From Empty Ledgers to Full Hearts (Part 1)

May 31st, 2025:

Ms. Li (Auntie Li), second from the right, leading assistive device applicants to their assigned evaluators

Note: Language referencing gender identities, disabilities and disorders, and social work may be outdated or fail to reflect the complexities of individuals mentioned. Gender/sex categories, disability categories, and disorder types reflect those used by the interviewee.

On a humid morning in May 2022, Aunt Li made her way through the yellow, hazed glass doors of the Shenzhen Comprehensive Service Center for the Disabled. A new social worker with a gentle voice and resolute eyes, Aunt Li was led to a small, fainted-red plastic seat, the style and kind favored by kindergarteners. Before her lay a large, low table stacked with appointment records: a dense mosaic of names, disability levels and types, and assigned evaluation specialists.

“Yeah, I remember my first day,” Aunt Li told me in her steady pace and perfect Mandarin pronunciations. “I thought to myself, well, this is where I’ll be working—this little red chair that we’re sitting in right now, this table before us. I imagined waves of people with tons of needs—like, how do I help so many people with so many disabilities?” For a middle-aged woman who dedicated her early career to foreign-trade management, this shift from global markets, English contracts, and airplane seats to individual lives, colloquial greetings, and her small red chair proved to be a profound, however abrupt, transition. “In trade, what you do is straightforward: pushing shipments, contracts, payments. You match buyers with sellers. Here, you’re still pushing deals of another sort; you match assistive device applicants with our evaluators. But we’re pushing more than that: we’re pushing hope.”

Aunt Li graduated in 2005 with a BS degree in Food Science and Engineering from a “211 university,” a title given to approximately 100 prestigious Chinese universities selected and funded by the national government’s Project 211. She spent the next decade navigating the choppy waters of foreign trade: documenting exports, reviewing contracts, drafting invoices. She took the tide at the flood of China’s new WTO membership and dodged waves of tariff and tensions. But when the 2018 trade war rattled her foreign-trade unit, she found herself at a crossroads. “Trade volumes suddenly dropped, and my workload with it. The suppliers, the buyers, everyone was anxious and uncertain.” Aunt Li watched her colleagues’ desks clear out, one by one. Customers paused orders, forcing factories to halt production. The city’s fabled skyline seemed to lose parts of its promise. “I was terrified. There’s not much I could’ve done. I sat at my workplace and watched deals canceled, and waited for new ones to come—which they never did. These days, I followed up with customers and factories that I’ve worked with recently. And eventually, I tried contacting all potential buyers and producers I knew. To be fair, there were still tasks for me, so I wasn’t starving or unemployed,” she recalls, tapping the table. “My day became a lot more empty, and my wallet was emptying as well, haha.” Economically, something in her snapped: “I thought that if my efforts at work could suddenly vanish and trade wouldn’t recover, then perhaps foreign trade isn’t the best job. Maybe I needed a vocation impervious to the uncertainties of geopolitics and swings of the market.” But Aunt Li’s transformation was more than economical. Docks hummed with empty containers outside. Aunt Li felt empty inside. She yearned for purpose.

Following her colleagues, she signed up for volunteer spots at community centers. Curious to see if compassion could fill the void, she started as volunteer librarians, then took on more challenging roles that required interactions with all sorts of people: from minors to seniors, athletes to the disabled. She watched as visually impaired kids learned to walk in a straight line, and as stroke survivors challenged themselves in charity swimming contests. “I was moved,” she said. “There were always people full of gratitude. They’d thank me, time and again. As if I saved their life or did something else hugely substantial. ‘It’s ok, no problems, that’s my job as a volunteer,’ I told them. But they were grateful regardless. Talking to these people, sharing moments of tears and laughter, felt really different. If you had held a toddler’s hand, you would know the difference.”

This “different” experience would soon prove life-changing. One evening, a colleague who always volunteered at a Longgang kindergarten called her, informing her that their volunteer spots were filled by full-time social workers from then on. “All this time I spent as a volunteer, I was progressively gravitating towards more serious volunteer work—social work, though I might not have realized until that evening. The volunteer spots were no longer available to the public, so I thought, ‘I might as well try becoming a social worker,’ and I needed a certificate for that.” Having self-studied through online courses and books, she remembers staying up past midnight poring over definitions and real-life scenarios. In 2020, she passed the National Social Worker Professional Qualification Exam (社会工作者职业水平考试) and became a licensed Junior Social Worker (助理社会工作师), swapping shipping ledgers for evaluation rosters.