What If...?

What if you had a baby and discovered it had a neurological condition that meant the only language it would ever be able to learn was Mandarin Chinese? If you lived in China or already knew that language it wouldn't be much of a problem. But if you lived in the US, Canada, or western Europe and didn't know that language what would you do?

Would you forbid your child to use it, hoping the diagnosis was wrong? Or would you do everything possible to learn Mandarin yourself and find situations where your little one could interact with others who use that language?

If you were a smart and loving parent of course you would choose the second option.

Not too long ago that's the sort of choice parents had to make when they learned their children were couldn't hear. For a long time the philosophy was that forbidding deaf children to use Sign Language would motivate them to learn to speak and read lips.

A hundred years ago when lots of kids lost their hearing due to infections and diseases after they had already been hearing and perhaps using spoken language that approach might have worked for some of them. But by the mid twentieth century medical advances had made it very rare for people to loose their hearing for those reasons.

Instead, most deaf children were born that way because of prenatal damage and forbidding them to learn Sign Language meant they would have no exposure to language at all. Of course some deafness is hereditary, but kids from Deaf families would learn to sign from their parents.

When I started working at California School for the Deaf in the 1960s I was one of the first people who knew American Sign Language who was allowed to work with the young children. At first the kids who were not from Deaf families had tantrums all the time, but as soon as they learned to sign the tantrums stopped.

Hurt Go Happy

You might think Hurt Go Happy is an odd title for a book, but if you're familiar with American Sign Language it might not seem so strange.

I saw this book, by Ginny Rorby, in a catalog. It's about a Deaf girl who meets an old man raising a baby chimpanzee and teaching it Sign Language. Since I've had lots of experience with Deaf people and once met Koko, the famous gorilla who learned how to sign, I couldn't resist buying the book.

The girl in the story has been forbidden to learn Sign Language by her mother, but starts learning it from the old man and becomes friends with Sukari, the Chimpanzee. But when the old man dies, Sukari is shipped off to a horrible research facility where she and many other animals are treated cruelly.

Is there any way a young girl who can't hear can find a way to save the animal she loves?

Some of the realistic descriptions of the research facility are disturbing but I recommend this book anyway because it's exciting, well written, and should motivate lots of readers to care about animals and understand that people who can't hear are not very different from themselves.

Wonder Struck

A friend suggested I read WonderStruck by Brian Selznick because it involves deafness. Since I worked at California School for the Deaf, married a Sign Language interpreter and raised three Deaf foster kids that's a topic I care about. I loved Selznick's previous book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret so I was eager to read the newer one.

WonderStruck was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. The creative combination of two kids' stories, one told in words and the other in pictures, worked amazingly well.

The boy, Ben, was deaf in one ear and lost his hearing in the other ear as the story progressed. The girl, Rose, was never able to hear, but that doesn't become obvious for a while. Selznick does a masterful job of letting readers know some of the challenges Deaf kids had to face, such as being institutionalized and forbidden to use Sign Language, in the past.

But that's only one aspect of this exciting book.

Both kids, who live fifty years apart, must deal with finding their ways in the world alone and both are drawn into the mysterious and amazing museum where their stories intertwine in a surprising way.

I wouldn't call this book a graphic novel because those are usually drawn more like cartoons and Selznick's illustrations are beautiful art, most of them taking an entire spread of two pages. They make the book thick, but it's a fairly quick read since only about half the pages are text.

Brian Selznick is obviously a multitalented, creative thinker and I recommend this book highly.

This One's for Adults

"Talking Hands" by Margalit Fox is a fascinating book for anyone interested in linguistics or how our brains work. It's about a Middle Eastern community where the people have developed their own Sign Language because of frequent hereditary deafness. Even the hearing people who live there use that language in addition to their spoken one. 

The book is popular in style and comfortable to read, but it relates the experiences of scientists studying the local Sign Language as well as insights they're gaining about how our brains work to process language. I found it fascinating.