A Trip to Xiamen: Through the Eyes of a Social Work Student in Taiwan
by Chen Hsuan Weng, BSW
I was invited to Xiamen, China, to participate in an international student exchange under the auspices of an early childhood intervention program. It turned out to be an unforgettably enlightening trip for me. Xiamen is a coastal city known for its splendid Chinese architecture and beautiful beaches. However, there are disabled people in China who are largely invisible in public spaces. When you amble around a park in the city, you will discover few, if any, tactile paving stones to assist the visually impaired. If you go shopping in a mall, you might notice that there are very few accessible bathrooms for disabled people.
Seven classmates and I went to visit a nonprofit organization, which consisted of two or three qualified social workers plus four or five paraprofessionals. It is a social service agency founded by a disabled individual who established it to help promote the well-being of children and help ensure assistance to the families with special needs. This offers teenagers with disabilities job training, educational resources, and psychological care. In addition, it also offers programs to help children with developmental delay self-care training. Our group consisted of seven second year social work students who went to visit a three-member family client in a community outside the city center. The family lived in a roughly 2.5 square-meter space with only one bed, a tiny closet, a desk, and a small refrigerator inside the room. It was so hard for seven of us to crowd into at the same time.
The child had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, and symptoms were apparently worsening. When I first spotted him, he was sitting in a wheelchair at the desk, playing an online game. In answer to our questions, his father who, was employed as a janitor, said that the child couldn’t walk unassisted nor could he carry heavy items because of muscle weakness.
We started to interact with the perhaps 12-year-old boy by chatting with him. In their tiny room, I noticed three or four volumes of a children’s encyclopedia on the shelf. So we took one of the books down, because we wanted to assess his reading levels, pronunciation, and listening comprehension. I spent about 30 minutes speaking, listening to him, and taking some notes. He didn’t talk very much, and I suspected he was a bit intimidated by the large number of people all standing around and staring at him out of curiosity.
To ease the pressure, I stepped away and took up a conversation with the lad’s father and their neighbor. We were casually chatting about certain physical and mental conditions so as to grasp whether the child had been well taken care of. The father mentioned that he and his wife were working opposite shifts to ensure their child would have 24-hour family care. I could sense that this father’s love for his son was magnificent and a total commitment. However, the current Xiamen education institutions weren’t meeting the needs of certain young citizens. He was not receiving any special education whatsoever, inasmuch as this 12-year-old had been rejected by the regular elementary schools. In my estimation, such a situation is inhumane and unacceptable.
As the home visits gradually made plain to us, we realized that certain social priorities were not forthcoming to those families with special needs. Families with these children were not able to gain either social or housing assistance as a result of an overly strict means-test system plus the regular restrictions of Chinese household registration. For example, this family was originally from a residence outside of Xiamen, so this boy was virtually vocationally abandoned because of household registration restrictions. It seems that to build a prosperous society, the government of China intended to get poor people lifted out of poverty by using very strict criteria to establish qualification. As a consequence, significant numbers of families were judged to be outside the catchment area. And the reality of those chronically impoverished has not been completely eliminated.
There are still significant numbers of families desperate for social assistance. I have witnessed the great infrastructure development in Xiamen, but also witnessed some appalling scenes behind the curtain. This trip was influential and educational for me to see that even a large province or city institution with apparently comprehensive services has nevertheless many children like this boy who have “fallen between the cracks.” I became clearer about the future challenges of China that are not often talked about in regular social work textbooks.
This society seems to have characterized people with disabilities as a minority that is unable to contribute to the labor market. In China, people still use “canji (殘疾)” to describe disabled people. This phrase carries a negative implication of disease or sickness. Meanwhile, here in Taiwan, we have adopted the term “shenxin zhang’ai (身心障礙),” which means physically or mentally obstructed. This usage partly reflects the difference in how disabled people are treated in the two places.
Chen Hsuan Weng received her Bachelor of Social Work from Kaohsiung Medical University. She is planning to continue her social work studies at National Taiwan Normal University.