The graduation season of three blind college students
believe that education can change the destiny of being taken care of
Zhou Wenqing likes embroidery, silk thread outlines rhododendron and plum bamboo, lace woven vines.
Wu Yifan also likes the beauty of the Chinese style. She has seen colors and is convinced that she likes purple Hanfu. She wears pink purple and orange lotus colors on the top of the collar and the flower-and-bird skirt.
Wu Xiao has double phoenix eyes, and the pupils are large and round, but they are the dark gray of the Nanjing city wall.
She hung herself glittering pearl earrings, crystal necklaces, and thin strap sandals studded with rhinestones.
On May 19, it rained at Nanjing Special Education Teachers College (hereinafter referred to as Nanjing Special Teacher). The sky was light blue, the teaching building was dark red, the locust trees washed out fresh green, and the pink water lilies appeared on the water.
The three visually impaired girls cannot see these, but it does not prevent them from dressing up and blending into this colorful world.
Summer is here, and the three girls ushered in their graduation season.
The three were in the same class and lived in the same dormitory, and they were integrated into a class composed of healthy students, with outstanding results.
Zhou Wenqing was admitted to Renmin University of China as a graduate student and became the first visually impaired student admitted to the school's applied psychology major.
Wu Yifan passed the IELTS test with high scores and received admission qualifications from many British universities.
Wu Xiao is still running for an interview in a dark place that cannot be illuminated by the spotlight.
She seemed to be the unfortunate one. She was rejected by Shaanxi Normal University when she applied for the postgraduate entrance examination. She passed the teacher qualification exam but failed to pass the physical examination certification.
Surrounded by failure, Wu Xiao still has energy in her heart, and must get rid of the fate of being a blind massager.
"I don't want to go to college for nothing." Wu Xiao rolled his eyes with big eyes.
Want to get rid of the original destiny
The courses at the undergraduate level are over, and the graduation thesis is only to be defended, so the days are leisurely.
On May 20th, Shao Lei, also a visually impaired boy, came from Changchun to play. After Zhou Wenqing, Wu Yifan and Wu Xiao dressed up, they brought them out of school to entertain friends from afar.
The girls dressed up exquisitely, walking forward arm in arm.
The cane is only ten centimeters long after being stowed, and it is hung on the wrist with a rope.
Zhou Wenqing walked in the forefront, she had a little field of vision left, it was tube-shaped, smaller than a fingernail, but enough to be a guide.
After meeting at school, the four decided to go to a nearby hot pot restaurant.
It was a hot pot restaurant frequented by visually impaired students, and the waiter expertly guided them, helping to cook and distribute the dishes.
The hot pot restaurant was full of voices, and four students in their early twenties were moved by the atmosphere to discuss themselves and their future.
Speaking of the postgraduate entrance examination experience, Zhou Wenqing said that he had communicated with the school many times during registration, and finally obtained the braille test paper.
The high score in the written test moved the school and was eventually admitted. The school also promised her that it would provide barrier-free facilities.
Wu Yifan took the topic of "accessibility" and introduced Shao Lei to the barrier-free exhibition hall of a museum in Nanjing.
She said that she hopes to come to the UK to study inclusive education and "smooth the gap between the able-bodied and the disabled."
Some reports describe the success of the disabled with "disabled and strong", and the girls think it is offensive.
"There is implicit discrimination here." Zhou Wenqing said.
"A lot of people talk about caring, I think they are looking down on this group more." Other people's inherent views on the visually impaired often sting Wu Xiao.
She mentioned that when she took a taxi with a friend the day before, the driver didn't realize that she was a visually impaired person at first, and ridiculed that the special education students "have no pressure to go to school."
Wu Xiao couldn't help refuting, "Students with visual impairment and hearing impairment also have the pursuit of academic qualifications."
The driver then reacted, "Are your eyes not so good?" The tone immediately became soft, and he tried his best to comfort, and advised her to "find someone with normal vision to take care of you in the future."
