Overcoming adversity

He was once bathed in light. Before the age of 6, Zhou was a joyful, ordinary child. Then illness struck. One of his last clear memories of sight is of his father teaching him Chinese characters, using an ink brush on cardboard so the strokes would be large enough for him to see. The deterioration was swift, and by middle school he could no longer walk to school on his own.

"That was when my father began to take my hand and guide it along the strokes of the characters I needed to learn. He read to me as well, for one or two hours every day," recalled Zhou, now 54.

Some things, however, were much harder — solid geometry, for instance.

"My father would guide my hand to trace planar projections on the desk, or even on my own leg. But without a visual crutch, how do you transform a perspective drawing into a three-dimensional object? In the end, there is no one to rely on but your own imagination. You turn it over in your mind again and again, until the diagram begins to move, to rotate, to take shape — almost like a computer rendering. That is still how I work today: turning an idea over and over until light seeps through a crack, and suddenly — everything clicks."

"But I'm not always successful," he added.

To enter high school, Zhou sat the same examinations as his peers, with only one accommodation: a teacher sat beside him throughout, reading the test papers aloud and recording his answers. His results were strong enough to qualify him for a top-ranked public high school, but he chose to attend an ordinary one instead.

"During high school, I always sat in the front row. The teachers — especially my math and physics teachers — would voice everything they wrote on the blackboard. They were always mindful," Zhou recalled.

He was not permitted to sit the college entrance examinations, as no special provisions were available for him. Instead, at 18, he enrolled in a vocational school to study massage, which in China had long been the default occupation for the blind.

"Up to that point, I had lived among the ordinary and had never thought of myself as 'special' in a burdensome sense," Zhou said. "Being in that school, surrounded by people who could not see, was like hitting a wall."

The experience was compounded by the pain of being unable to attend college — a future his father, who died in 1997 at the age of 65, had always believed he deserved.

"I did become a masseur, and was one for 32 years, until my retirement from a factory hospital in 2024," said Zhou. "But physics and math — my two favorite subjects — found me only two years after I left vocational school in 1992."

At the time, Zhou hired university students to read physics and mathematics books to him, subsisting on a meager monthly stipend of 100 yuan ($14.46).

His resolve was met with unexpected generosity in 1995, when one of the students he had hired introduced him to Mao Youdong, a physics student at Wuhan University.

"Not only did he offer to read for me without pay, but he also shared my story with his classmates and teachers," Zhou recalled.