One evening when her mother was out borrowing money and her son was still on his way home from school, Luan Shurong, lonely at home, picked up the scissors that were once so familiar to her. It was December 1998, two years since the bus accident that left her paralyzed, and the first time the artist would try her hand at paper cutting since her misfortune.
She delicately cut a pattern out of red-colored paper, creating a mother bird feeding four baby birds.
Then she selected a paper cut of a galloping horse from her previous works and put these two pieces together in her son's favorite book.
"I want to let him know that his mom loves him, and his mom hopes he will be as successful as a galloping horse in the future," Luan said.
Facing a string of setbacks after the accident, including a husband and a trusted friend who abandoned her, she had slipped into complete despair. Suicide popped up in her mind many times.
That evening, she took out a sharp blade from a drawer and cut right across the vessels on her wrist.
It was her son who found Luan in a coma with blood stains all over her. She was saved in the hospital.
But her attempted suicide became a turning point.
"My mother was very disappointed at my attempted suicide and scolded me harshly," Luan recalled. "She told me that 'since God endowed you with a pair of deft hands, you are at least able to cut papers, to do what you really like.'"
With her mother's words sobering her up, she finally came out of the shadow of suicide.
"Paper cutting is my life," Luan told China Daily.
November 11, 1996 was another turning point a day she would rather, but could never, forget.
A traffic accident dashed her happy life into pieces on that day.
As a promising paper-cutting artist in Shandong Province, she once visited Brazil in 1988 with the Shandong provincial folk art delegation, dazzling the Brazilians with her deft scissor skills and fine paper cuts. At the age of 25, she got married to one of her fans and soon gave birth to a lovely boy.
On the tragic day, she made a trip with Liu Naimei, one of her apprentices, hoping to find a job for Liu so that this girl from the remote countryside could support herself through paper cutting.
On their way back home, a truck struck their bus, causing it to swerve into a roadside ditch.
After she regained her consciousness eight days later, she found herself paralyzed, while her student Liu was lightly bruised.
Her husband divorced her two months later.
What's more, Liu swallowed the promise she had made to Luan at her bedside that she would take care of Luan for the rest of her life. She left Luan five months later without leaving any comforting words to her mentor.
During that period, she underwent three surgical operations, which cost her all her savings and left her in debt.
Coping with her daily life was the first difficulty she had to encounter at that time. She had to practise moving her body from the bed to the wheelchair using her arms. After countless failures, she finally learned how to get out of bed by herself. Soon, she learned how to use the wheelchair. Then she once again took up the scissors and revived her love for paper cutting.
In the past seven years, she finished more than 10,000 pieces, among which over 100 have been shown in different exhibitions both at home and abroad.
She was praised as "the Chinese Magic Scissors" by foreign guests.
Two of her works, entitled "A Happy Farmer's Family" and "Flower on Window," were printed in German postcards with more than one million copies distributed.
One of her masterpieces is "Happy Monkeys," which is composed of 100 monkeys with a variety of gestures.
Through years of studying and practicing, she created a skill called "fine-hair cut" that supposedly no one else in the world can imitate.
Now she is teaching the fine art to over 10 students from nearby schools. "I hope to pass on the tradition of paper cutting and even make some necessary changes," Luan said.
(China Daily December 16, 2005)
