SHENYANG, May 4 (Xinhua) -- A 108-year-old lady in Northeast China's Liaoning Province is not only in perfect health, but able to sew her own clothes, too.

    The lady, living with her eldest grandson Yu Shouren, who is nearly 60, and his grandson Yu Bao, a toddler, in Shiban village of Xindian town in the city of Xiuyan, does not even have a formal name. Her grandchildren call her "old lady" and the neighbors often refer to her as Yu Wang -- a combination of her husband's family name and her maiden name.

    The old lady does not seem to remember her age and would tell people jokingly she is only eight years old.

    Like a child, she often argues and fights with Yu Bao, awarding him a cookie when he offers to help her with her needlework and threatening to punish him with a rod when he's naughty. In the latter case, the toddler would take another rod and openly challenge the old lady, who is not easily offended.

    Born in 1898, the old lady got married at 22 and was widowed at50. She has outlived two of her three children. "Her long life is a result of her good humor and optimism in face of disasters," said her grandson Yu Shouren.

    Gray-haired and hunchbacked, the lady spends many hours sitting crosslegged on her bed and doing her needlework. Her eyesight has failed but that isn't a big problem for the seasoned sewer who has been doing needlework all her life.

    "When I got married, I had only 16 embroidered pillow cases as my dowries, while the richer girls had at least 20," she said in an interview with Xinhua.

    At 108, she still embroiders pillow cases for the family and sews her own quilts and cushions. "Many people traveled all the way from the provincial capital Shenyang to see for themselves how an old woman at 108 could still do needlework," said her granddaughter-in-law.

    "So what?" said the old lady. "I'm fed up with the job. I've been doing this since I was a little girl."

    The local Qianshan Evening News said she is presently the oldest citizen in Xiuyan, one of the very few people who still have their feet bound, a centuries-old custom in China that trailed in the 1920s and disappeared altogether after New China was founded in 1949.

    Her feet were bound extremely small by her parents to resemble "three-inch golden lilies", a trait shared by all the Chinese beauties in those days. It happened when she was just a child and she remembers nothing about the pain today.

    The old lady can eat up a big bowl of rice at every meal and her favorite fruit is apple. Strangely, she never suffers digestive diseases though she is toothless and never able to chew her food carefully.

    The shortest-lived of her seven sisters died at 90. At 72, her nephew Yu Mingye still walks and climbs mountains swiftly like a young man. Enditem