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Paralympics Raise Consciousness

It could have been a scene from Los Angeles, Dallas or New York, but I had not seen anything quite like it in Beijing before September 7.

As I got out of my taxi on Xingfu Dajie to begin walking to work, a smartly dressed woman zipped by me on a battery-powered wheelchair with her dog in tow. I was not the only one who noticed.

Ten years ago, if the woman had been on the street at all, she would likely have been travelling on a chair powered by her own hand cranking. Since the other hand would have been steering the wheeled chair, she likely would not have been accompanied by a well-groomed dog. You still see some of these devices on the streets today.

But the smile on the woman’s face says it all: things are better for everyone in today’s Beijing, including people with a disability. And it appears one of the government’s goals in hosting the Paralympics, to raise public consciousness about this issue, has been achieved as with so many other of its Olympic goals.

Yet, it must also be said that there’s a long way to go before the improvements made in public spaces to aid the disabled, especially in relation to the Olympic and Paralympic Games of 2008, are extended to the municipality and country as a whole.

The day before this writing, I observed a group of tourists at a KFC restaurant across Tiantan Dongjie from the Temple of Heaven. Those using wheelchairs had to be carried down about ten steps to enter the below-ground entrance to the restaurant, carried either on someone else’s back or in their wheelchairs. As a group, it was very hard for the 10-15 people in the group to sit together, despite ten minutes of rearranging chairs and tables in the restaurant to accommodate the diners in wheelchairs. Still, one young man had to sit away from the others in a place with more space.

After his companion purchased his meal, the young man wheeled over to the counter and began trying to buy his own lunch. But he could hardly reach the counter because people, acting perfectly normally, did not think to clear his way. At an oblique distance, the clerk could not understand what he wanted. Eventually, his companion had to go and assist with making the order, as had other companions for other diners.

As an expatriate laotou (old man), I often feel that despite its aging population, Beijing is basically designed for teenagers and mountain goats. For the rest of us, it’s not so easy, especially if we twist an ankle hiking or break a leg. Sometimes you depend on an escalator to exit a subway station, but when you get there, it’s not working. Except for the most modern areas, if you have to use crutches to get about, it’s a terror, because sidewalks are so uneven and highly trafficked. I was once stranded in a room on the second floor of a dormitory in northern Beijing, my leg in a cast. The phone in the room stopped working (I had no cell phone then.) and my friends who were wondering about what had happened to me couldn’t enter the university’s grounds to find why I was absent.

Disabled people, even temporarily disabled people, realize soon enough that they’re on their own in this town: creativity rules.

This is part of the reason why the Paralympic Games were so vital to Beijing; a new consciousness and the new street-level curbs at corners, elevators in shopping malls and newer apartment buildings, transportation for the disabled (including training of taxi drivers, who are usually very helpful), ramps for wheelchairs and the long-standing specially paved sidewalks for the blind are all big additions to the Beijing scene, yet they are just a beginning.

Consciousness about the needs and concerns of the disabled will have to be nurtured and grow. But, as with the woman on Xingfu Dajie, what’s been done is quite liberating, and the seeds of care and concern have been planted in the glow of the Olympic and Paralympic flames.