series gaining widespread popularity, the first thing Song Fangyuan did with her earnings was to replace the drafty old windows and install new air conditioning for her foster parents.
A graduate of Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Song Fangyuan officially debuted in 2017 through the girl group development program “I Was Born to be Me.” After entering the entertainment industry, she portrayed the stubborn and willful half-sister “Xiao Chengzi” in the 2020 family drama “In the Name of Family,” showcasing her natural and vivid acting skills. She subsequently appeared in several works such as “Where the Wind Blows,” “Changle Qu,” and “Pearl Curtain, Jade Screen.”
It is worth mentioning that this is the second collaboration between Song Fangyuan and Tan Songyun. In “In the Name of Family,” they played Li Jianjian and Xiao Chengzi; in “Lan Xiang Ru Gu,” they became each other’s protectors as master and servant. The fateful transition from sisters-in-law to master and servant has led many viewers to exclaim, “It really hits you in the feels.” Song Fangyuan vividly portrays the warmth, simplicity, and innocence of Du Xiaolian, with a stark contrast between on and off-screen persona, eliciting sincere blessings from fans wishing for her happiness both on and off the screen.
Song Fangyuan’s abandoned infant background is largely a product of the intertwining of the Chinese Communist Party’s family planning policy and the deep-rooted notion of “valuing boys over girls.” While her exact motives behind her biological parents’ actions remain unknown, from a macro historical perspective and demographic data, her experience is not an isolated case but rather a microcosm of the fate shared by a large number of female infants during that era.
Born in 1996, Song Fangyuan’s abandonment at the age of 5 months reflects the intense social backdrop of the conflicting “one-child policy” and “male-preference mindset” since the early 1980s when the CCP designated “family planning” as a fundamental national policy, strictly implementing the “one-child policy” nationwide. Faced with strict policy restrictions and penalties for having additional children, family reproductive quotas became extremely scarce. In cases where the first child was a girl, some families desperate for a male child would resort to concealing births, adoption, or abandoning female infants in order to avoid policy penalties and retain the opportunity to continue reproducing to “have a son.”
At the age of 20, Song Fangyuan chose not to delve deeper into finding her biological parents and instead redirected all her love and gratitude to her foster parents who had devoted their all to raising her, embodying the belief that “the kindness of upbringing outweighs the act of giving birth.”