●Wei Yi Shi Weiyan
Liu Wei woke up on a hot afternoon in Beijing without having slept long. When his mother brings lunch from the kitchen, Liu Wei grips the spoon with his right foot and brings a leek and scrambled egg with rice to his mouth.
After eating, he began playing "Dream Wedding" with his feet. Playing the piano with your feet is similar to using your hands, in that many times your wrists need to be suspended. While the average person playing piano with their hands can hold their fingers open to 8 degrees, Liu Wei's toes are trained to spread to 5 degrees, requiring more movement to make up for the lack of span.
He has a large poster of Jay Chou plastered in his room. "My ideal is to be a first-class music producer," Liu Wei said.
Original dream
Born in 1987, Liu Wei went to elementary school at the start of the professionalization of soccer in China, and it was his ideal to become a professional player.
However, all that imagination came to an abrupt end one day when he was 10 years old. He can no longer fully recall what happened that day.
"How did I get electrocuted? I can't actually remember it myself, I've lost that part of my memory."
When he woke up, he was already lying in a hospital bed. At first, he did not think it was a more serious thing, "is not amputation, well and then connected not on the line?" After getting out of the life-threatening situation, Liu Wei was told that he had lost both arms forever, "At that time my head was blank, stupid."
During his time in the hospital doing rehabilitation, he met a patient who had also lost his hands. "He was able to eat, brush his teeth, write on his own and was very successful in his career, and he taught me a lot."
The man's name was Liu Jingsheng, vice chairman of the Beijing Municipal Disabled Persons' Federation. Facing people with the same encounter, Liu Wei's feeling is: "If you are born with two heads, people think it is strange, but when you meet a person who also has two heads, and you find that he is living a good life, then you will surely think that if he is living a good life, I can also." Six months after losing his hands, he learned to brush his teeth, eat and write with his feet.
The treatment and recovery time was long. For two years, he did not re-enter school. After spending a summer vacation cramming, he returned to his old class. By the final exam, he was still in the top three in his class.
Life was put on a break without hands. At this point, he watched the World Cup live on TV for the first time, but his soccer dreams had already been dashed. 12 years old, he began to learn to swim, and entered the Beijing Disabled Swimming Team. Just two years later, he won two golds and a silver in the National Disabled Swimming Championships. Liu Wei made a promise to his mother to come back with a gold medal at the 2008 Paralympics.
Cruel youth
The cruelty of fate for Liu Wei was that it always gave him a wonderful start, then quickly blew the final whistle. While trying to prepare for the Olympics, the intense physical exertion led to a drop in immunity and an allergic purpura. Doctors told his mother that high-voltage electricity for Liu Wei's body cells have had serious damage, do not rule out the possibility of developing lupus erythematosus or leukemia in the future, he had to give up the training, otherwise it will be life-threatening.
After giving up soccer and swimming, he put his hopes on his other hobby, music.
Family members objected unsuccessfully to his taking up music. Liu Wei ended up not taking the college entrance exam and acquired a piano that his family borrowed money to buy. "The happiest thing a person can do is to be able to pursue a career that they love, so I ended up choosing music."
Playing the piano with one's feet is tough; it takes courage and imagination, and it takes many years for many people to get up to speed playing with their hands, let alone their feet. Liu Wei practices the piano for more than seven hours a day. "I live a three-point life: practicing, learning music, and going home. My home was in Wudaokou, the place where I practiced the piano was in Shahe, and the place where I learned music was in the fourth middle school; it was a real mental and physical test at that time."
After a long period of refinement, Liu Wei gradually figured out how to get along with the keys with his feet. As in soccer and swimming, his perception of music was equally amazing. At the Olympics, Liu Wei, who had only studied piano for one year, appeared on Beijing TV's Singing the Olympics program and played a song called "Dream Wedding" in front of Andy Lau. Then he played the piano and sang a chorus of "Heaven's Will" with Liu.
The birth of a "man"
In May this year, he took part in the "Happy Man" Jinan regional qualifier, "I was interrupted before I sang a few lines of the song, and when we brought the piano in to perform, less than half, the judges were very impatient to interrupt the performance, then didn't say a word. I thought none of this was a big deal, and 5 words would appear in the sky in front of me: what a big deal".
In August, on the set of China's Got Talent, Liu Wei walked up with empty sleeves and sat down at the piano. The song "Dream Wedding" rang out. The song ended with a standing ovation. When judge Gao Xiaosong asked him how he did it all, Liu Wei said, "I think there are only two paths in my life, either hurry up and die or live wonderfully."
When Liu Wei was put on a dazzling stage once again by fate, he was somewhat like the lyrics he wrote: always clear. "I've been working hard for my dream, and right now I'm kind of average in terms of playing, I'm learning in terms of songwriting, and I've learned a little bit in terms of production. You can't talk yourself up too much, the bigger the halo, the bigger the hollow inside. All I want is to do well for myself, and that's OK".