My interview with JianZe

“A person's life should be lived in such a way that, when he looks back, he does not regret wasted years nor feel ashamed of an idle life,”wrote Pavel Korchagin..

“In the water, I feel much freer than on land,” Jianzhe says.

In 2020, at the age of twenty-two, he earned his Handicapped Scuba Association (HSA) certification — becoming the first person with a disability in China to do so.

Jianzhe was born with Emery–Dreifuss muscular dystrophy (EDMD), a rare genetic disorder caused by a mutation in the LMNA gene. Symptoms typically appear around age ten, leading to muscle weakness in the arms and legs, spinal stiffness, and potentially severe heart and respiratory complications. Globally, only about 20,000 people are known to live with EDMD — making it one of the world’s rarest inherited conditions.

Though the disease has weakened his arms and neck and placed him in a wheelchair, Jianzhe never stopped dreaming. When he discovered the HSA program dedicated to adaptive diving, he decided to dive — literally — into a new chapter of life.

Innovation Beneath the Surface

For most divers, pinching one’s nose or tilting the head is routine. For Jianzhe, both are nearly impossible. Yet he refused to let that stop him. Unable to pinch his nose, he learned to equalize pressure by swallowing air — a technique usually reserved for professional instructors. When standard air valves required lifting his arm, he searched until he found a Japanese design that allowed air to vent downward.

Three months of persistence paid off. On August 30, he earned his certification. Underwater, he discovered a freedom unlike any other — a world where gravity fades, and his body moves as lightly as his dreams.

A Life Beyond Limits

“Diving is something that blossoms slowly,” Jianzhe reflects. In the ocean’s quiet embrace, he found not just freedom, but purpose — proof that courage, creativity, and persistence can turn the impossible into possibility.

In the end, Jianzhe’s story is not one defined by disease, but by determination.

It is a story of motion — of sinking and rising, of struggle and grace — of a man who found his truest self between the waves.