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【阅读理解】Reading: The Fan, the Workshop, and the Quiet Masterpiece
Yang Mei was thirty-six and had spent eleven years making artificial limbs in a rented booth on the fifth floor of a building in Zhongxian, a town of 380,000 people along the Yangtze.
When the ventilation fan stopped at 4:17 on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2019, the room filled with a coarse, soluble dust that made her gland swell and her eyes water.
She called her old coach from vocational school, Deng Wei, who was fifty-two and ran a small prosthetics clinic in Wuhan.
Deng told her she had a nerve problem and that the machine was only a symptom.
For years she had relied on a technique from a German manual, layering resin by eye, with no computerised measurement and no statutory safety code.
Deng offered her a place in a bilateral training programme with a hospital in Chengdu, but it came with a tariff: 60,000 yuan, four months unpaid, and a promise to return to Zhongxian and recruit five apprentices.
She had 84,000 yuan saved, but her mother had a psychiatric condition that required monthly expenditure of 3,200 yuan.
Yang did not answer for three days; on the fourth day she took the train west.
The programme nearly broke her: she was the oldest in a cohort of nineteen, and most were in their twenties, agile with software.
Her first attempt at a socket for a below-knee amputee was 2.3 millimetres too loose at the periphery.
The instructor, Luo Jing, asked whether she wanted the honest version or the kind one, and Yang chose honest.
Luo said, 'You compress too early. Let the plastic breathe.'
By week ten Yang had produced a socket that a patient could wear for fourteen hours without a single pressure sore.
She went back to Zhongxian in July and found the old workshop gone; the landlord had raised rent by 40 percent and wanted the space for a retailer of imported conditioners.
Yang found a new room near the river, 38 square metres, with a real ventilation system and a statutory fire certificate.
She spent 21,000 yuan of her remaining savings and recruited four apprentices, not five.
The first was He Liang, twenty-nine, a former tramp she had met at a bus stop, who had lost his left arm in a workshop accident and could not find work because employers regarded him as a liability.
Yang taught him to operate the scanner, to filter resin, and to interact with patients without sympathy that sounded like disdain.
The real disturbance came in 2021 when a local hospital announced it would open its own prosthetics unit, staffed by a team from Chongqing, with equipment that cost more than Yang's entire career earnings.
The news spread through the town's 74,000 households in a week, and Yang's monthly profit fell from 26,000 yuan to 9,400.
He Liang asked whether they should retaliate by cutting prices, but Yang said no.
She had learned in Chengdu that price wars deplete everyone, and that credibility is slow to recover once lost.
Instead she started a periodical newsletter for amputees, eight pages, printed at a shop by the pier, with skin care advice, a summary of new socket materials, and a section called 'Ask the Workshop.'
It reached 1,100 readers by winter.
The hospital's unit opened, then quietly scaled back its limb-fitting service within eighteen months, not because Yang had overcome it, but because the demand was smaller and stranger than anyone had budgeted for.
What remains is a room, a fan, and a question Yang cannot answer.
On a wet morning in 2023 she stood at the window watching a container ship swing toward the lock, while He Liang fitted a socket on a nine-year-old girl who had been born without a left foot.
The girl asked if she could have a flower pattern on it, and Yang said yes.
Questions
1. What happened to Yang Mei's workshop in Zhongxian in July after she returned from Chengdu?
A. It was moved to a larger room near the river by the landlord. B. It was destroyed by a fire caused by the ventilation fan. C. It was closed because the landlord raised rent by 40 percent and wanted the space for an imported conditioner retailer. D. It was taken over by He Liang, who turned it into a prosthetics clinic.
2. How much did Yang spend on her new room near the river, and how many apprentices did she recruit?
A. 21,000 yuan and four apprentices. B. 60,000 yuan and four apprentices. C. 38,000 yuan and five apprentices. D. 84,000 yuan and five apprentices.
3. In the passage, the word 'tariff' most nearly means:
A. a tax paid on imported goods B. a price or cost that must be paid C. a type of medical treatment D. a legal document for a workshop
4. Why did the hospital's prosthetics unit quietly scale back its limb-fitting service within eighteen months?
A. Because He Liang had learned to fit sockets better than the hospital team. B. Because Yang Mei had overcome it with her newsletter. C. Because the team from Chongqing left after a dispute over equipment. D. Because the demand was smaller and stranger than anyone had budgeted for.
5. What is the best title for this passage?
A. A Hospital's Success in Limb Fitting B. The Best Prosthetics Programme in Chengdu C. The Fan, the Workshop, and the Quiet Masterpiece D. How to Win a Price War in a Small Town