Wu Xiao didn't answer again, "I was a little sad at the time, why must the visually impaired be taken care of?"
They believe that education can change the destiny of being taken care of.
Zhou Wenqing said that education can provide a higher platform, and "the choice will be wider." Wu Yifan said straightforwardly, "It (education) is actually a process of breaking free from shackles and getting rid of its original destiny."
What is the original destiny?
"Do massage or arrange low-income jobs." Wu Yifan said, this is the consensus of several people.
Shao Lei is a senior at Changchun University, majoring in Acupuncture and Tuina.
Many students do not admit that they are "Tuina practitioners" and think that they are Chinese medicine practitioners.
"Since you have a bachelor's degree, everyone wants to strive to become a real doctor."
For visually impaired students majoring in massage, whether they have a technical secondary school, college, or undergraduate degree, the qualifications they can obtain are "Blind Medical Certificates", that is, "Blind Medical Massage Professionals' Qualification Certificate for Medical Massage."
Compared with the real medical practitioner qualification certificate, the "blind medical certificate" has policy restrictions. Therefore, even if the hospital is willing to hire visually impaired massage workers, the medical services they can carry out are very limited.
However, since the medical examination standards include visual inspection, it is almost impossible for the visually impaired to obtain a real medical practitioner qualification certificate.
Go to the hospital every day to see your eyes
In the twelfth lunar month of 1998, Huang Weijuan went to Beijing with her two-month-old Zhou Wenqing.
At Tongren Hospital, Xiao Wenqing was diagnosed with congenital optic atrophy.
Returning to his hometown in Xinyi, Xuzhou, Huang Weijuan was depressed and unwilling to celebrate the New Year.
"My child's father and I are not nearsighted, and the eyes of other people in the two families are fine." She remembered her daughter's eyes when she was born. They looked normal, with bright black pupils, and there was no jaundice on the whites of the eyes.
These beautiful eyes were abnormal when Zhou Wenqing was born 20 days.
When Huang Weijuan took the card to Zhou Wenqing and moved it, the child didn't respond.
Someone persuaded Huang Weijuan, "Don't ask for this child," which made her very angry, "How can my own child say no?"
Zhou Wenqing’s optic nerve atrophy is progressive and gets worse with age.
When she was young, she still had vision. Huang Weijuan said that in order to preserve her daughter's vision as much as possible, the small family gave it all.
Recalling childhood, Zhou Wenqing’s most impression was “going to the hospital in Beijing every day to look at the eyes”. When not going to the hospital, he would cooperate with his parents at home to “do all kinds of projects to stimulate the optic nerve”.
But Zhou Wenqing's eyesight still inevitably deteriorated.
Father Zhou Degang recalled that when his daughter was three or four years old, she had the best eyesight. "Our unit has a basketball court and she can ride a small bicycle there."
He opened the photo album, Zhou Wenqing in the photo grew up year by year, and his eyes gradually deviated from the camera.
For the entire six months between five and a half to six years old, Zhou Wenqing lived in Beijing with his family, focusing on rehabilitation training.
After returning from Beijing, Huang Weijuan found out that there was an old Chinese doctor in Xuzhou who was good at treating eye diseases. She went out early and returned late and took her daughter to and from Xinyi and Xuzhou every day.
"Walk around the eyes and pierce eight needles. She gritted her teeth and said nothing."
Another way
In 2006, eight-year-old Zhou Wenqing entered Xuzhou Special Education School to study with deaf students.
"My daughter is smarter, and she responds very quickly. She will be able to teach as soon as she teaches." But Huang Weijuan found that her daughter's promotion in this school was limited.
Two years later, Zhou Wenqing entered the Nanjing School for the Blind (hereinafter referred to as Nanjing School for the Blind) to study in the third grade.
This school was founded in 1927 and is an old school.
Two years before Zhou Wenqing enrolled, this school had just become the "Jiangsu Provincial Blind Education Resource Center", recruiting students from across the province.
At school, Zhou Wenqing learned paper-cutting and film inserting.
