Fruit-pit carver helps people with disabilities

Pushing her way off a crowded bus, Yan Ming, 60, strolls down the road toward a small workshop with the help of a crutch and warmly greets her workmates as she enters.

She takes a seat, puts on her reading glasses and plays with her "dental drill" (an electric carving tool) and gravers in the light of a desk lamp, carving an ear of corn out of a single olive stone.

Yan has spent the past three years as an apprentice learning the intricate Chinese folk art of fruit-pit carving, superb craftsmanship that turns fruit pits into exquisite handicrafts.

The centuries-old traditional craft first came into vogue during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, in which fruit pits of olives, peaches, walnuts were used to create life-like minute sculptures of figures, landscapes, architecture, flowers or birds.

Yan puts her right little finger against her left thumb to stop it trembling, a hangover from almost six years spent recuperating in a wheelchair after a craniotomy she received following a severe car accident in 1999.

"When I was a green hand, it was hard for me to stop bleeding as the drill usually went into my badly shaking fingers," she says.

Ci Xiang would always come over and pat his discouraged apprentice on the shoulder, and sometimes give her a hug to calm her down when she fidgeted and lost focus.

The 31-year-old is the founder of the workshop which has taken in 16 members, all with disabilities, to learn fruit-pit carving for free.

He shares the same misfortune with Yan, just in a different form-being diagnosed with mental illness since grade three in primary school.