Episode 20: I'm Deaf And I Have 'Perfect' Speech. Here's Why It's Actually A Nightmare.

 In Rachel Zemach's essay, first published in Huffpost, we learn that for a deaf person, being able to speak is not superior to communicating in ASL (American Sign Language). Rachel lost her hearing as a ten-year-old girl and as a result, can speak clearly--unlike many people who are deaf. But this doesn't give her an advantage. In fact, complications arise when people assume that if she can speak, she can hear. In this informative essay, we learn through Rachel's honesty and humor that there are many ways to communicate. 

Transcript

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Tavi Black  0:13  
Hi, I'm Tavi Black.

Christine Junge  0:15  
And I'm Christine Junge. 

Tavi Black  0:17  
And this is The Personal Element, 

Christine Junge  0:20  
where we listen to an essay we love, and then discuss what makes it so good.

Tavi Black  0:24  
This month, we're talking about the essay. "I'm Deaf And I Have Perfect Speech. Here's Why It's Actually A Nightmare" by Rachel Zemach, which was first published in the HuffPost.

Rachel Zemach  0:45  
In the Academy Award winning movie, CODA, the Deaf characters do not use their voices to speak. Some hearing viewers will probably see that as a negative thing. They may imagine the silence and wonder how it would feel to not speak. Even if they see American Sign Language, ASL, used abundantly and well. However, I’m Deaf and have “perfect” speech (meaning I don’t “sound Deaf”). And I want to stop speaking. Everywhere I go, people compliment me and say they wouldn’t have known I was Deaf if I hadn’t told them. They say it kindly, but it’s like they’re giving me a cupcake without realizing there’s a razor blade inside it. Here’s what they don’t understand: Their compliment is an insult to my many Deaf friends who cannot — or do not — speak and who are some of the best, most accomplished, funniest, wisest people I know. It’s also an insult to me, since there’s an implicit message that not knowing I’m Deaf is good; therefore, being Deaf is not good. 

 In public, my interactions with strangers typically go like this:
 Other person: “Ooofa gimmabee imopoe? Orfaa wompus aroom?”
 

Me: “Look, I’m Deaf. I don’t understand you.”
 

Other person: “Oh, but you lip-read, right?”
 

Me: “No, I don’t.”
 Yes, I did just lip-read and understand what they said. What they don’t realize is that their question was easy to catch since I’ve been asked it billions of times before. Now they’re looking at me quizzically and trying to decide if I’m being difficult or a liar.
 

“But you have excellent speech,” they respond.
 

“Look ― yes, I can talk,” I tell them, “but I can not hear. No, I’m not going to lip-read you. Please just write it down, or point, if it’s important.”
 

But they don’t give up easily.
 “Oofa barampa mefeee itobin. Illy acoppa carooma. Aca minna putoh. And but a widdoo caca ilumpitah, impag.”
 
 

“Well, OK then ― let’s just widdoo caca ilumpitah impag!” I think but don’t say out loud. I know they’re trying and they want a good outcome just as much as I do, but these kinds of encounters are exasperating.
 Whenever I have the energy, I try to educate people so they don’t project their assumption that Deaf people will speak and lip-read onto the next Deaf person they meet. “

I became Deaf later in life ― after I’d learned to talk,” I’ll say. Here the other person often tells me about their grandmother, childhood friend, neighbor or co-worker who “was completely Deaf but could lip-read perfectly!” I gently tell them lip-reading is incredibly hard and 55% to 70% of English is not even lip-readable because many sounds are made deep in the mouth or throat.
 There are a couple of things going on here. One is an ethnocentric reaction: The message people take unconsciously from my “good” speech is that I can hear. There’s also a value judgment ― that speaking and lip-reading are better than signing and not lip-reading.
 I taught Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in a mainstream school for years. About 80% of Deaf and hard-of-hearing children attend public schools where they’re surrounded mostly — or entirely — by hearing students and staff. The emphasis is on “fitting in,” and speech therapy is often conflated with — and often takes precedence over — teaching actual language (which is often better accessed via ASL). Yet, to many staff members, those Deaf and hard-of-hearing students who speak are seen as success stories and can be unconsciously seen as smarter than those who use only ASL, regardless of their intellect.
 Some respond to this kind of educational experience by choosing not to use their voices, no matter how “good.” For others, especially if they live with Deaf people, speaking simply becomes defunct and inferior as a mode of communication when compared to ASL.
 

