A girl with extraordinary hearing
At the age of 26, Jiang Mengnan heard sounds by a cuckoo for the first time.
It was in Tsinghua University. When she was jogging past a wood, a strange sound came to her ears, and Mengnan stopped to hear it clearer. Since she regained hearing, telling illusory sounds from real ones has been a challenge for her.
Before that, Mengnan knew that bird chirpings sound “pleasant” or “melodious,” but she didn’t really understood what the adjectives mean. At six months, Mengnan mistook a medicine that led to complete hearing loss in her right ear, and her left ear lost 105 decibels, hearing only the sound as loud as that of a helicopter taking off nearby.
Helped by her parents, however, she learned lip-reading at home to make up for hearing loss. At school, the girl has been strict with herself and her hard work was well-recognized by schools. In noisy conditions, Mengnan can even show her extraordinariness in “hearing with eyes”.
Jiang Mengnan
The vague “Ah”
Jiang Mengnan was born in Mangshan, a Yao ethnic township in Chenzhou city, central China’s Hunan province. Her parents, both working at the local junior high school, belong to the happy few who pursued a cultural life style in the little scenic township.
Entrusting their poetic passion to the daughter, they named the child after the mother’s family name Jiang according to the Yao tradition, with the full name meaning “peaceful times in a dream area south of the Yangtze River.”
For quite a while, Mengnan had been really quiet and peaceful, seldom getting noisy and never speaking. The parents often tried to amuse her by shaking key sets or clapping hands before her, only to see a dull face of the daughter.
In the “Wah-wah” game popular in Mangshan, kids opened their mouths and sounded a prolonged “Ah--”, while using a palm to pat the mouth for the repeated “Wah” sounds. Mengnan imitated her peers with her mouth and hand, but no sound was heard.
It was a prolonged struggle for the parents to accept the fact that Mangnan could not hear anything. At nine months, the parents took her to the Hunan Xiangya hospital for a physical checkup, and the doctors concluded that she was suffering from serious nerve deafness.
Unwilling to accept the bad news, the parents took her to another hospital for the same checkup, and there was no mistake at Xiangya hospital. The parents sighed in disillusionment.
At any rate, however, the parents still expected the daughter could hear or speak, and their expectation grew into a longing as time went by.
“So long as she could get me a soy sauce from the nearby shop, I would be very pleased,” said Zhao Changjun, the father who had to face the realities and hoped the daughter could take care of herself in the future.
But even such a humble expectation was too tall for Mengnan. Since their parenthood, Zhao and his wife Jiang Wenge hadn’t even heard the girl call “daddy” or “mommy”. The parents repeatedly uttered the two names that come out of human instinct and gazed at her for a response. But there was nothing but dull quietness.
At a year and four months, the parents took Mengnan to Beijing for medical advice again. Hearing nothing encouraging from the doctors, the couple went back to the lodge and packed things up in silence. The girl was playing with a toy ball that had gone beyond her reach. “Ah…”
The couple startled at the daughter’s voice in the quiet room. That was a somewhat vague cry, but it doesn’t matter as long as they saw the daughter’s motivation for speaking. The vague “Ah” was good enough to rescue them from repeated disappointments.
Greatly excited, the parents went sleepless that night and the vague “Ah” remained on their minds. Jiang Wenge held that daughter was calling “Mama”, while Zhao Changjun insisted that the cry meant “Papa”.
“Why I suddenly uttered “Ah” is because of the hearing aid that allowed me to hear something really faint,” recalled Mengnan in a recent interview. But she couldn’t tell the direction back then, nor could she get any idea of the meaning. The slight noises were a total mess on her mind.
Anyway, the seemingly faint and meaningless sounds turned out to be the final chance for her to go into the auditory world.
At three years, the parents take Mengnan to Beijing again for medical advice.
No give-up
At the medical truth that the daughter is impaired in hearing, the parents Zhao Changjun and Jiang Wenge decided not to give up there and then. They refused either the doctors’ advice to get special education for the girl or the relatives’ suggestion to have another child.
“No, I’ll give all my love to Mengnan and make her a normal girl,” swore the father Zhao, who taught math and biology at school but was almost out of his mind when it came to the matter of his daughter.
Back then, there wasn’t even a scrap of evidence for him to go by, and Zhao made the decision simply out of his love. He felt no rigid sense of duty attached, and that is perhaps why he was so successful in the end.
The couple first turned to a hearing-aid, but was told that it only aids those with a hearing loss of less than 95 decibels. In Mengnan’s memory, the parents also tried on her acupuncture, herbal medicine and other folk prescriptions, all not working.
But Zhao didn’t give up trying the hearing-aid. Costing 300 plus yuan, the first machine they got was almost the size of a beeper. Mother Jiang was shocked at the minimum volume, but the girl had no response even at the maximum.
“It’s similar to place a loudspeaker in the ears,” said Jiang. Even when Mengnan was asleep, Zhao would keep it in her ears, hoping the sounds as loud as train whistles could wake up the daughter at some point. But that didn’t happen for quite a while.
In spite of this, the couple still followed the routine of putting on the hearing aid for their girl in the morning, speaking to each other as much as they could.
Zhao Changjun gradually developed a habit of telling the daughter stories, and at certain point he even forgot about the fact that Mengnan couldn’t hear him.
Since she uttered the vague “Ah”, the parents had tried more possible means to train her in speech.
At first, Mengnan just opened her mouth but often failed to make a sound. The couple let her touch their throats and feel vibration of the vocal cords, putting her palm before their mouths for the air flow.
Zhao Changjun and Jiang Wenge also had an all-out campaign to expand their knowledge and ability.
Jiang spent a summer vacation in a speech-rehabilitation school, having lessons with kids of linguistic impairment and getting a certificate for speech therapists.
Zhao bought books on otology and speech rehabilitation, studying day by day. He even compiled a feasibility report on setting up speech-rehabilitation centers for deaf children in a county seat, which was handed over to the Chenzhou Disabled Persons Federation.
The parents take Mengnan (C) to a riverside near her home for leisure in childhood.