A woman from Shanxi Province had a tattoo of a rapist's name removed from her chest in Shenzhen on Sunday.

The surgery at the Beijing University Shenzhen Hospital took less than 20 minutes, said Gao Hongli, a witness and a reporter with the Daily Sunshine. It would take some time for the woman to recover from the skin wound, he said.

Meimei's story was highlighted by the newspaper Sunday.

In 1995, a man named Yang Shunian took a fancy to the then-14-year-old Meimei when he saw her at the home of one of her classmates. The man asked the classmate's mother to use Meimei to "pay" the gambling debt the woman owed him and the woman went so far as to agree. Yang then forced Meimei to his home and raped her several times.

At the end of 1998, Meimei escaped from Yang, but Yang soon found her and forced her to go back with him, threatening to kill her and her mother. When Meimei returned to Yang's home, he black-inked his name in the middle of her chest in a bid to "possess" her forever. Yang was arrested in 2000 and sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2001.

Meimei could not afford to have the tattoo removed but a Hong Kong man helped her with the surgery that cost about 10,000 yuan (US$1,200).

The man, called Shi Jinquan in pinyin, learned Meimei's suffering from a newspaper report in 2001 and started to work hard for enough savings to help her. Last summer he wrote to the Taiyuan Daily, a newspaper in the provincial capital Taiyuan, saying he wanted to pay all the cost for removing the tattoo and asking for help in finding Meimei.

Shi earns HK$8,000 per month and has a lady of his heart -- not girlfriend yet -- in Jiangxi Province.

(Shenzhen Daily April 19, 2004)