Have you ever wondered what it is like to be blind or unable to walk? METRO sent two freelance writers out into the city to find out.

David Cohen

I have been trying to cross the street at Xidan for half an hour when I feel for the first time that I am really disabled.

I could have walked. But I have borrowed a wheelchair to experience Beijing as it feels to residents with disabilities.

At first, in the suburbs of Haidian district, wheels hardly feel like a disability. On a flat, even surface, I can roll faster than most people walk.

Of course, there are things to get used to. You have to watch out for potholes and grates. Even tiny ridges pose a problem, forcing me to turn the chair around and back up to get up heights as low as a few centimeters. A single step is out of the question, up or down.

Beijing's sidewalks are particularly wheelchair-unfriendly. The bumps and grooves of the tiles slow me to a crawl. Many places don't have inclines for crossing the street, and where they do they're often blocked by planters or parked cars. Many sidewalks also incline toward the street just enough to make the wheelchair veer off. Keeping it going straight is exhausting.

Still, I can work things out. Bike lanes make it easy to bypass crowded and broken sidewalks relatively safely. Shopkeepers are happy to bring things down to the street if they have stairs, and, when I try to take a bus, four passengers get off and pick me up, chair and all.

It is when I go into the city to meet a friend at a Xidan mall that I am in real trouble. While the modern areas in the city center have all the facilities you need to get around in a wheelchair, they are often in out-of-the-way corners.

I spend almost an hour in a frustrating trek from the subway to a street corner opposite the subway exit, traveling barely 150 meters from the elevator. Although I do make it, I am exhausted. Imagine if I was in poor health.

When I arrive, the elevator at the subway station takes me to the southwest exit, but my friend is at the northeast. The road has a bridge crossing from west to east. To get onto the bridge, I have to use an elevator in the mall - first dashing across Chang'an Street on the surface, then battling through traffic to cross an alley where the ramp on one side is 20 meters up the road from the ramp on the other side.

In the mall, I wheel my painstaking way through the displays to find out the elevator only stops above the fifth floor. It takes me another 20 minutes to find the other elevator, struggle up a steep bridge, and then find an elevator down on the other side.

Finally, 45 minutes after leaving the subway station, I arrive at a mall near the southeast corner.

And here I meet my Waterloo: a single step to get down to the street.

Shannon Aitken

Blind for a day means lost and confused

There might be a lot of blind massage salons around Beijing, but that really is about the extent of visible signs of a blind community living among its inhabitants. What would it be like to live as a blind person in Beijing? This was the task I was given.

First I set out to see how well I could navigate Beijing using its ubiquitous yellow tactile pavers, but pretty quickly I realized it was a mission impossible and that I'd be well advised to keep my eyes open and stick to the main footpath. Low-hanging trees, newspaper stands, blue-fenced construction sites, parked cars, dog droppings and unrepaired holes were all obstacles I encountered.

And where there were no physical barriers, there were other frustrations, such as having to walk circuitous routes to get to a given point and tactile paths that themselves seemed to just give up, ending nowhere.

Ma Lirong at the Sun In The Dark facility confirms my suspicion that even blind people aren't keen to be escorted by these nobbly pavers. "I prefer to use the gutter as my guide," she tells me. "It's more dangerous to follow the tiles."

Ma has been completely blind since she was 7, and since then she has accomplished many things that prove how able she is. She's worked as a physiotherapist for people with cerebral palsy, is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and, now, is a trainer at Sun In The Dark, a large center below Workers' Gymnasium, which simulates what it's like to be blind. When I visit, she is my guide through its pitch-black rooms.

With canes in our hands, she takes me through a small park with a bench and a bridge, a family living room, and even a cafe. She's patient with my slow, shuffling steps. At first I use my feet just as much as the cane to navigate my way through what to me feels like a labyrinth. She encourages me to touch everything, smell everything and, most of all, trust myself.

It's amazing how your mind creates vivid pictures. When I enter a new room, the image in my mind is like a blank canvas. Then I touch something - a couch or a cafe counter - and suddenly a picture spreads out in my mind, giving me context and some orientation based on what I think is likely to be there.

Trusting myself is difficult. I find that sometimes my assumptions help me in mapping out what's in front of me, and sometimes they thwart me.

One of the many tasks Ma gave me was to dress a life-size baby doll. This was one of the most difficult challenges. I lost her shoe somewhere in the darkness, and in the end gave up without buttoning up the poor thing's shirt.

"It is difficult," Ma says of her daily life, "but we have to do it."

(China Daily 05/12/2011 page)