Welcome to 听故事说中文, the podcast where stories come alive to help you improve your Chinese language proficiency and cultural competency.

Today's story is about Cai Lei, a man who was diagnosed with ALS — known in Chinese as 渐冻症(jiàn dòng zhèng), literally "the freezing disease" — and chose not to quietly disappear. Before his diagnosis, he was a successful businessman. Afterward, he became something harder to define: a patient who threw himself into funding research, building platforms, pushing policy, and demanding that the world pay attention to a disease it had largely ignored.

It's a story about what it looks like to face the unfaceable — not with grace, but with grit.
- Rui & Simeng

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