Culture
Trailblazer finds key to careers for blind
By Meng Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-09 08:06
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Most people can get a professional license to tune pianos in a few months. It took Li Renwei, 22 years.
Li, who has been almost blind since birth, became the first blind piano tuner in China after his long struggle. It took him many more years to build his reputation into what it is today and to make the public realize that blind people can do a lot more than offer a massage.
7:45 am: Wait for the bus
Li waits at the entrance of the Beijing School for the Blind for a bus to take him and his 12 students to an examination site where his students will have a practice test on their way to becoming licensed piano tuners.
Five of his students cannot see anything, just like Li. The other seven have very weak eyesight. Li has taught nearly 100 blind students since he started offering a piano tuning major specially designed for blind people in 1991.
Every year, 40 students apply for Li's major, but he can only choose 12 due to a lack of time. "I prefer those who are older and who still have some eyesight," he said, admitting the job is very difficult for those who are completely blind.
9 am: Exam starts
Li sends his students to the examination rooms in which they will have two hours to tune the pianos waiting there. The pros and cons of being a blind piano tuner are very obvious for Li who started learning the craft in 1978.
"It is not because we have better hearing. When people cannot see, they rely more on their hearing, so we pay more attention to sounds," he said.
But he said blind piano tuners struggle as well because they have to touch the piano to figure out where problems might be instead of being able to look for them.
"We use more time, but the work we do is more precise," he said while listening to the three judges' appraisal of his students' performance.
12:15 pm: Lunch in the dining hall
Li asks a student with weak sight to take him to the school's dining hall every day.
He gradually lost his feel about light after reaching his 30s and since then has been completely blind and dependent on his hearing. From the slight echo of a wall, he can tell how far he is from it. From the voice or even the breath of people, he says he can tell the ages and emotions of people he is speaking to.
However, in the dining hall where noise is everywhere, Li's super hearing loses its power.
"Students in our dining hall often run into each other, no matter how careful they are," he said.
3 pm: Tuning lesson starts
Li touches his way to the classroom after hearing the sound of a lesson bell. The clock on the wall of the small classroom with 12 students is stopped at 2. Li says they have no idea when the clock stopped working because no one in the class needs to use it.
Wang Ruihua, 45, the eldest in Li's class, sits in front of a piano and follows Li's instructions step by step.
"Put it here and play the piano," Li said, touching Wang's fingers and feeling his way of tuning. "No, you pushed it too hard, now you feel how I do it."
Li said lessons between a blind teacher and blind students can be very difficult. "We cannot see each other, so I have to teach them by hand and they need to learn by hand," he said. The learning process is very time-consuming as only a dozen students can enroll in this major every year.
5:30 pm: Time to go home
Blind piano tuners rely on their touch.
Though the working day ends at 4:50 pm, Li seldom leaves the school on time because he always tries to offer as much knowledge as he can during the one-year program. Now, approaching 60, the only professional blind piano tuning teacher in China says the school has already hinted that he probably will not retire in 2012 because there is no one else available to take over his job.
"Some people are very skillful at piano tuning, but they don't know how to pass their knowledge on to students, especially when most of your students cannot see anything," Li said.
He uses his Dopod C750, which is able to translate every move on the cell phone into sound, to call his wife. He presses the buttons as if he can see them and tells his wife he is ready to leave.
Li says he is able to walk home by himself, but his wife who has eyesight of 0.1 in one eye, never lets him. She insists on holding his hand all the way home and warns him when there are steps or doorways to negotiate.
7:30 pm: Preparation for exam
After dinner, Li sits in a chair and translates some piano tuning questions into Braille, which will be part of the non-practical test for his students.
"Now we have some software that can help us translate ordinary words into Braille characters but the software is not advanced enough. Some of the sentences don't make sense, so I have to read through all the questions and make them right," he said, as he touches a Braille display, character by character.
After his students finish the test, he will be the only teacher to go over the examination papers, since he is the only teacher who can read Braille. But Li said he will never favor any of them.
"It took nearly two decades to win the trust of the customers and to prove that we can do as good as those who can see," he said, adding that even if one substandard blind piano tuner starts working, it could ruin the reputation of all blind piano tuners.
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