Su Yingzi knows this all too well. Her son, 11-year-old Xiaogu, is clever and witty in many ways. He excels at devising new games, cracking jokes comes naturally to him, and he makes friends easily. However, reading and writing Chinese characters seemed an insurmountable obstacle. While some of his classmates needed less than half an hour to memorize a few characters, Xiaogu could spend hours on the task and still forget how to write the words. When it came to exams, he often failed to understand the questions because many characters simply did not make sense to him.
In hindsight, Su believes her son showed early signs of the disability in kindergarten: His handwriting was messy, and he was often the last to finish writing exercises. “But the teacher attributed his performance to laziness, and I believed it, too,” Su said.
When Xiaogu entered primary school, Su spent thousands of yuan to send him to a cram school, but the family saw little improvement. Su started to lose patience. She scolded Xiaogu for his disappointing exam scores and admits to beating him when he wrote characters incorrectly.
Xiaogu could not understand why he struggled so much in something his peers could easily master. His aversion to schoolwork grew. Eventually, he stopped trying altogether, submitting blank exam papers even though he could have answered some of the questions.