When I’m out with Deaf friends, I put my hearing aid in my purse. It removes any ability to hear, but far more importantly, it removes the ambiguity that often haunts me.
 In a restaurant, we point to the menu and gesture with the wait staff. The servers taking the order respond with gestures too. They pantomime “drinks?” and tell us they learned a bit of signs in kindergarten. Looking a little embarrassed, they sign “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day” in the middle of asking our salad dressing choice. We smile and gently redirect them to the menu. My friends are pros at this routine and ordering is easy ― delightful even. The contrast with how it feels to be out with my hearing husband is stunning.
 Once my friends and I have ordered, we sign up a storm, talking about everything and shy about nothing. What would be the point? People are staring anyway. Our language is lavish, our faces alive. My friends discuss the food, but for me, the food is unimportant. I’m feasting on the smorgasbord of communication ― the luxury of chatting in a language that I not only understand 100% but that is a pleasure in and of itself. Taking nothing for granted, I bask in it all, and everything goes swimmingly.
 

Until I accidentally say the word “soup” out loud.
 Pointing at the menu, I let the word slip out to the server. And our delightful meal goes straight downhill. Suddenly, the wait staff’s mouths start flapping; the beautiful, reaching, visual parts of their brains go dead, as if switched off.
 “Whadda payu dictorom danu?” the server’s mouth seems to say. “Buddica taluca mariney?”
 “No, I’m Deaf,” I say. A friend taps the server and, pointing to her coffee, pantomimes milking a cow. But the damage is done. The server has moved to stand next to me and, with laser-focus, looks only at me. Her pen at the ready, her mouth moves like a fish. With stunning speed, the beauty of the previous interactions ― the pantomiming, the pointing, the cooperative taking of our order ― has disappeared. “Duwanaa disser wida coffee anmik? Or widabeeaw fayuh-mow?”
 


 Austin “Awti” Andrews (who’s a child of Deaf adults, often written as CODA) describes a similar situation.
 “Everything was going so well,” he says. “The waiter was gesturing, it was terrific. And then I just said one word, and pow!! It’s like a bullet of stupidity shot straight into the waiter’s head,” he explains by signing a bullet in slow motion, zipping through the air and hitting the waiter’s forehead. Powwwww.
 Hearing people might be shocked by this, but Deaf people laugh uproariously, cathartically.
 “Damn! All I did was say one word!” I say to my friends. “But why do you do that?” they ask, looking at me with consternation and pity. “Why don’t you just turn your voice off, for once and for all?” they say.
 Hearing people would probably think I’m the lucky one ― the success story ― because I can talk. But I agree with my friends.
 
 One in four people in the U.S. has “hearing loss,” but only a small percentage of those individuals have connections to the Deaf community that could make them wiser and tougher in how they navigate the world. Many of them have been convinced they aren’t part of or don’t need the Deaf community, and this causes them to distance themselves from it. 

But time and again, I’ve found it’s Deaf people who have the solutions.
 “The best thing to do is this,” one Deaf friend said when I described my frustration in a store earlier that day. “Before the hearing person can say ‘Can you read lips?’ you sign to them ‘Can you sign?’” I tried this the next day and I was absolutely stunned by how well it worked. The clerk instantly looked flummoxed and apologized for not being able to sign. Then she looked around the counter and grabbed a pen and paper. The onus shifted — no, it jumped! — right off my shoulders and onto hers. It was astonishing.
 Another simple but powerful thing to do in these kinds of situations is to text. The hearing person can even use voice-to-text apps on their phones. For simple communication during most everyday encounters, this is game-changing. I’m late to this adaptation, but my goal is now to go voice-off and communicate via text apps or good ol’ pen and paper whenever I deal with strangers. It’ll be great.
 If you’re a hard-of-hearing person who is used to lip-reading ― and especially if you find yourself demoralized by how much harder the COVID-19 mask-wearing makes things or if you’re simply tired of this dance ― I beg you to use the solutions right there at your fingertips (or in your pocket) courtesy of Deaf people. You’ll be amazed how it changes the game, flips things, and puts you in control, instead of having to deal with the painful, squirming, butterfly-pinned-on-a-needle way it usually feels to lip-read.

And this might be hard for some people to accept, but if you really want to stop the lip-reading agony, like I do, consider getting your Deaf on and stop using your voice altogether.
 If you’re a hearing person, please, when you meet someone who says they can’t hear you, take your cues from them. Do they want you to write what you're saying? Do they want you to take down your mask and speak slowly? Do they want you to pantomime? Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are the experts on how to communicate with them. Ask them openly and earnestly and respect their solutions, which they’ll undoubtedly have.
 As for me, I can talk the talk, but can I walk the walk and really stop talking? We shall see. I’m going to do my best ― speaking in public just causes too many problems.
 And I promise not to say “soup.”
 

