Until the day his son took his side, the American teacher had never had the pleasure of working with that most elusive of colleagues: the ideal partner.

 

The father-son combination has proved a winning formula. The Lius -- Teacher Liu Hong-pai and Teacher Liu Jr, as many parents around the country know them -- run what is perhaps the country's most extensive assistance program for autistic children.

 

Liu senior was educated in Taiwan and the United States. He first started searching for opportunities to teach on the mainland about a decade ago, but numerous fallings-out with his partners proved a major hurdle.

 

That all changed the day his son William Liu joined him not long ago after graduating from Columbia University in New York's teachers college.

 

"He knows more about management," the father said of his son. 

 

While the two run assistance centers for autistic children in both the US and Taiwan, the Chinese mainland represents their biggest investment. The Lius have opened assistance centers across the country, particularly in Shanghai and Beijing.

 

Their biggest challenge so far has been that the problem -- the Lius are reluctant to use the word disease when talking about autism -- is becoming increasingly common around the world. China is no exception.

 

The spread of autism has belied both the growing affluence of most modern societies and the latest advances in medical science. People afflicted with the condition, which tends to affect more boys than girls, find it difficult to focus and communicate with other people.

 

Beyond the medical difficulty of identifying what causes autism, helping autistic children find a place in society remains a huge challenge. While some of them do demonstrate a certain kind of genius, most others simply lag behind their peers, forever shut off from their surroundings.

 

If it seems that every autistic person lives in his or her own little world, the Lius see their challenge as helping the children in their care strike a balance between their secret internal lives and the life of the world outside.

 

The teachers pursue this elusive goal by alternating the children's physical activities and classroom learning, incorporating exercises that stimulate the children's sight, listening and the use of their hands. The students progress through stages and receive sustained training.

 

The junior Liu said some training programs could last all the way up until the point a student was ready to go to college, should a youngster prove capable of that level of development.

 

He added that the Lius had seen such cases in the past.

 

The Lius' training system is sort of an amalgam of the traditional Chinese concept of the yin-yang balance and modern child psychology.

 

At a time when scientific efforts to understand autism have yet to yield clear answers, one parent of an autistic child said the Lius' program was better than just an endless list of no this, no that. It is based on understandable concepts that they can participate in. And in some cases these concepts slowly working.

 

(China Daily April 10, 2007)