Making toys and rebuilding lives
Workshop helps people with disabilities move from charity-dependent roles to market-driven employment
Looking back
Cao, now 47, knows all about braving the odds. In 1997, when she was 18, she was in a car accident on her way to school that led to her two lower limbs being amputated. "I felt like I'd been thrown from the clouds to the ground," she recalled. "Before the accident, I had dreams like any other teenager."
Her father sawed off every doorstep in their rural Beijing home to ensure her wheelchair could move freely. But they had a squat toilet so her parents had to bodily lift her to the restroom and back daily.
Her luck changed in 2003, the year she discovered wheelchair basketball. A coach spotted her at a local sports event, remarked it was terrible for someone so young to be so badly injured and asked for her contact details.
That chance encounter led to her finding a place on the Beijing women's wheelchair basketball team. By 2005, she was winning national championships.
In 2008, she went on to compete in the Beijing Paralympics.
"For the first time, I wasn't alone anymore," Cao said. "I met other people who use wheelchairs. I realized I wasn't the only one. It felt like coming back to life."
After the Games, Cao met her future husband, from the United States. They married, settled in Beijing and had two children. For more than a decade, she focused on raising her family. But as her children grew older, she began feeling left out. "When you stay home for years, you lose touch with the world," she said. "At first, I thought it was because of my disability. But later I realized anyone who stays home for too long feels disconnected."
