In 1976, an earthquake rattled the city of Tangshan in China. It left 242,769 people dead and 3,817 individuals paralyzed.
Gao was living with her family at that time, and they were celebrating her achievement of earning her undergraduate degree just hours before the earthquake struck. Gao’s father and sister died in the quake, and both Gao and her mother were paralyzed. It took Gao’s brothers hours to dig her out of the rubble by hand.
Gao, along with many other wounded, was taken by train to a hospital in a neighboring province where she underwent surgery. There, Gao overheard a nurse say the word ‘paraplegia,’ and thus learned of her spinal cord injury.
A few years later in 1980, the Tangshan Paraplegia Convalescent Hospital was built to offer rehabilitation to people like Gao. It was at this hospital where Gao met Yang who had also been paralyzed in the Tangshan earthquake. They bonded over the similar injuries and the changes that their lives had taken since the quake.
In 1984, Gao and Yang married, and have been at one another’s side since then. Yang says that had it not been for the earthquake and his and Gao’s injuries, he would have never met or married Gao: “My wife was born in a cadres’ family and graduated from college. I would by no means have an opportunity to marry her if we had not been paralyzed by the quake.”
“We don’t mind each other’s physical disability. So hard though life is, we can live a good life.”