Mills recounts how, in 1943, he came across the youngest of the 700 children who eventually moved with him to the converted high school in Canton after the war:

"I had to go down to Kwanghoi on the coast, just south of Macao, to see one of our big soup kitchens," he recalls. "At the time we were feeding the hungry people out in that area. I was with Mr. Lai How Ming, on of the men in my office in Toishan, who was helping me take care of the orphaned children we had taken in. We left at about six in the morning, because we had quite a long way to walk. On the outskirts of Toishan city, right opposite the girls' normal school, there was a big cluster of bamboo. And right beside the road was a little boy. He looked more like a monkey than a human being -- thin, drawn, the skin on his face parched and wrinkled. The child was starving to death. He couldn't stand up, he couldn't cry, he just made moaning sounds. He was probably two and a half or three, and there he was, sitting in his own mess, too weak to move.

"We went on our way -- we couldn't stop. He was only one: everywhere you went, people were dying, starving -- children starving everywhere. We went to Kwanghoi, and on our way back, as we came past the normal school, that little boy was still there. I thought to myself, 'He's too far gone to do anything without medical facilities.'

"We'd gone a considerable distance, and Mr. Lai turned to me and said, 'Pastor, I can't leave that little boy we passed back there. I'll never be able to sleep tonight if I don't go back and get him.' I said, "How Ming, if you want to get him, we'll go back and get him.' So we went back and I said, 'I'll carry him back to the home. He's filthy dirty, so I'll take some of these bamboo leaves on the ground, these big, long bamboo leaves, and I'll put them on my hand. And you take your two fingers and stick them under his armpits, and lift him up, and put him on the leaves in my hand.' Which he did. And when he put him on my hand, there was this little monkey face looking me right in the eye, and he smiled a monkey smile. Too weak to say anything, but he smiled thank you. When I think of it now, it just about rips the heart of of me -- and I was going to pass that little boy by.

"So we took him to Number Two Home, and I told the ladies there to get some hot water and give him a bath and wash him up and get some clean clothes to put on him. And I told the cook to get some kongee, very thin kongee -kongee is rice gruel, a rice soup. I said, 'Only bring one bowl, no more.' So after he wa washed, and they'd given him some tea to drink, he was getting his voice back, and he was starting to cry and holler. So they brought the kongee with this Chinese spoon. And when this child saw it, he just about went crazy -- just ravenous. He went to grab the bowl and the spoon, wanted to put the whole thing in h is mouth at once. So we had to hold his arms and feed him a spoonful at a time. And he'd no sooner get the spoon in his mouthan than he'd start crying again, he was just so ravenous. So I said to the lady helping him, 'Take your time, don't be in a hurry. If you hurry, you'll kill him.'

"So -slowly- we fed him. When he finished the bowl he still wanted more. And by this time, the child had regained enough strength that he could really howl. He howled and howled. And I said, 'You can't give him anything more now for an hour.' It would have killed him. He'd been days without any fluid.

"Well, that little guy survived. We didn't know his name -- he didn't even know his own name. If he wanted water, he could say 'water.' If he wanted rice, he could say 'rice.' But, he didn't know his name, didn't know where his mommy and daddy were or anything. Probably his mother just left him there by the roadside, because she probably didn't have anything to eat either.

"This little guy began to put on weight, and I gave him a name, Lo Duk -- it means 'Begotten of the Road.' But he had to have a surname, so Lai How Ming said, 'Well, he'll have to take your name, because you're the one that picked him up.' So they gave him my surname, Mei for Mills. So his name is Mei Lo Duk.

"After we got the kids from the five orphanages and moved them to Canton, here were 700 kids and he was the smallest one. He just about ran the outfit. He was spoiled rotten. If he fell down or anything and started to cry, the other children would come running like a swarm of bees to pick him up."