Christine Junge  13:11  
I just wanted to start by actually reading the postscript from the Huff Post piece which was not in the recording that we did. But I think is really funny and kind of sets the stage for discussing this poignant but also funny essay. It says: "Rachel Zemach taught deaf students in both mainstream and deaf schools. She's passionate about books, dance, and helping her former students navigate this nutso world. She lives in Nevada, California with a hearing husband who calls her his hamburger rather than wife. Since the signs are similar. She has a memoir currently under consideration."

Tavi Black  13:41  
And to actually her memoir, I've been in touch with Rachel, and her memoir is going to be published fairly soon. So we'll put a link to that on the website when it's out.

Christine Junge  13:51  
Yeah, I'm really excited to read that since since we love this essay so much.

Tavi Black  13:54  
Yeah, and we got to do something different for this podcast, we got to record with Rachel. And it was very rewarding. I felt like.

Christine Junge  14:04  
It was, it was great. She wanted us to kind of do it together on a zoom so we could do the tech aspects of the recording. But it led to just a really great experience because we kind of experienced a lot of what she was talking about in this essay in that we didn't want to use our voices and have her try to lip read over zoom which seems like it'd be impossible so we just use the message function of zoom and chatted each other and then we also like pantomimed different things which was really really fun and and lent the conversation a different feel.

Tavi Black  14:35  
It did. I enjoyed it. We don't usually get to see our authors; they just submit to us and we have them record it on their own and send it to us. So it was excellent in that way as well to be able to communicate and especially in a different way with one of the authors

Christine Junge  14:54  
Jumping into the essay, one thing that I wanted to discuss was-- Tavi you already know this--but I suffer from some really severe migraines and, and I had an attack this last week that literally lasted like 10 days of constant headaches. And, I say that just because this essay really reminded me of some of the struggles I go through as a, I consider myself disabled by these migraines. So as a disabled person navigating the world, you know, there are definitely challenges that Rachel brings up here that I feel like parallel in my own life.

Tavi Black  15:24  
Yeah, I actually wrote-- when I first read this essay--I wrote the word "schooled" on it, because I feel like in the first couple of paragraphs, she just schools us, and not in a bad way. She's just teaching us like, there are considerations that you don't have, that you don't think of in your life. If you're a hearing person. You don't know about this. And I imagine you could say the same thing, Christine, if you don't have headaches, you don't know.

Christine Junge  15:54  
Yeah, one of the things that I love about essays is the fact that they do school us and in the best possible sense that like you, you get to kind of dive into a person's experience, and then learn from it.

Tavi Black  16:06  
And I feel like this is a bit of a different essay, different than we normally do in structure itself. It's almost, like a manual to, to like, how should you interact with a deaf person if you are not deaf and part of the community? And she is very reflective in it. So it is, in some ways, like one of the other essays that we do, but it also has another function that it teaches us in a really literal way, what we can do differently in our lives. Well, I feel like you said, when we were recording with Rachel, we got to implement some of what we learned. What I like, about three or four paragraphs down, is she says, "context makes a difference". Right? So for me, I underlined that because I felt like that's true in every part of our lives, contexts for what people say, what they do, really makes the difference. And especially in this circumstance.

Christine Junge  17:10  
Like often happens, that is a line that I underlined as well.

Tavi Black  17:14  
I love it when we do that.

Christine Junge  17:15  
And jumping up a few paragraphs, I loved the line where she says that people compliment her saying that they wouldn't know she is she was deaf. And the line is "they say kindly, but it's like they're giving me a cupcake without realizing there's a razor blade inside". Yeah, I just loved that. And, and like I said, reflecting on my own experience, it reminded me of a time like 10 or 15 years ago when I was really struggling with my headaches and so much so that I like didn't eat, I couldn't eat very much, because there was so nauseated. And so I lost a lot of weight. And then I'd run into people. And they'd be like, Well, you look great. You don't look like somebody who was having health issues. And I was kind of like, oh, well, I feel like crap. So like, you know, this feels like kind of invalidating that, that you're kind of assuming that, you know, the outside look of my body tells you something about the inside of my of my being.

