Finding her wings: Sudanese student soars with studies

"Every time, I've grown stronger amid lonely wandering.

Every time, even when wounded, no tears betray my heart.

I know I've always had a pair of invisible wings,

Carrying me high, flying beyond despair …"

With a clear, melodic voice, 18-year-old Sudanese girl Ghofran Shamseldin sang a Chinese song before a vast audience in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. Its lyrics had long given courage to many, but in her, they found their truest echo. Losing her sight to a genetic disorder, Shamseldin had searched through darkness for those invisible wings — and found them.

"I decided to learn Chinese in high school after reading an Arabic translation of Yu Hua's novel To Live," she says.

Published in 1993, the work, widely considered one of the most influential modern Chinese novels, tells the lifelong travails of an ordinary peasant, against the backdrop of sweeping upheavals in 20th-century China. Having lost nearly everyone he loves — his parents, wife, son and daughter, each to fate, hardship or accident — the protagonist continues toward the end of the book, embodying the stark, haunting truth at the heart of the novel: that survival itself, however lonely and painful, is the deepest form of perseverance.

At that time, Shamseldin, who had always known that she would one day lose her sight, was still able to see. Yet, her condition deteriorated over the next few years: while a freshman at the Chinese Language Department of the University of Khartoum, she was only able to discern the strokes of a Chinese character by shining a torch onto the book's pages. "That fleeting window let me glimpse the shapes of Chinese characters. Though I would spend the rest of my life learning the language by ear, I have never forgotten their forms," says Shamseldin.

Yet, occasionally, she would still need to write, like when she wanted to give one of her Chinese teachers a card written by herself. "I asked a classmate to hold my hand and make the moves — I felt that anything less than that would fail to express my gratitude," she says. The same teacher gave her a Chinese name, Li Can — Li being a common surname while "Can" means "splendor".