Handan bench girl Li Yue lights up a wonderful life with her hands

According to a report by Handan Daily, Li Yue, a girl born in the 1990s, lost both legs at an early age. Though shorter in stature than others, her aspirations are second to none. She pursued her studies with determination, started a business through hard work, and lit up a wonderful life with her own hands.

Li Yue, now 25 years old, is from Donghetoubao Village, Feixiang County. She should have had a happy childhood like other children, but when she was one and a half years old, a fire at home completely shattered her hopes. Her legs were severely burned. In the hospital, she underwent four skin graft surgeries in just three months. After all-out rescue efforts, her life was saved, but both legs had to be amputated. Because treating Li Yue used up all the family's savings and left them in debt to relatives and friends, when Li Yue was learning to walk, her parents could only prepare two small benches for her and teach her to move forward by alternating her hands. As a result, the villagers all called her the "bench girl."

As she grew older, the "bench girl" reached school age. Watching other children happily heading to school with their schoolbags, she could only weep silently. "I want to go to school." Faced with her child's longing, Li Yue's mother felt quite helpless, as schools were unwilling to accept her due to her physical condition. To help her child become literate and able to support herself when she grew up, her mother, who had only a junior high school education, taught Li Yue to read at home, hand in hand. Little Li Yue was very sensible. She especially treasured this rare learning opportunity, always pestering her mother with questions, and making use of every chance to learn. Watching TV at home, she would follow the characters' speech and match it against the subtitles at the bottom of the screen to learn characters; walking on the street, she would pay attention to advertisements on the walls on both sides and the signs of supermarkets and shops; even flyers handed out on the street became her learning targets. Her brother bought books and a dictionary for her, and she often read biography stories and science encyclopedias, looking up any characters she did not know in the dictionary until she had fully mastered them. Hard work pays off. Although she never attended school for a single day, at such a young age she already knew more than 2,000 commonly used characters and words, not inferior to children of the same age at all.

"Self-taught success" gave Li Yue greater confidence. In order to learn a survival skill, she sought help from many sources, and was rejected time and again because of her physical condition. Later, with the help of the Publicity Department of the Feixiang County Party Committee, the Women's Federation, the Disabled Persons' Federation and kind-hearted people in society, and after contacts through multiple channels, the county's Great Wall Computer School accepted her and provided free food and accommodation. To make it convenient for Li Yue to study, the school also moved her dormitory to the first floor and arranged her classroom close to the cafeteria and dormitory.

The care of society's big family ignited Li Yue's hope and passion. She studied hard and actively looked for employment opportunities. A chance chat sparked her interest in WeChat business. Considering that she had computer skills and did not need to go out, she chose this industry without hesitation. She humbly asked friends around her who did WeChat business for advice, gathered all kinds of information online about doing WeChat business, joined multiple WeChat business training groups, asked professional trainers in the groups about relevant knowledge, watched videos, listened to lectures... After a period of learning, she chose a brand of women's bras to represent. In August last year, Li Yue's WeChat shop officially opened. Due to lack of experience, her shop did not make a single sale for half a year. After discovering the problem, Li Yue promptly adjusted her marketing strategy according to market demand and adopted different marketing methods for specific groups of people, and the little shop soon began to improve.

Now, Li Yue not only carefully runs her own WeChat shop, but also works part-time at a courier company handling parcel collection and delivery. Talking about her ideals, she said: "Besides doing my daily work well, I also want to open a physical bra shop, and then save money to buy a house of my own in the city and live a happy life."