Tavi Black  18:09  
It's true. I mean, well, I feel like I could go off on a tangent here, about the way we look and how we, you know, portray ourselves in the world. And then we start going down into social media. So that's a whole other tangent, maybe we don't want to go off into because I want to focus back on Rachel's essay. And I, I meant to say, before we move on through the essay is I really love how it opens as well. I love how she talks about Coda, the movie, and it's something that a lot of people maybe have seen and can relate to. And, suddenly they're pulled into like, Oh, I saw that movie. Yeah, I know what she's talking about.

Christine Junge  18:50  
Yeah, and I, want to say I just ordered Coda, not really on any streaming services as as far as I could find. But I ordered it from the Netflix mail in DVD and I'm really excited to experience it. 

Tavi Black  19:01  
You still do--you still do the DVDs?

Christine Junge  19:06  
Yeah, I'll put a plug in for that. Because a lot of the newer movies aren't on streaming services, so you can get them via the DVD that you can't find them on streaming. Yeah. I I'm like probably one of the only people in America that's

Tavi Black  19:21  
I love it. It's old school.  It's like all of us who are still reading books. Right? 

Christine Junge  19:27  
Exactly, exactly. 

Tavi Black  19:28  
Hardcover books.

Christine Junge  19:30  
I'll jump down to right after the line about context making a difference. She says, you know, "I lip read, and I can catch maybe 50 to 75 or sometimes zero to five." And then she says, and "even that is hard work." And I feel like that is, for me, I've been learning a lot about like ableism kind of like the the way that people with disabilities have to navigate a world that's not created for people with disabilities. And it means that they have to do a lot more work. Either, like in this case, she's talking about the hard work of trying to lip read. But there's also the hard work of being out in the world and constantly having to school people about the best ways to interact with her, her and other people in the deaf community. That is like it's a lot of work on top of already living with a disability that makes life a little bit harder.

Tavi Black  20:19  
Yeah, it's something that I think the rest of us don't consider. No, I suppose we all have things that we deal with that other people don't. But there's levels, you know, like for people in wheelchairs. Imagine not being able to get into a building or talking to Rachel, I realized she really didn't know anything about podcasts because guess what, it's only for hearing people. And so she's taught us we've started to add transcripts to all of our podcasts so that now this opens up a whole new medium for people with hearing disabilities.

Christine Junge  21:00  
Mm hmm. Yeah, I'm really excited that that we're able to do that and that she, you know, very kindly told us like, Hey, this is a way that you can make your podcast more accessible.

Tavi Black  21:09  
Great. We were so happy to see that we had had a blind spot there. So moving on down the essay, we keep getting sidetracked because there's so much to talk about this time. I really love the part where she says other person: "Ufa gimpy Ufa Wampus ar oom". And it will be interesting to know what our hearing audience thinks of this because it will be a very different experience than reading it. Reading it is very funny. But hearing it as we were recording with Rachel, I realized, oh, that's what she hears.

Christine Junge  21:48  
Yeah, I just I feel like, this is such a perfect essay for the podcast medium, because she gets to show us in a more explicit way than than she does on the page. Exactly what her experience is.

Tavi Black  22:01  
Yeah, because when she first started, even though I had read the essay already, and she first started to say this line, I thought, Oh, that's not coming across clear. And then I realized, oh, it's not supposed to come across clearly.

Christine Junge  22:16  
Right below that she talks a little bit about after she spills the word 'soup,' and then how people who are interacting with her after she talks, try to decide if she's difficult or a liar. When she says that said she can't hear. And I felt like that was like a gut punch for me that, again, like the work of being out in the world and having to navigate these difficult interactions where people are not being very understanding, 

Tavi Black  22:44  
I of course, underlined that part to the words difficult or a liar. Because suddenly, like you said, not only is she having to navigate this, but suddenly she becomes the difficult one, or the liar in this situation where she's just trying to go about her day, and somebody is judging her based on that. And you know, that's probably happened so many times.

Christine Junge  23:07  
Yeah. And she kind of illustrates that I forget exactly where it is in the essay. But when she talks about the reason that she could lip read the question about whether she can hear is because she's been asked it a bazillion times, again, that just highlights like the fact that these are questions that she's just like getting over and over and over again.

Tavi Black  23:25  
Right, I wanted to reference the graphic novel El Deafo. I don't know if you've read that Christina?

Christine Junge  23:31  
 No I haven't.

Tavi Black  23:32  
It's so, so good. It's by Cece Bell. And it's about a deaf child who become deaf after she's been able to hear and speak and her challenges and she doesn't want to learn sign language she wants to use her hearing aids is sort of the opposite of it. I learned a lot there as well in that book about what it might be like to navigate all that and I love getting Rachel's take on it, where she really finds ASL to be this incredibly rich, not at all lacking language, maybe even more rich than English. You know, it's great in my my daughter's middle school, they actually teach ASL, it's pretty cool. And you can take it as an elective. 

