In 2009, she got a phone call.
The person on the other end asked her: "There's a kitten here that nobody wants. Can I send it to you?"
She asked: "If I don't take it, what happens to it?"
The person said: "It will probably die."
That was the sentence that softened her.
By then she had already walked a long stretch of her life. When she was young she had been a writer. She had published bestsellers, and she had had her moments of being seen and praised. But later in life, many of the things the outside world had once defined as "success" slowly became less important.
And the arrival of that kitten brought a different kind of meaning in front of her.
Starting with that first cat, her life slowly changed. At first, it was just people sending over kittens they didn't want. Later, more and more people came to know that she was willing to take cats in. The abandoned ones, the ones that were too young, the sick ones, the ones with no one to care for them, even some that had to be given up because their original owners couldn't afford the medical bills, were sent to her one after another.
She did not see them as trouble.
She simply felt that each one was a life.
Over more than ten years, she came to know many other people doing animal rescue. They were scattered in different places, yet they were connected to each other by the same belief. They shared experience, reminded each other of things, and taught newcomers how to care for cats, how to read a cat's condition, and how to help them as much as possible when resources were limited.
She says that in this process she has met many people with genuine compassion.
Not to be praised, and not to perform kindness.
Only because they truly believe these small lives deserve to be taken seriously.
Today, she is 75 years old. Not long ago she had a very serious spinal operation. Because of her age, and because she had been through major surgery, she can no longer bend over or lift things as often as she used to, and many movements have become difficult.
But she is still doing it.
There are still forty or fifty cats living in her home. She says that before the surgery there were even more. Later, because her body simply would not allow it, she had to reduce the number of cats she rescued. Even so, she has not really stopped.
She has only switched to a more careful, more difficult way of continuing.
In her home, the cats do not live all mixed together. She has carefully divided them into areas: some are middle-aged cats, some are lively and healthy cats who can move around in a larger space, and some are elderly cats, many of them with chronic illness or in need of long-term care, and those live in the same room as she does.
That way, she can look after them every night.
Injections, medication, watching their breathing, checking their alertness, confirming whether any cat has suddenly stopped eating, or whether any cat needs to go to the hospital immediately. For her, the night is not only time for rest. Much of the time, the night is also when she sits up with these old and sick cats.
She gives almost all of her day to these cats. In the morning she wakes up and goes to see the cats first. During the day she is busy feeding, cleaning, caring, observing. Before she sleeps at night, she still has to make sure the old cats and the sick cats are settled. Her life is not one that occasionally revolves around cats; it is almost entirely filled with them.
Among the cats she has rescued, there is one called Guaixin.
Guaixin had many illnesses. His condition was once serious enough that the vet recommended euthanasia. That time, she brought Guaixin to the hospital, and the vet assumed she had come to make the final decision.
But she did not give up right away.
She only said to the vet: "Could you examine him again? I don't want him to just die like this."
She knew Guaixin was in a lot of pain, and she knew treatment might not bring a miracle. But she thought, if there was still a way to ease his pain, to let him be a little more comfortable and a little happier in his last days, then she was willing to try.
At the time, the money she could put her hands on immediately was not much. She said afterwards, privately, that if the cost of treatment had gone beyond what she could bear, she might really have had no way to continue. It was not that she didn't want to save him; it was that she truly could not afford to.
In the end, the cost of treatment landed just barely within what she could manage.
She took out all the cash and coins in her pockets, a little over three hundred dollars, and put the rest on a credit card.
That moment was very quiet, and very hard to forget.
Not because the number was large, but because you could see a person willing to take out nearly everything she had for a cat that many people would have considered no longer worth saving.
Later, Guaixin lived.
His illness did not disappear completely, and some of his conditions may stay with him for a long time. But once the other symptoms eased, he began to live like an ordinary cat again. He comes over and rubs against people, he responds when people come close, and in days of being cared for he slowly relaxes.
She says that as long as she can see Guaixin the way he is now, she feels that money was well spent.
Over these years, stories like this have not been only Guaixin's. In more than ten years, she has cared for many cats that were abandoned, given up on, or wracked with illness. Much of the medical cost and the living cost she has carried herself, bit by bit. Her pension is not generous, but she still spends a large part of it on these cats.
For one of the kittens, she once spent more than ten thousand dollars.
There is one more thing she has always remembered clearly.
It was during her spinal surgery. It was a major operation that lasted many hours. For a woman already in her seventies, a surgery like that carries high risk in itself.
Before the surgery, there happened to be a very sick cat in her home.
She could not stop worrying about it.
Even though she was about to go into the operating room herself, and even though she did not know what would happen to her after the surgery, she still did not casually give up on that cat. She entrusted it to another person who also does animal rescue, hoping that while she could not care for it, it would still be watched over properly.
She says she went into the operating room in the morning.
And that cat happened to leave at exactly that time.
Thinking back on it later, she has always found it hard to explain. She says that perhaps that cat took the disaster in her place. Old people have their own beliefs, and their own understanding. To her it was not only a coincidence, but something like an unspoken bond between her and these cats over all these years.
She had meant to save it.
But at the moment she went into the operating room, that cat quietly left.
She has kept this with her. Not to prove anything, only because that moment was too particular: a person and a cat, both standing at the most fragile edge of life. She handed the cat over to someone else, and handed her own life to the doctors. And on that morning, life completed a farewell in a way she has not forgotten to this day.
Of course, this path is not always understood.
Because rescue takes money, she has also posted appeals for help on her social feed, hoping someone would help these small cats along with her. And because of that, she has run into misunderstanding. Some people said she was fishing for a good name, and some suspected she was running a scam.
Those words are not pleasant.
But the next morning she still got up as usual, fed the cats as usual, cleaned as usual, and watched each cat's condition as usual.
Doubt will not make a cat miss one less meal, and it will not make illness disappear on its own. So what she can do is keep doing it.
She has not packaged herself as a hero. Much of the time she is just an old woman who gets tired, who worries about money, who faces real limits. She goes silent in front of a hospital bill, she is sad when she has to make a choice, and she admits she cannot save every cat every time.
But she has never easily put "giving up" first.
Where she is, every cat has a name, a temper, a habit, and the right to be cared for seriously. They are not a string of numbers, not a burden, and not something that can be casually replaced.
They are lives.
Her story also lets us understand more deeply how complicated multi-cat homes and rescue situations are: how to make sure each cat eats the food that belongs to it, how to care for cats with special needs, how to reduce wrong meals and stolen meals, how to make sure old cats, sick cats, and cats with chronic illness can all be cared for more precisely. These look like small everyday things, but all of them matter.
This is also why we believe a good pet product is not only there to make things convenient for people, but to make caregiving feel more secure.
Our product is meant to help multi-cat homes tell each cat apart more easily, to reduce wrong meals and stolen meals, so that every cat can eat the portion that truly belongs to it. It cannot replace love and patience, but it can be a reliable small helper in everyday care.
Because every cat deserves to be taken seriously.