Video | Blind Chinese teen violinist who commutes 12 hours for lessons in Hong Kong sets bar high for herself

Ding Yijie became blind at 15, but that didn’t dampen her positive spirit nor her passion for playing the violin. Every few weeks she travels from Foshan with her mother to study at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts

Ding Yijie, 17, has been completely blind for the past two years, but that does not stop her travelling to Hong Kong from her home in Foshan for music lessons. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Published: 6:45pm, 17 Jan 2018Updated: 2:45pm, 18 Jan 2018

Making a 12-hour round trip from Foshan in Guangdong to Hong Kong for violin lessons is admirable – but doing it when you are blind is inspiring.

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Ding Yijie, 17, has been making this arduous journey from the southern Chinese province since September 2017, when she began taking lessons with Professor Michael Ma at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in Wan Chai.

A classical violinist, she is allowed two visas a month to travel for the lessons in Hong Kong, so attends classes in the city every few weeks. It takes at least five hours to get to Hong Kong from her home in Foshan, and even longer to get back.

Yijie and her mother on the way to a lesson. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Her mother, Wang Chunyuan, accompanies her on each visit. The journey involves taking a bus from Foshan to the border crossing; getting through customs and immigration; a bus to Yau Mei Tei; the MTR to Wan Chai; and then a 20-minute walk from MTR station to the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

The biggest problem is always the traffic, particularly on their way back to Foshan, where on one occasion the trip home took the pair a gruelling 17 hours.

On one trip, it took Yijie and her mother 17 hours to get home to Foshan after a violin lesson. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

“We had to travel back on National Day and it was terrible. We left Hong Kong at 6pm after class and got to Foshan the next day at around midday. We were on the bus in a traffic jam all night in Shenzhen,” Yijie’s mother explains.

It was a fact not lost on Ma, who is head of strings at the academy’s School of Music, as it proved to him the lengths Yijie will go to for her love of playing.