AILSA CHANG: Growing up, Scout Bassett says that she felt like an outsider. Her earliest memories are from an orphanage in China, where she had to figure out how to live with a life-altering disability. After she was adopted by a family in the U.S., she felt lost until she found running. Scout Bassett is a Paralympic athlete, and now she has her own book. Here's NPR's Lakshmi Singh. LAKSHMI SINGH: Scout Bassett's new book is called "Lucky Girl." (APPLAUSE) SINGH: But long before she ran in the 2016 Paralympic Games, the celebrated athlete says she never felt all that lucky. It was just the name she got. SCOUT BASSETT: My Chinese name, Zhu Fuzhi, written in the characters - the Chinese characters - means lucky. SINGH: Bassett says some people hear lucky and think it's ironic. When she was an infant in Nanjing, China, Bassett says she survived a fire. She also lost her right leg. BASSETT: I was left on the streets of Nanjing and found at a year-and-a-half old with burns from my waist down and taken to the local government orphanage in Nanjing. SINGH: You write about some horrific conditions there - forced labor, food shortages, unsanitary conditions. We're fascinated by one story. You found a friend there, another girl, named Hope. BASSETT: Yes. We gave her the name Hope in the book. That wasn't her actual Chinese name. But we called her that because she really was that for me. And in this orphanage, I was really the only person in the room with a physical disability, where I was immobile and didn't have a prosthetic until a little bit later on. But when I got there, I just got around by using my hands and my one leg to kind of just scoot across the floor. And we had trough-style bathrooms - so not actual toilets. There were several times that I fell. She would see, like, that I'd fall in, and she did her best every time. Like, we had this signal of when I needed to go, and she would just carry me to the bathroom and hold me. And when so much of your dignity is stripped, to be able to have somebody that giv