Huang Weijuan still kept the photos of her daughter's work. She cut out monkeys, tigers, swallows and plum blossoms with intricate patterns. She also folded small pieces of paper into triangles, one by one, and inserted the white swans.
Wu Yifan also entered Nanjing School for the Blind in 2008. She is born in Zhenjiang and has low vision.
"Before 8 years old, the eyesight was okay, but it was a little worse than normal children. Just sit in the first row in class." According to her memories, after the first grade, her retina fell off, and after the repair operation, she fell off again and lost the salvage. opportunity.
After entering Nanjing School for the Blind, Wu Yifan entered the first grade.
Born in 1997, she was almost 11 years old when she entered the school for the blind. She skipped three grades in elementary school. After Zhou Wenqing finished fifth grade, she skipped to junior high school. The two girls became classmates.
After graduating from high school in early 2014, the two faced a choice.
The Nanjing School for the Blind does not have a high school. If you choose to enter the school, you can only enter a technical secondary school. The only major is TCM Tuina.
Zhou Wenqing was unwilling.
"Why do blind students have to go this way?" she asked her mother.
Only then did Huang Weijuan realize that "daughter has an independent mind."
Zhou Wenqing and Wu Yifan decided to go to Qingdao to study at the Qingdao School for the Blind.
This school, built in 1932, was the only general high school for blind people in the country at that time.
In 2015, the general college entrance examination began to provide braille test papers, and the visually impaired students had one more way out.
Prior to this, visually impaired students could only go to university through the "single examination and single recruitment" in March and April each year, and their choices were limited, including majors in music and massage in schools such as Changchun University, Beijing Union University, and Binzhou Medical College.
In 2017, when Zhou Wenqing and Wu Yifan were about to graduate from high school, they took part in the "single exam and single move" while preparing for the general college entrance examination.
They noticed Nanjing special teacher. In 2017, the major of the general college admissions was applied psychology.
Zhou Wenqing said that the competition was fierce at the time. There were more than 20 people who took the single-examination and single-stroke examination, and only two of them were admitted in advance.
In 2017, 6 visually impaired students across the country took the general college entrance examination, including Wu Xiao, who also graduated from Qingdao School for the Blind. She scored 470 points, more than a dozen points in the second line. After applying for Nanjing Special Teacher, she became this school. The third visually impaired student admitted that year.
Wu Xiao had blurred vision when he was a child. At the age of 10, he was diagnosed with congenital glaucoma. He was completely blind in both eyes. After that, he entered a school for the blind.
Yang Lizhen of the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of Nanjing Special Teachers told reporters that this university is a pilot program for advanced integrated education for the disabled and has been recruiting visually impaired students for many years.
According to reports, the Nanjing Specialist will insert one to three visually impaired candidates recruited each year into ordinary classes, provide them with barrier-free facilities, and purchase teaching aids that can print Braille.
Xiong Bingqi, dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, told reporters that it is an internationally recognized educational philosophy to allow disabled students to study in the same class instead of studying in special education schools.
In recent years, our country has also promoted students with disabilities to study in the same class, but students with disabilities still face barriers of concepts and specific conditions, from elementary school to university.
Therefore, there is a long way to go to provide a barrier-free environment for students with disabilities to study and eliminate conceptual and conditional barriers. The national level must play a leading role in this process.
Middle ground
In 2020, Yang Yuqing, a visually impaired student of Nanjing special teacher and congenital retinal dysplasia, scored 404 points in the preliminary examination of the postgraduate entrance examination, which was 73 points higher than the national line. He was finally admitted to the Liaoning Normal University with a master's degree in Development and Educational Psychology.
This brought new inspiration to the three girls.
For visually impaired students studying in psychology, the "Guiding Opinions on Physical Examination for General Colleges and Universities" issued in 2003 pointed out that both psychology and applied psychology belong to students with mild color vision abnormalities (commonly known as color weakness) "specialties that may not be admitted."
