Girl with cerebral palsy delights millions with reaction to school news

An online video which captures the moment a little girl with cerebral palsy found out she had been accepted by a primary school has melted millions of hearts on the mainland social media.

Six-year-old Zhang Junru, who is nicknamed Doudou, could not contain her joy when her mother, Yang Feng, told her the news.

But the moment was tinged with sadness.

“I thought they didn’t want me,” Doudou said with a mix of joy and relief in the video which shows her practising walking on her way to a therapy centre in the municipality of Chongqing in southwestern China.

“Why wouldn’t they want you? Doudou is excellent,” Yang quickly replied to her daughter in the clip.

Yang, who had posted the video on her Douyin account, said she felt “heartbroken” when she heard Doudou’s response to the news. “The idea that children like Doudou cannot easily go to school is so rooted in our minds,” she said.

Doudou, who was born premature, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two, when she had still not learned to walk.

After the diagnosis, her parents took her from their hometown in the countryside in Sichuan province to neighbouring Chongqing for treatment.

The prognosis was devastating. They were told by a doctor that Doudou “would never be able to stand up”.

Yang refused to give up on her daughter. She rented a flat near the therapy centre in Chongqing, and took Doudou there six days a week.

To help pay the therapy fees, her father, Zhang Lin, took jobs as a migrant construction worker in the northern provinces of Hebei and Shaanxi while Yang looked after their daughter full time.

Yang said Doudou had also shown determination, insisting on going to the therapy centre every day despite having to endure painful massages and leg-stretching treatments.

But the hard work paid off. After a year of treatment, Doudou was able to stand up by herself, and could walk on her own by the time she turned five.

Last December, a video of her walking home from the therapy centre was watched 3.5 million times on the social media platform Bilibili. In that video, recorded by Yang as she walked behind her daughter, Doudou took each step slowly but steadily. The 300-metre journey included several flights of stairs.

“Dad, I’m back! And I walked all the way by myself!” she shouted with glee to her father after the walk home.

Cerebral palsy refers to a group of disorders that affect a person’s ability to move and maintain balance and posture.