THROUGH HIS EYES: Wang Weili, a movie narrator since 2005, presents a narration of a movie to visually impaired listeners

Her efforts paid off. In 2007, she won an award in a radio summer camp designed for people with visual impairments. In July this year, she received an enrollment letter from the Special Education College of Beijing Union University.

"My major is acupuncture and massage, a profession related to traditional Chinese medicine, which is exclusively designed for students with visual problems nationwide like me.

"I will spend the following five years with them. That's so exciting!"

Eyes of hearts

In fact, Song arrived in Beijing in early August and became a part-time editor and reporter of the "Eyes of Heart Cinema," the country's first and only radio program narrating movies for people with visual impairments. Movie narration is a form of explaining and describing scene-by-scene action in a movie to a visually impaired audience, through a full-sighted volunteer.

It is also the coordinator of the radio summer camp that Song joined.

The organizer of the camp was Beijing Hong Dandan Edu-Culture Communication Center (shorter as Hong Dandan), set up by Zheng Xiaojie in July 2003, a non-profit organization providing training courses on media production and barrier-free communication for the visually disabled.

Their service program includes the "Eyes of Heart Cinema," a party-like movie lecture; "Seeing the World via Eyes of Heart," a 50-minute weekly radio program consisting of movie narrative and interviews; training sessions for radio professionals; psychological lectures, and so forth.

Song's current work is to edit the introduction part of the movie narration section.

According to Wang Weili, Zheng's husband, best known as Da Wei, the movie narrator since 2005, the "Eyes of Heart Cinema" radio program is "a remedy for those visually disabled."

It can be traced back to 2004 when a couple with visual disabilities came to visit the Wangs. The Hollywood blockbuster Terminator was then aired on TV; Wang volunteered to be the movie narrator for the couple.

"It was not a well-done job, but they were so excited that they hugged me and held me up. The husband told me that he was totally shocked by the movie world that there seemed to be a door opened for him, a colorful new world," Wang recalls.

Inspired by the idea, Wang has put his heart into movie narration ever since. "The Eyes of Heart Cinema" formally launched in early 2005.

To create a better result, he would watch the movie at least three times and take notes before the lecture; he would invite healthy people to feel the way the disabled "watch" the movie by covering their eyes.

"I'd like to let them enjoy the movie world by ears and the imagination; let them have a better understanding of the world they may not be able to see through the eyes. It is indeed a combination of the movie sound effects and my description about the scene, such as the location, the actor's emotional expression and appearance, the scenery, and so forth," said Wang, a former businessman who turned into a full-time volunteer of Hong Dandan in 2004.

"In the past, watching movies seemed to be a mission impossible for us. But now it's accessible. My horizon is broadened, thanks to the cinema," said Chen Guole, a male member of the audience.

"I would like to ‘run' over here whenever the lecture begins," said Zhang Hui, another visually impaired audience member.

Over the past two years, the "Seeing the World via Eyes of Heart" radio program hit 100 episodes, reaching more than 750,000 people nationwide. The live movie narration has been watched by 3,356 people with visual disabilities, old patrons and new faces. In addition, some 768 volunteers from renowned TV comperes and movie professionals to white-collar clerks and university students, showed up to support; 214 people took movie narration training courses. Wang has been to neighboring cities to deliver live narrations for visually impaired locals.

"Mutual respect is the threshold of any rapport. Equality is a proper manner in communicating with the handicapped-to healthy people, the ‘looking-down-upon-you' manner, which means treating them like children, doesn't help at all; to the disabled, opening their hearts and facing themselves are challenges they have to come up against," Wang noted.

On August 8, 10 disabled audience members listened to a live narration of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games presented by Wang and his friend Cao Yinan, a compere from Beijing TV Station. Wang also gave live narrations for handicapped spectators after the 13th Paralympic Games kicked off in Beijing on September 6.

The visually impaired, according to Wang, should have more career choices other than becoming massage therapists.

It is exactly what Song wants to say.

"I'll become a full-time DJ someday," Song told Beijing Review. " I'll keep going."