By Yang Hongyan

Smile freezes on his face when Song Sicheng accidentally knocks over a box full of cocoa powder on the table. The 14-year-old boy stops jumping up and down. Only several seconds later, however, his eyes move away. Then he continues to jump happily, as if nothing has happened.

His mother quickly cleans the sprinkled powder, then softly pats Sicheng on the back, "Stop, good boy." But he fails to keep focused on what he is supposed to do.

Sicheng and his mother are going to make chocolate cookies. Ten minutes has passed. They are still preparing raw materials in line with the instructions printed on a piece of paper.

Every Friday morning, Sicheng's mother would accompany him to Yuren Bakery in the northwestern suburb of Beijing to learn elementary baking skills. As baking does not need too much social interaction, Mrs Song decided six months ago to let her son have a try.

Sicheng is a boy with autism, a spectrum disorder characterized by impaired social skills, repetitive behaviors, and impaired speech and nonverbal communication. Sicheng never actively talks to anybody or makes direct eye contact. He lives in his own world, with a narrow interest in objects.

Cookies made by an autistic teenager at Yuren Bakery

For Mrs Song, the bakery means a glimpse of hope of Sicheng's future. Maybe her son can one day work as an assistant baker to support himself when she and her husband are too old, she thinks.

It is believed that around 80 percent of China's estimated 10 million autistic population are aged above 14 years old. However, most rehabilitation programs are designed for children under 12, while facilities providing life skills for autistic teenagers and adults are particularly few.

As Sicheng is expected to graduate from a special school for intellectually challenged children in two years, Mrs Song has to worry about what her son can do in the future.

She got the information about Yuren online. The bakery under Kangnazhou Autism Family Support Center in Beijing was founded in 2012 as an experimental program to explore vocational rehabilitation and support employment for autistic people. Currently, 36 adolescents are learning at Yuren. They learn how to make cookies and cakes.

But Liu Linmei, an executive teacher in charge of the program, says it is even more important for them to learn social skills here than baking skills. So they have to clock in and out when they come to learn, an imitation of real work environment. They also have work-break exercises and share what they make with others after the work.

As the name of an illness, autism wasn't known in China until 1982, when the first case of this spectrum disorder was reported. Three decades has passed, but the term remains unfamiliar to the public.

Chinese people's limited knowledge about autism comes mainly from scarce news report and a movie or two about the group of people, such as the Oscar winning Rain Man, a movie about an autistic savant starring Dustin Hoffman. The name of the Kangnazhou bakery Yuren literally means "rain man."

Some media events in recent years have helped promoting the awareness of autism among the public. However, their touting of autistic kids' special talents has shaped a romantic image about the group of people, while the real conditions of them and the plight of their families are neglected.

Trainers and learners pose for a photo to celebrate their newly-made cakes at Yuren Bakery

FOR THE BETTER

Sicheng was diagnosed with autism more than ten years ago in 2006. At the beginning, Mrs Song felt strange that her son still could not speak at the age of three and was also unwilling to play with other children.

While her neighbors suspected that little Sicheng might be autistic, Mrs Song refused to believe it. To seek an authoritative diagnosis, she made a 1,080-kilometer journey with her son to Beijing from her home in northeast China's Jilin Province.

The result came as a shock. She stared off into empty air, tears rolling down her face. "All of my family members are healthy. How could my son be autistic?"

It was too hard for her to admit the reality. As Deng Xueyi, director of Kangnazhou's research and development team, put it, most parents of autistic children could not face the reality at the very beginning after their children's diagnosis. "Most mothers would weep day and night," Deng says.

While some elders in the family tried to persuade Mrs Song to give up, she was determined to look for a place to have her kid treated.

Despite a large autistic population, the number of child psychiatrists all over China is rather small, estimated at no more than 500, and most of them gather in large cities like Beijing, according to a report on China's autism rehabilitation industry released by Beijing Wucailu Children Behavior Rectification Center in April.

Mrs Song and her husband decided to quit their jobs and moved to Beijing at the end of 2006. They rent a 10-square-meter room, where they made a family plan at the first night: Sicheng's father would go to find a job, while the mother would take care of the boy.

The monthly cost for Sicheng's rehabilitation training of about 5,000 yuan (about 750 U.S dollars) was a big sum for the couple, but they did not give up even when they were in debt.

