Disability, China, College

Folks who've been around for a while probably know I'm studying abroad at Tianjin Normal University this year. That's in Tianjin, China. Folks who read so much as my sidebar or header know I'm autistic. So far as I can tell (as in, it's relayed second-hand but it's pretty much coming from the admins) I am the first openly autistic student they've had. Ever.

I'm not the first disabled student they've ever had- there's apparently a student missing some fingers in the physics department, though I've never met him. I've never seen a wheelchair on campus, and I'm not convinced that many of the buildings and classrooms are actually accessible. I know the bathrooms generally aren't.

But, you know, the not accessible thing isn't unique to China or anything. Psuedoaccess, where there's a ramp theoretically there, or abled folk are claiming a place is accessible but you never see disabled people using it because the supposed access doesn't actually work? That happens all the time in the USA too.

So what I am writing tonight is really only about China in that the particular examples I'm talking about happened here. My personal experience as an autistic college student in China (a combination that apparently no one's ever heard of, my attempts at searching for other autistic college students via news articles found me nothing in mainland China and one autistic woman in Taiwan whose mother went to all her classes with her, and the article was more about the mom than the autistic woman who did college) has been pretty good. There's been icky stuff, but my residence and academic directors for the program I'm on have dealt with it for me and I haven't had to do any of it directly, which has been nice. I still know about some of it: before I arrived, there were administrators who said people like me shouldn't go to college, and they tried to get the program to un-accept me, and they tried to have me sent home.

But to my face people have been pretty good. I use AAC in class sometimes- specifically, when speech isn't working for me I'll type instead. If it's something I want the rest of the class to hear, I'll get a classmate to read it for me (they know I do this) because my laptop speakers aren't that great and my iPad's AAC is all English-based in addition to not being that loud. If it's something where I just wanted to make sure the teacher knew I understood how to use the language construction or how to use the word in question, I don't get it read out and just email it to the teacher after class. They'll count this for me instead of talking in class for class participation. Getting in and staying in was the hard part, day-to-day... well, I think that 面子, or face, is relevant? Directly insulting a person to their face isn't so much a thing. Makes it hard to know what people are really thinking of me, but it also helps shield me from the worst of the discrimination stuff- my residence director got to deal with it instead.

And what brought these thoughts up today? Well, I've been seeing articles about a Chinese man who took the 高考, the college entrance exams. He's blind, and he'd prepared on electronic versions, but in the end they gave him paper versions, using Chinese Braille. He wound up handing in nearly blank tests (On the test paper he apparently did write in a request for an electronic version) because electronic stuff is faster for him than Braille, both reading and writing. Didn't happen. Folks react. There's English coverage here and here, you can probably find more if you look. I'm not going to analyze the English articles, just point out where they are so you can look if you want. But tomorrow my plan is analyzing some of the Chinese coverage.