The picture below is of a couple renowned for being disabled competitive dancers in China. This is their story…
The girl, Ma Li, was a promising professional ballerina at age 19 when she lost her right arm in a car accident. After being dumped by a long-time boyfriend, Li attempted suicide. However, her parents rendered the attempt unsuccessful and saved her life. Through that experience, Li gained the strength to carry on and learned how to live life independently.
Five years later, in 2001, Li was invited to compete at the 5th National Special Performing Art Competition in China for handicaps and won the gold medal. That success gave her the confidence she needed to return to the stage professionally.
In 2002, Li started dating a man named Li Tao who, two years later, became Li’s agent and began helping her develop a unique performance showcasing the mastery of her handicap with her talents in dance.
A year later, Li met 21-year-old Zhai Xiaowei while he was training to be a cyclist for the National Special Olympics. Xiaowei climbed on a tractor at age four and fell off to lose his left leg but despite the handicap, took a very optimistic look on life and became passionate about athletics. He participated in high-jump, long-jump, diving, swimming, and cycling. However, he had never attempted dance.
After meeting Li & Tao and pushing through a year of intensive training and practice, the trio’s efforts and determination produced the following performance in the 4th CCTV National Dance Competition in China.
At this competition – the first time a handicap couple had ever competed – Li and Xiaowei won the Silver medal with the 99.17 high score among 7000 competitors. They became an instant national hit.
I don’t know about you, but that brought a tear to my eye. You can’t watch their performance without realizing that there’s much more going on here than just dancing. What I saw, in this award-winning routine, was an expression of pure perseverance.
These are people who know pain and despair well. These are athletes who got back up after life threw them down. These are dedicated performers who pitted against professional dancers as the only disabled pair in a notable competition witnessed by their entire country. These are competitors who came in second.
It reminds me of Kerri Strug from the 1996 Olympics. If you don’t remember, she’s the girl who fractured her ankle but ignored the pain and did her vault, where she landed on one foot, and clinched the gold medal for the U.S. in the team competition. I’ll give you that Strug had adrenaline and the pressure of the entire world on her side when she had to make her decision to persevere or to give up, but the point is – she didn’t throw in the towel.
For most of us, we know not of this brand of perseverance. Sure, we’ve had our ups and downs; we’ve pushed ourselves to keep going when the odds have turned against us. We’ve adapted. But would we really have the determination to persevere after something so catastrophic as losing a limb? You never know, right? I guess you might say that you’d need to experience it to know for sure? It’s sort of an incomprehensible idea to those of us who’ve never had to deal with something like that first hand.
In this experience of the soul, I dearly hope you have a little less experience and little more naivety. But if you do find yourself in such a situation, I hope you get back up and go farther than you had ever dreamed possible. I hope that the way you choose to live is an expression of perseverance that makes the world stand in awe.
- Cat