To their relief, however, little Sicheng started to utter "um-um" and became responsive after receiving a month of language training. The couple felt soothed.

Now ten years has passed and Sicheng has grown up into a 1.7-meter-tall adolescent, big and old enough for his parents to think about how their child can be accepted by society in the coming years.

Learners watch how to make decoration for cakes at Yuren Bakery

Ah Meng, a 25-year-old baker who works full time at Yuren Bakery, might be whom Mrs Song hopes her son could be like.

In fact, Yuren Bakery provides training for autistic children only from Friday to Sunday. During the remaining weekdays, Ah Meng makes cakes and cookies there based on orders.

Ah Meng has worked at the bakery for two years. With light autism, he is one of the three autistic adults who have been hired by the bakery after years of vocational training there. He works there also as a way of rehabilitation.

In his mind, he has a fixed work schedule that nothing seems able to break. He arrives at the bakery at 9 am every day, has lunch at 12 pm and goes off work at 4 pm. When he cannot find raw materials he wants, he would get lost in entanglement for a while.

Despite these stereotyped behavior, Ah Meng seems to be no different from ordinary people. In the eyes of the management staff, the man can be called a good employee without any bad habit.

Most of the bakery's orders come from parents of autistic children, NGOs and philanthropy enterprises. There are also occasionally some orders from the bakery's online shopping store.

Mooncakes for Kangnazhou's charity sale

SURVIVAL MATTERS

However, like Sicheng's shaky start at Yuren, the bakery itself also faces "huge" difficulties, according to Zou Wen, initiator of the bakery program and one of the six mothers of autistic children who founded the Kangnazhou center.

"Our biggest difficulty is the lack of money and professional management. We hope to find both government and non-governmental funding to sustain the program," says Zou. " As we mothers grow older, we find that our strength always fails our ambition. So we need a professional management team."

Another problem is that the bakery doesn't have a regular sales channel. So business goes through ups and downs. Taking the mooncake sales for the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival for example, the bakery has sold only about 1,000 cases of the traditional round pastries, about one fifth of last year's sales, according to Zou.

Zou sees the charity sale of the mooncakes both a way to raise money for the care of autistic people and an occasion to promote public awareness of autism.

Staff of Kangnazhou sell cookies and cakes made by Yuren Bakery at a music festival in Beijing

Although the orders do not come regularly, Ah Meng gets a regular pay for each month, like other employees in the bakery. But not everyone is as lucky as Ah Meng. For most autistic children, their employment is too extravagant a dream for their parents.

Ma Jingpeng's autistic son Ma Shuai is 24 years old. Shuai was found to be autistic at the age of two and half, but before that, he was able to chant rhymes or sing, according to the father.

To make it worse, however, the boy began to suffer incontinence and was no longer able to speak six months later at the age of three.

What followed was years of rehabilitation training, but the boy showed little sign of improvement. At the age of 18, Ma Shuai was sent to a rehabilitation service to receive social interaction training for five days a week. He has been there for nearly seven years. Each weekend he would be picked up home from the school.

A "groundbreaking" behavior of Ma Shuai surprised his parents a few months ago when the young man one day after dinner stood up from the table and went to the kitchen to wash the dishes.

Another improvement: The young man who was once too nervous to go outside has now become increasingly calm in an unfamiliar environment when the family hang out.

Mooncakes for Kangnazhou's charity sale

Ma Jingpeng says that he and his wife are grateful for their son's small progress, but they "dare not expect too much," including Ma Shuai's employment.

In his speech marking World Autism Awareness Day in 2015, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world to recognize the talents of autistic people to create "a society that is truly inclusive."

The theme of the day in that year was "Employment: The Autism Advantage." The fact, however, is that more than 80 percent of autistic adults are unemployed, according to Ban's speech.

Over the past 20 years, Ma Jingpeng has visited all well-known rehabilitation institutions across the country to give his son all kinds of training. During the process, he has met with thousands of parents of severely autistic children.

"Almost none of us expect that our children can get a job in the future. Our primary concern is their survival at present," the father says.

(Some people in the story are given pseudonyms to protect their privacy. All photos are provided to Xinhua by Kangnazhou)