A girl with extraordinary hearing

  

Jiang Mengnan (C) walks out of the School of Pharmacy, Jilin University with her classmates. (Xinhua/Shi Tianjiao)  

Personal effort

Returning from Beijing, the parents were convinced that Mengnan is capable of pronunciation, and they began teaching her tongue positions of mono syllables, with a mirror before them.

Gradually, Mengnan learned the pronunciations and lip-reading, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. Unlike other children who correct their pronunciations via the brain's auditory memory, she needed to learn by heart the mouth shapes and tongue positions of each word.

Later, the parents realized that the daughter had developed a strong accent of Hunan dialect, and they asked Mengnan to watch CCTV news and imitated the anchors in pronunciation.

Unlike most of her peers keen on cartoons, Mengnan became interested in news. Every day, she sat before the 21-inch TV set, gazing at the mouth of news anchors.

Mengnan watched at least three news programs daily, and she preferred the rebroadcast ones for the subtitles. And the “watch and say” practice persisted till the age of six.

Starting in primary school, Mengnan was listening to the teachers by reading their lips, but it was impossible to cover all. She mostly taught herself and relied on what the teachers had written on the board to make up for the missing information.

It was time-consuming, but she knew there was no other choice for her. Perhaps Mengnan’s weakness in hearing made her extraordinary in memory, for she turned out to be a top student in her class.

“She could recite the first 100 plus pages in the dictionary of Chinese idioms,” said the mother Jiang Wenge. By the end of grade four, Mengnan had taught herself all the lessons for fifth graders, and she directly entered grade six after a test.

In the junior high school entrance examination, Mengnan ranked 2nd in Chenzhou city, and she wanted to attend the city’s 6th high school 300 plus kilometers away. “I shouldn’t be always cared by my parents,” said she.

In the high school, Mengnan had to get used to mouth shapes of the new teachers. It turned out to be a big challenge due to the new subjects and the homesickness that inflicted her and other boarding students alike. But she managed to overcome it after a while.

In 2010, Mengnan joined in the Gaokao (China college entrance examination) for the first time, but the unsatisfactory result urged her to make a comeback.

In the following year, Mengnan was admitted to Jilin University, a top school in northeast China, and without the accompaniment of a parent, she went to the higher institution some 3,000 kilometers from her hometown alone.

Because of her personal experiences, Mengnan initially wanted to major in clinical medicine, but she soon realized the communication barriers and chose pharmacy. “I can still play a role in helping the patients,” said she.

Whenever Mengnan entered a new stage, new difficulty emerged. Even in the current Tsinghua days for her PhD pursuit, she still feels it hard to catch up with the heated debates occurring in the brainstorms by research panels.

However, Mengnan always found her own ways to solve the problems. The doctor said the ones with serious loss of hearing would have a poor sense of balance, and it’s difficult for them to ride a bike. Later, she managed to ride bikes in the Tsinghua campus as freely as her peers.

  

Jiang Mengnan at leisure 

Parental guide

In Mengnan’s childhood, the parents would take her out for more chances to communicate with others, facing the problem directly instead of shying away from it.

“This is my daughter who can’t hear,” said Zhao Changjun. The father would introduce Mengnan to others in this way, without a slightest sense of inferiority in his words.

To a certain degree, Mengnan’s speech world was largely build up by her parents. While letting her go and live free, they had to serve as her ears at times.

During a music class in junior high school, she watched her peers say “The song by Jay Chou sounds so good!”, but she failed to appreciate the song whatever means she tried. “I also want to feel the good music,” said Mengnan.

The father Zhao Changjun expected the daughter’s troubles in advance, and told her not to compare herself with others for each person is different. “Everyone has his or her own problems that need to be dealt with by themselves,” Zhao would say to the daughter.

The father was often haunted by a paradox. On the one hand, he wanted to make the daughter safe and sound. On the other, he had to let her go and learn to live by herself in the world.

