From Empty Ledgers to Full Hearts (Part 2)

May 31st, 2025:

Ms. Li (Auntie Li), first 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Note: Language referencing gender identities, disabilities and disorders, and social work may be outdated or fail to reflect the complexities of individuals mentioned.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.

For a few months, she worked at a Longgang District kindergarten, before arriving at her new position at the Disability Service Center in Futian District. Her workplace had changed from an office cell to a playground, and finally to an echoing hall housing the Center’s reception area: a wide, sunlit lobby with tactile floor guides and sparse sofas. Her task was to greet and guide assistive device subsidy applicants.

That first morning, she sat on her low red chair, reading the day’s appointment roster. “Whenever you scan a name, you can almost see a story,” she explains. “A woman in her thirties might have lost sight in a factory accident. A child might have developed a mental disorder due to genetic developmental deficits. These cases are real. As social workers, we don’t try to guess what happened to others—maliciously or not. We treat the applicants as people with privacy. But sometimes we and the evaluators, more often the applicants themself, talk about it openly. Then the stories are out there. And I can’t remain that detached.”

Aunt Li’s empathy and willingness to learn led her to understand that Shenzhen’s assistive-device subsidy was both a generous lifeline and a bureaucratic obstacle. According to its Statistical Bureau, the municipality’s social security budget stood at just 0.0131% of GDP in 2023, meaning that its subsidy practically covers only the most severe cases. Electric wheelchairs are denied whenever the applicant can use a manual wheelchair, even as the latter means substantial mobility hurdles. Aunt Li pointed to her appointment roster: “take this roll of applicants as an example—the most serious is disabled to the second degree, so they have a small chance of qualifying. The rest are all disabled to the third and fourth degrees, so at best, the government will pay for a manual wheelchair.” Same thing with hearing aids, or eye surgeries. “Working for the evaluation department makes one feel like a gatekeeper,” she confessed, “I’m not the one who makes decisions; but the whole point about evaluation is that: ‘the center holds a golden ticket, but not everyone can be granted a seat.’”

Aunt Li greets and processes dozens of visitors each morning between 9 and 11 a.m., and again from 2 to 4 p.m. All visitors have secured appointments beforehand. She’s met single-leg amputees, deaf elders, and kids with neurodevelopmental disorders. She greeted different visitors with varying volume: “there’s just no way you can expect an old woman applying for hearing aids to hear you if you speak softly. That thought’s funny.” Working alongside her as a volunteer, I learned to raise or soften my voice as I greeted “good morning [to] Auntie Zhou” or bid “goodbye [to] Uncle Chen,” confirming ID Cards, checking Disability Identity Certificates, assigning each a number, and leading them to their respective evaluation rooms. Aunt Li’s desk was a stage for hope and despair alike.

Aunt Li sat exposed, without a barrier window. Once, her desk staged a chilling incident: “last winter, there was this tall, large psychotic visitor. He rushed into the building and started throwing punches at my co-worker, pushing her to the ground. Nobody knew what to do. All the social workers on the ground floor were female that day. I had to hide myself and call the police in secret. Actually, I’ve been pleading for security guards to be stationed inside the hall on the ground floor, but resources are limited. They [the government] can hardly afford professional guards at the front gate, let alone additional guards inside. You saw the old guards at retirement age at the front gate too, didn’t you? Do you expect them capable of fighting off a psychotic man in his twenties? And what if he had a knife?” Aunt Li slowed and quieted her voice as she went on. The center’s one security station was a small cubicle tucked by its parking lot gate, and the guards’ primary task was to charge parking fees.

Like the guards, Aunt Li’s job is deceptively simple: verify certificates, assign a number, then guide them to a room. Aunt Li told me that as they appear, these processes are in fact, not the challenging part: “the difficulty lies in dealing with all sorts of people. Like in the extreme case of a violent psychotic. That was, to be fair, very rare. But every day or two, there’d be an applicant with random emotional outbursts. Sometimes, if you think about it, you can come to understand them a bit. They arrive weary—sometimes dripping with sweat after a scorching walk under Shenzhen’s summer heat, or dripping from unpredictable monsoon showers. (Shenzhen might be cloudy without being rainy for whole entire days, or it might give you a shower on a sunny, cloudless day.) They blame my desk’s height, that the air con isn’t cool enough, but their frustration is really about other hassles.”

Rain, heat, and bad temper were all present on that humid June afternoon, when a man with one prosthetic leg stormed into the hall. “All of a sudden, upon seeing us, he started cursing the distance from his home in Bao’an. ‘Why here? Why did you have to pick here? Why is it so far from where I live?’ he spat. Well, as a matter of fact, our building is pretty close to Futian District’s residential centers, and we’ve been here for over a decade. Our building is here, never moved. And Futian District is, geographically speaking, near the center of Shenzhen. Maybe it’s inconvenient to get here from where that person lived, but it’s not as if we can change location just for him.” This was, of course, not what Aunt Li said on spot. Held back by her professional training and the rule of avoiding conflict escalation, Aunt Li tried to comfort the visitor: “I know it’s far. I’m sorry for that. If you want, I could sit down with you and work out the best way for you to get back afterward.” She always embraced problem-oriented coping: “I’m not a psychologist, and there’s no time for counseling—there’re people waiting in line, and they each have their own difficulties in life. All I can do is to quiet down their anger, and work out efficient solutions to unreasonable demands.”

Aunt Li’s psychologist friend urged her to develop jogging into a habit. “He urged my co-workers and I to run along Shenzhen Bay, so as to release our stress and unspoken frustration. ‘Having to greet and serve people who throw their negative emotions at you isn’t healthy,’ he said, and he’s concerned that social workers at the Service Center would develop mental illnesses.” When I met Aunt Li, she had already fallen in love with jogging and weightlifting. As she said, “self-care is nonnegotiable.”

Over the weeks volunteering at the Service Center, I witnessed how Aunt Li’s patience feeds into care for herself and for others. Inside the small but cavernous evaluation rooms, specialists of diverse fields measured how well one’s applied assistive device is in mitigating daily hassles and difficulties brought about by disability, as well as whether cheaper alternatives exist. Aunt Li’s role was to shepherd visitors to their respective rooms, often calming anxieties: “it’s ok, take your time, come this way,” she’d say to impatient kids or exhausted parents. She recalled one child who, “upon entering the hall, rushed over and started licking her table’s edge without a trigger, as if the table was a harmonica-like toy. It was as random as it sounds, and what surprised me more was how his parents never seemed to care. I followed up with his evaluator later that day and learned that’s a typical behavior of his mental disorder—autism it was, I believe.” Greeting individuals with physical and mental disabilities alike, social workers and volunteers at the center have learned to not judge or scold—only understand and care.