New Dawn in My Darkness

　　The letter gave me a jolt on sheer pleasure: I had been selected for enroll-ment in Huaian First High School, the tops in our provincial capital. The news seemed to sprout wings on its own, to fly over all of Sanzha,my small hometown.Many friends and acquaintances came to congratulate me for proving worthy of the very best high school in Huaian!
　　Everybody said that now I was sure to attend a fine university. My prospectsfor a good career and social recognition seemed assured. I was elated.
　　Ever since Confucius told us to study hard and left us the example of his own scholarship, academic excellence has always been a primary goal for young chinese. Ours was the culture that invented the civil service exam, where even in antiquity, results were graded anonymously to ensure that merit alone prevailed and whereby only the best scholars were chosen for government service. Our folk tales, our native operas are full of stories where some poor scholar gains wealth and fame for himself and his family, honour and renown forhis village, through hard study and moral rectitude. Consciously or not,we in Bangzha were heirs to this tradition.
　　At first, none of us suspected that I had big trouble ahead: Not until I took my mandatory eye test for entrance into high school. Though I wore the strongest lenses possible because of chronically weak vision, Ijust could not make out any colour or number on the chart until the doctor pointed them out for me! The results of the eyes exam were obvious: because of my poor vision I was found wanting for public education.
　　We contacted various department in the hope that somehow I could pursue my schooling. But the answers were always the same:" I have no way to help you go to school."
　　My dreams of high school, of attending an impressive university, of earning an important career were crushed. I was only 16 the age when one still believesin dreams.
　　In order not to despair completely, my parents and I continued to pursue ourquest to find a really expert doctor--somewhere, somehow--who could effectivelytreat my eye condition. At the same time, I used my increasingly poor vision tostudy high school courses on my own. After about two years, as I began to take courses at the university level, my vision dimmed so much that at last I could no longer read books at all. Finally I was forced to accept the doctors, unanimous prognosis--" Your trouble is retinitis pigmentosa. Nobody has ever found a way to treat that illness anywhere in the world today!" It seemed that all my books, which I had always loved, had deserted me and I had lost my chances for education and employment forever.
　　What was I going to do with the rest of my life!
　　Just when I had reached the depths of despair, an official suggested that I learn braille. It was a painful experience to shift my goals from seeking a cure for my eyes to accepting permanent blindness. Yet I began to study Chinesebraille adapted to our Pinyin system under the guidance of an instructor.
　　Though Chinese braille was entirely new to me, I did not feel that its mastery was too difficult, because I had already studied Chinese at school. After only about three months of study, I could read whole books in Chinese braille. From the School for Blind Children in Shanghai, I borrowed materials on the specific braille symbols for math, physics, and chemistry.
　　And so through the medium of braille, my beloved books began slowly to come back into my life. There were not as many of them as before and they came in much bulkier and more numerous volumes. But I was very glad to have them back under any conditions whatever.
　　Things were turning out just as that official had predicted: Braille not only held out the prospect of continuing my education but also the chance to gain employment. In 1988 I successfully passed an important examination, my first in braille and was admitted to a school for the blind for massage medicine in Luoyang City.
　　With my experience of the past few years, I could never have believed that Iwould walk into classroom again. Yet in reality here I was!
　　There were more than 20 of us in my class and most, like myself, used braille. But there were several print users as well. Both groups had to master the same courses materials. All our desks appeared a bit larger than normal, apparently to accommodate the bulk of our braille books. I found that both groups achieved about the same grade level, though reading braille was slower than reading print.
　　But braille in its turn also offered certain advantages. What happened one night was a good illustration.
　　We were slated for final exams the day after tomorrow. So just as soon as wehad finished supper, everybody came back into the classroom as a kind of grand study hall to cram for our finals. Then about 8 p.m., just as we were intenselyinvolved in reviewing, the lights all went out, and the room was plunged instantly into pitch blackness.
　　"Hey, the electricity went off!" Several of us cried out the obvious. "How can they lose power just when we need it for reviewing for finals?"
　　"What are we going to do now?"
　　"Say!" I light had suddenly flashed niside my mind. "Let's all study together! Those of us who read braille can cover the questions,and we'll share the information. That's the best way to review in the dark!"
　　"Good idea!" several agreed.
　　So we began with questions on anatomy. In our zest to study, we seemed to forget about the dark and to lose all track of time.
　　At last when we had covered the main points in anatomy, someone remarked, "Hey,this braille is really something! It's saved us from a lot of lost time inthe dark!"
　　In this fashion we held up the tradition of Chinese students helping each other both in our studies and our lives. After three years of study and training in medical massage, we passed our qualifying exams and earned our certificates, braille and print users together.
　　Before mastering braille, I had never imagined ecoming a doctor of medical massage like my good friend and old classmate from middle school days, Dr.Chen.But after graduating from the Luoyang school, I established a small massage clinic near the centre of Huaian City in 1993. Here, too, braille has proved anessential tool for keeping my patients, files.
　　Another important avenue that braille has opened for me is the opportunity to continue my study of English, the lingua franca of our time. While still at massage school, I heard that the Hadley Distance Education School for the Blind in the US had opened an overseas branch in Fuzhou, China. I enrolled in classes in 1992 and so far I have completed nine coutrses in English in my spare time. I've gained a lot from my English studies, and this has impressed some of my first, including Dr.Chen.
　　One Sunday morning, he paid me a visit. Dr.Chen and I had seen each other only a few time since leaving middle school. As we were old classmates and had gone into the same field, we had a lot of things to talk over. In a short time,my large bookcase caught his attention.
　　"You have so many books! These are about medicine, these about science. And what is this? A Chinese-English dictionary! Do you still study English?"
　　I told him about the courses I had taken from Hadley. He seemed very pleasedthen suddenly thought of something. He drew a book out of his bag and opened it to find an article in English. It seemed that he wanted my help to translate certain passages in the article into Chinese.
　　I took out my braille equipment to write down the words as Dr.Chen read themout by spelling the English letters. Most of the words were familiar to me, butseveral terms were new, and I needed to look them up in my dictionary.
　　After we had finished, Dr.Chen said in amazement, "I never would have this time that your English could be so good, since you didn't even go on to high school. Braille is really great! It's become your path to success. And here's aletter in English. Do you correspond with a foreign friend?"
　　"Yes," I said. "That letter is from America." "America! That distant countryacross the ocean!" Then he mused, "You know, I guess that braille is really leading you out into the whole wide world!"