Leading a full life Blindness no bar to success

Press, 6 December 1989, Page 18

Leading a full life Blindness no bar to success

By

MICHAEL RENTOUL

Chung-Pin Lin is a difficult young man to keep down. Nothing seems too difficult for this keen scholar and sportsman. It is easy to forget that he is blind. He feels no bitterness about “missing out,” only constant surprise that people under-estimate his abilities. Chung-Pin won the Australian Competition Credit, a maths competition, in his final year at Burnside High School this year; in 1988 he won a trip to Britain after taking the British Science Foundation Award for excellence in science. His peers, by contrast, can seem unmotivated. “If I were them I feel I would have done more than just sitting around.” Chung-Pin and friends race a nine-metre sailing cruiser most week-ends. His parents, exercising normal caution, restrained him from having a go at bungee jumping and parachuting. He has also taken an interest in judo. On the cultural side, Chung-Pin has played the violin for seven years, and recently, the harmonica. He is an avid reader, assisted by a “talking computer” (a personal computer with a voice unit) and a clever device called a opticom tectile converter — which converts the shape of words into a series of vibrating

pins. As Chung-Pin scans a page with a small handheld camera device, he picks up images of words through his finger tip,, which is on a mat of vibrating pins. He has his text-books translated into Braille, and sat his bursary exams orally. Ironically, Chung-Pin believes that “if you have enough money you have got nearly everything — they (peers) cannot say they can do without money.” Chung-Pin starts a fouryear electrical engineering course next year at the University of Canterbury. He has no particular job in mind, so long as it is a top-earner. Chung-Pin and his extended family moved from Taiwan to New. Zealand in 1984 partly to escape the high-pressure lifestyle and pollution in Taiwan. Chung-Pin went to a junior high school with 6000 students. Taiwan, he says, has adopted many aspects of the demanding Japanese education system. Chung-Pin would rise at 6 a.m. to be at school by 7 a.m.; arriving home at 4.30 p.m. to continue’ studying until the early hours of the morning. At age 18, he already professes some “strong political views”: Taiwan he believes, should be given more recognition as the real China. The

Taiwanese delegation which walked out of last week’s drift-net fishing talks in Wellington were protesting at a lack of diplomatic status, he says. “You don’t learn much from television apart from the news,” says

Chung-Pin, who also listens to “Foreign Correspondent” and “Fast Forward.” Most evenings, he tunes into the shortwave — Radio Moscow, China, Australia, and the 8.8. C. Chung-Pin will spend

most of these holidays training a guide-dog which will enable him to travel alone into town and onto buses. It will no doubt also assist Chung-Pin make further quiet strides to achievement and success.