However, in recent years, some colleges and universities have continued to break through restrictions and recruit visually impaired students to study psychology, but some colleges and universities still follow the old regulations.
Whether it was recorded or not became a gray area, and Wu Xiao could not cross this area.
She applied for a master's degree in psychology at Shaanxi Normal University, but the school refused to let her take the exam on the grounds that "there is no condition to provide convenience."
Zhou Wenqing is much more "lucky".
When she first applied for the Department of Psychology at Renmin University of China, she was rejected once.
Zhou Wenqing argued for reasons and emphasized that she still had some eyesight and could distinguish colors. She also talked about procedural issues, "Always give me a chance to take a test, and I'll talk about the physical examination when it comes." Her persistence impressed the admissions teacher, the NPC. She made a braille test paper.
In order to seize the rare opportunity, Zhou Wenqing worked hard to prepare for the exam. She got up at 6:30 in the morning and often learned to go to bed until 11 o'clock in the evening.
The most difficult thing for Zhou Wenqing was English. Due to the slow reading speed of braille, it took her eight hours to finish the English braille exam for the first time.
During the exam, the visually impaired students will get 50% more time, and the English exam time is four and a half hours.
Zhou Wenqing insisted on training and finally finished the papers during the exam.
The problem Wu Yifan encountered was also Braille.
On the braille paper of the IELTS test, each letter is a braille character.
"When you encounter long words, one word is more than one line." After the three reading questions were converted into Braille, there were 21 pages of paper. She had applied for electronic test papers, but the old equipment affected her performance.
After several failures, she finally achieved an IELTS score of 6, which is the score of most British universities.
Pursuit of "Master"
Privately, the three girls referred to the visually impaired as "masters."
Zhou Wenqing said that this name comes from the literature of the blind masseur group research, and the blind are collectively called "masters."
Wu Xiao also divided the crowd into "true masters, prospective masters, and non-masters" according to the experimental standards of psychology.
"A true master is a master who is really doing massage, and a prospective master is invisible, but like us, non-masters are ordinary people."
In today's massage industry, "real masters" are also pursuing bigger business and higher education.
"We are studying Chinese medicine, except that we don't have a doctor's qualification certificate, but our medical knowledge is the same." said Shen Yonghao, who wears a white coat, in a Chinese medicine clinic in downtown Nanjing.
Shen Yonghao is tall and his pupils are gray-this is the same glaucoma as Wu Xiao.
Since the blind cannot obtain the qualification certificate of a practicing physician, Shen Yonghao cannot apply to open a clinic. Therefore, this Chinese medicine museum is actually a massage shop, and pharmacology and acupuncture within the scope of medical practice cannot be carried out here.
The Chinese Medicine Museum just opened in March and used up all of Shen Yonghao's savings of 200,000.
There are many massage shops around, but Shen Yonghao believes that his shop has "core competitiveness", that is, professional Chinese medicine training.
At the blind school in Suzhou, Shen Yonghao passed the stage of compulsory education, then joined the blind goal team of Jiangsu Province and went to Nanjing.
After that, he thought he was a little older and needed to learn craftsmanship, so he chose the three-year secondary school of Nanjing School for the Blind.
The technical secondary school teaches general TCM knowledge, including massage, acupuncture and pharmacology.
Shen Yonghao passed the blind medical certificate, but this certificate is not enough to get him into a regular Grade-A hospital.
After working for two years, he was promoted to become a boss by relying on his savings and bonuses during his time as an athlete.
The Chinese Medicine Museum is located on the 20th floor of the office building. There are four or five visually impaired employees in the shop, all of whom are blind students who come to work part-time.
The elevator has no floor voice prompts. The employees use the rangefinder in their mobile phones to measure the ascent height to judge the floor.
There are two floors in the Chinese Medicine Hall. Each floor is tightly separated by two rooms. The stairs are narrow and steep. The visually impaired employees walk steadily in each room.
