The first Chinese wing-suit flying girl

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CGTN

A type of extreme sport, wing-suit flying is skydiving with a special "flying squirrel suit." The skydivers jump out of the plane, fly all the way with their "wings" before opening the parachute at an ideal altitude.

"You look like a flying squirrel when you stretch the wing-suit. The air resistance helps you slow down the descent while giving you the push to fly ahead. You can control the speed and maneuver as you want through the slight movement of your body," Yu Yin, a skydiver, explains.

CGTN Photo

Her name comes with several marvelous records.

In May 2017, she broke the women's skydiving record with an altitude of 30,000 feet. In November of the same year, she became the first woman and the first Chinese to fly above the Himalayas in a wing-suit, right towards the peak of Mount Qomolangma.

Photo courtesy of Yu Yin

For that moment, she had been preparing for almost 10 years.

Yu went to study finance in the United States in 2008. Later, she worked in a Fortune 500 company and enrolled in skydiving training as a hobby.

"Of course, I was petrified when I jumped out for the first time. I thought I'd put my life in my coach's hands." Any unintentional tiny change in the posture would let her swoop in another direction, which made her quite excited, but also nervous and scared at the same time.

Gradually, the sense of achievement she gained in skydiving surpassed that of her work. Like an explorer sailing for the continent she had just discovered, Yu quit her job and was dedicated to the new realm.

The training and equipment are expensive. Living mostly on her savings, she had to work as a coach and look for patronage while planning for her own projects.

"It's not like I'm an escapist who chases dream and freedom," she says. "I just think of skydiving as something exceptional. It is cool, and I'm into it. I'm doing what I want to do. And I could do things that had never been done before. I could really create something with my own hands."

Photo courtesy of Yu Yin

Yu's mother once came to the US training base and wrote "safe journey" on her helmet in Chinese. Wearing that helmet, Yu dived better and higher. The tough training has broken her bones several times and left her with injuries everywhere. The worst fracture grounded her in the wheelchair for a month. "Nevertheless, I'm not going to live like a tragic hero. Just like a galloping horse, a swimming fish or a flying bird, I cannot stop there."

"If anyone insisted that I quit the job for a poetic destination, I'd say that it was the Himalayas," she says. She'd practiced nearly 400 times for that single flight, in order to get used to the thin air and extreme cold in high altitude, and the risk of spinning that can result in unconsciousness.

CGTN Photo

Suffering from severe altitude sickness, she went to the sacred Himalayas by helicopter on November 3, 2017.

"Looking out of the window, I saw the peak floating in the thin fog, like a goddess that had been waiting for me," she recalls. "The moment I'm out of the plane, all I felt was the cold. I was totally overwhelmed by the Himalayas as if they were embracing me. And when I went for Qomolangma, all I saw was the snow-capped white peaks. The view was stunning."

"I felt myself totally immersed in nature. If nature were a huge jigsaw, then I was the missing piece. I completed it right at the moment," she says.

Photo courtesy of Yu Yin

It was a sense of holiness that rightfully belongs to her. "I used to dive for fun or for coaching. But this time I did it all for myself. Standing on the ground, your vision was limited without seeing the whole thing. But when you were very high above, you'd have a bird's eye view of the entire world and people living upon it from a completely different angle."

That being said, Yu's success in skydiving is not only for herself. Her breaking records both as a Chinese and as a woman is inspiring. "I could hardly see a Chinese face when I began to skydive five years ago," she says, "but now I can see them every day in any of the bases." She feels that she's witnessed and still takes part in the promotion of skydiving in China.

Photo courtesy of Yu Yin

However, it also makes Yu feel "restrained" and "having no choice except going on." More followers means more expectations, and more people are getting involved in the projects. Skydiving is no longer a loner's game to her. Now, she's even afraid to announce her retirement and get back to normal life.

"Quitting your job for skydiving, scuba diving or surfing, however wonderful it sounds, is not freedom. It's supposed to be something more sophisticated," she says. "It's like in Forrest Gump, where the protagonist is always running. One day he just thinks 'That's it,' so he stops. The fact that he's had hundreds of followers actually running behind him wouldn't alter his mind. Skydiving is the same. Jump or not, nobody deserves to know where you fly to. You are like a cloud in the sky, always having a pure mind."

But Yu doesn't want to stop now. She is planning to skydive in the Antarctic and the Arctic. Perhaps, someday in the future, she would achieve the freedom she's always wanted.

Director: Liu Xinyue

Editor: Ma Mingyuan, Gao Xingzi

Filmed by: Wei Yi

Designer: Qu Bo

Article Written by: Zhu Siqi

Copy Editor: Henry Weimin

Producer: Wen Yaru

Chief Editor: Pei Jian

Supervisor: Pang Xinhua

The story is one in The 1.3 Billion series exploring the diverse lives that make up China.