A feature about handicapped access in Beijing ahead of the Paralympics. Published in the summer of 2008.
Lao Du loves the Beijing APM (formerly known as the Sun Dong’an Shopping Center) at Beijing’s Wangfujing Street. It’s not the shops he loves, nor the overall design. It’s the bathrooms. That shopping center is “the gem of commercial accessibility in Beijing,” he says. “That place – the bathrooms especially – is just fantastic.”
In addition to wheelchair-accessible toilets, the bathrooms feature low toilets and sinks for children. “It’s more modern and more user-friendly than anything I’ve ever seen in America.”
Du, aka Professor David Tool, has become well known in China for his volunteer work. Not long after he arrived in China seven years ago, Du, a charismatic retired US Army Colonel with a yearning to bridge cultural divides, began a mission to clean up the bad translations that spattered Beijing’s cultural and commercial institutions.
Du started with correcting museum signs, but with all his trips to Beijing’s cultural sites, he realized that there was a problem bigger than poor English signage, pointing the way, for instance, to “Racist Park” (instead of the Minorities Park): For the elderly and handicapped, they simply weren’t easy to enter. To foster greater understanding and make the historically cloistered country more accessible, Du began a mission to fix more than signage.