Zhao could not experience the daughter’s silent world, but he believed that “She must be lonely.” And so he determined to be Mengnan’s friend for ever, one who’s willing to be with her whenever possible.

When Mengnan asked to leave home for junior high, the mother disagreed and the father sank into silence, but they finally chose to respect the decision by Mengnan.

It was the first time for Mengnan to live alone in a bustling city, and the mother Jiang Wenge worried that the daughter might be in traffic dangers or bullied by others due to her poor hearing. So Jiang would visit Chenzhou city on weekends.

Because parents were the major source of Mengnan’s language, she seldom had the chance to tough upon dirt talks. Even if she saw others say a dirty word and asked what it meant, the dad Zhao often replied like this: “Oh, I didn’t hear it.”

Having encountered some rebellious teenagers who turned a deaf ear to his teachings, Zhao thought it much easier to teach Mengnan, but he also worried his teaching could make the daughter too kind and innocent to adapt to the realities in the future.

Zhao finally concluded that at least kindness and honesty cannot result in the evil. “The pure and innocent ones may lose in something trivial, but they will not make big mistakes in life,” said Zhao.

He turned out to be right. When Mengnan was admitted to the universities of Jilin and Tsinghua, the father’s expectations were met. In fact, Zhao had been so refrained from expectations for the daughter that even a plain call of “Papa” satisfied him.

 

The family pose for a photo at the gate of Tsinghua University. 

Hearing readjusted

In the year when trying Gaokao for the first time, Mengnan got a chance to regain her hearing. A social welfare program offered to artificially implant cochleae into her ears for free.

Given the risks in an operation, the parents asked doctors in Changsha, capital city of Hunan province, for advice, but the doctors didn’t suggest a surgery. Since the girl had been able to communicate with others, they jointly decided to “keep the status quo”.

When Mengnan was about to graduate from Jilin University with a master degree in 2018, a doctor in the local city of Changchun was moved by her story and urged her to have a cochlea implantation.

“Since you’ve made so much effort, why not try it and see other possibilities in your life?” said the doctor. She accepted the doctor’s advice.

With a cochlea implanted in her right ear that summer, she regained her hearing that had been missing for 26 years.

At first, Mengnan felt it hard to get used to the vocal world, having stayed long in a quiet environment. Though the cochlea was turned down to the minimum acuity, she still couldn’t stand the noises outside. A gentle fall of an empty plastic bottle would startle her.

Gradually, she readjusted herself and became accustomed to car horns, school bells, thunders and the like, as well as the songs she had been longing for.

Now Mengnan is fond of the relaxing piano tunes, and she reviewed songs by Jay Chou though some are still hard for her. Linking her cell phone with the cochlea and getting on a bike at Tsinghua campus, she is enjoying the perfect moments belonging to her only.

Though capable of speaking and familiar with how to pronounce the Chinese words, she didn’t really grasp their auditory equivalents. The moment she closed the eyes, speeches by others became completely foreign.

Shortly after the cochlea implantation, Mengnan needed hearing rehabilitation in bulk, having video chats with her parents daily. In letting the girl identify the words and expressions, the parents took notes of the contents in advance and had their mouths covered.

“Yizhang county”, Mangshan township”, “Take a taxi”, “Could you tell me how to get to the bus station?” … As time went by, Zhao Changjun and Jiang Wenge used up two notebooks. At times, the video calls reminded her of some faint scenes 20 plus years ago, when mom repeatedly showed her mouth shapes before a mirror.

After rehabilitation, Mengnan still kept the habit of sending script messages to her parents. Days ago, the father missed a few messages from the girl and his phone began to ring.

It turned out to be Mengnan, who, in a worrying tone, called to confirm if her dad was safe and sound. In small talks, Zhao reassured that he just put the phone somewhere else and hung up.

Soon Zhao was seen rushing to his wife in excitement. He finally heard the girl’s voice on the phone.

 Reporting by Yang Hai (China Youth Daily); Photo courtesy: Jiang Mengnan; Trans-editing by Wang Shixue