"You have some misunderstandings about visual impairment. The strict definition is that if the corrected visual acuity is below 0.02, it is considered visual impairment. Like me, I can see some of it." An employee wearing black-rimmed glasses has eyesight, and there is almost no visual impairment. While he was talking, his work did not stop.
Willow and Flower
In 2018, Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (hereinafter referred to as Southern Chinese Medicine) cooperated with Nanjing School for the Blind to formally enroll students for the visually impaired class of acupuncture and massage. Gao Yihao is the first class of visually impaired students and is currently in his junior year.
As to whether he will become a "Tuina Master" or upgrade to become a physician after graduation, he actually doesn't know, "Let's take one step and look one step at a time."
According to the current physical examination standards, even after completing the five-year undergraduate course of Chinese medicine, they still face the problem of practicing.
The health examination items before the registered physician’s practice certificate include examinations for vision, corrected vision and other eye diseases, which are almost impossible for the visually impaired people to pass.
Like these "true masters" who wanted to become doctors but encountered setbacks, although Wu Xiao passed the teacher qualification examination, he was also defeated by the physical examination.
From the beginning of the registration, she was worried.
After much communication, the organization approved her to take the exam and asked someone to read the questions for her and write the answers on her behalf.
She passed all the written examinations and interviews, but when she went to the hospital for a medical examination to confirm her qualifications as a teacher, she got bad news.
"The doctor said to me,'I know it's not easy for you. Out of sympathy, I am also willing to qualify you, but the standard is here, and I can't help it'."
The standard mentioned by the doctor refers to the vision requirements for the qualification of teachers.
After encountering a series of setbacks, Wu Xiao once felt frustrated that she was going to become a veritable "quasi-master".
The depression did not last long.
Recently, this girl who loves to laugh "beat out" a dozen other able-bodied people and was shortlisted for the final interview of a technology company.
"I thought this was a position for the visually impaired. I found out during the interview that all people except me were sound people. I felt very happy for a moment."
Reconcile with yourself
"As a visually impaired person, I have encountered a lot of difficulties that I shouldn't have encountered since I was a child. Therefore, in the future, I want to bridge the gap between the able-bodied and the disabled and promote integrated education." This is Wu Yifan's goal.
As the only daughter in the family, Wu Yifan grew up under the worry and care of her parents. Although her parents were worried about going to the UK to study alone, they could not persuade her.
"My parents always think that Tuina is more stable, and they want the Disabled Persons' Federation to help me find a job." She then persuaded her parents: Although the tuina masters have a high income, they are prone to joint wear and tear. The most likely job is to call customer service, "I'm not studying for college?"
It was Man Lin Jin who had been reported by the media to inspire Wu Yifan to study abroad.
A year ago, when the epidemic was the worst in Europe, the visually impaired girl arrived in London alone on a plane day and night.
She was the first visually impaired student in Liaoning Province to pass the general college entrance examination and was also the first visually impaired student to go to the UK for postgraduate studies.
In an English-only environment, Man Linjin once became anxious for her studies, and her teeth became irritated.
But slowly, she kept up.
With the in-depth study of the concept of integrated education, what she felt most deeply was her self-identification of the disabled identity.
In the past, she was a very strong student and forced herself to not fall behind healthy people, but now, her mentality has become Buddhist.
"What I can't do is not because of my inability, but sometimes the surrounding environment can't support me, and I can't do it."
She said that by entrusting the responsibility of smoothing out obstacles to society, her heart will be much easier.
Zhou Wenqing identified herself as a "minority group"—just different from the majority group.
At Zhou Wenqing's suggestion, the three girls had helped to take the train from Nanjing to Beijing, only to learn how to broadcast.
"It's actually very convenient." She booked key passenger services in advance, and there were conductors picking them up in and out of the station. When they arrived on the Beijing subway, they showed their disability certificates and volunteers sent them to the subway. Someone will pick them up.
"Not seeing is not a problem in itself. The visually impaired can also try many things, of course, except driving." Zhou Wenqing laughed, her eyes bent into the shape of a crescent.
Beijing News reporter Yuan Suwen and intern He Xinyu