Christine Junge  24:20  
Wow, that is cool.

Tavi Black  24:21  
 It is really cool to see all of these kids learning it and maybe bringing it out into the world and having a passion for it as well.

Christine Junge  24:28  
I had the pleasure of interacting with a deaf person through-- I play pickleball. And we ended up playing pickleball together. And it was such so rich to communicate with him because kind of like we were talking about with the conversation with Rachel. Like, we use pantomiming a lot. And it was so cool to see like the ways that he used his face to express things that you don't necessarily see in people when they're speaking. So, you know, he would like have really big expressions on his face almost like an actor, and it was just really fun. And then we would use, sometimes we use text on our phones, because like if he was asking you about, like a rule of pickleball, or something that was too complicated to pantomime about, but it was a really fun experience. And I felt like, I got to know him just as well as I did the hearing people that I play pickleball with, even though we like, literally, we're not speaking the same language.

Tavi Black  25:19  
That's really great. And I like how she decides, how am I going to go about this? Like, you know, she mentions the apps, you know, using text, and but I like how she puts it back on hearing people. Like, instead of just going I don't want lip read, please don't write it down. Instead of saying that she says, Oh, do you sign?

Christine Junge  25:41  
Yeah, I'd love that too. Yeah. And my last job, somebody was saying, instead of saying, Oh, that person only speaks Chinese or Spanish or whatever it is to to frame it more as like, they speak more Spanish than I do. And I speak more English than they do. So that way, you're kind of leveling the playing field, because it's not like they are inferior, because they're not speaking English fluently. It's just a different set of skills. Right?

Tavi Black  26:08  
Yeah, I feel like essays like Rachel's are so important, because they really do make us think about other people's circumstances. I mean, that's what all the best writing does.

Christine Junge  26:20  
Right? Hmm. Yeah, I wanted to highlight the part where she talks about after she mistakenly says "soup", and then how the server only looks at her, you know, as if her other friends are not as intelligent or not as worthy of being communicated with. And I really, I just really felt the sadness and the poignancy of that moment.

Tavi Black  26:39  
And I think that what Rachel did was she, in that, she really set us a great scene in that restaurant, like she put us there, and really made us feel that moment where she says, "soup". 

Christine Junge  26:57  
Yeah, it's a good point. Because this essay, unlike a lot of the other ones, we've discussed, most of those essays, they're really heavy on scene, and then kind of lighter on the explanation or teaching moments. And this one kind of flips that there's like, the one major scene in the restaurant, but then there's a lot of beautiful, beautifully written prose that's not not in scene, it's more lighting things to us.

Tavi Black  27:22  
Yeah, sort of this is how I feel. And this is what it feels like. But then there's this one solid scene that really grounds us into this essay. And I have to say that I I had a little sympathy for the unwitting waiter, when they they talked about a bullet of stupidity shot straight through this brain. I thought, oh, you know, I bet we all do that, we all do have those stupid moments where we're just not thinking and we're not being sensitive and, the guy's or the gal's, probably just trying to do their job. And they're not being sensitive, but you still feel the frustration that the deaf community feels when over and over this happens to them.

Christine Junge  28:10  
Yeah, it actually reminded me of a story about the pickleball player I knew who was deaf. So he'd come to play with a woman who was a child of deaf adults. So she spoke ASL fluently. And the coach of the of the league, we were chatting with, the four of us were chatting after the games. And she said something like to the woman Oh, it's so nice of you to to come and translate for him, you know, as if she was being kind, not that she wants to spend this time with her friend. And the woman actually did. She was very gentle about it. But she did say like, oh my god, it's my pleasure to be with him because he's so smart. And so funny. And it did make me realize like, oh, man, that was very insulting of this person to say,

Tavi Black  28:53  
Like I said, I mean, you don't want to point your finger to much at people, because we've all had those moments of just being not correct. But she has to tell us about it in this essay, because she has to tell us the extreme. And that's probably not even the worst that she's dealt with. Right?  In her life with people's stupidity around her deafness. 

Christine Junge  29:13  
I think, you know, part of the beauty of this essay is how kindly she's telling us about that her experience in the world and then how better we can interact with with other deaf folks.

Tavi Black  29:23  
Right. And I like how to she did manage to get in the part about COVID and mask wearing because that adds another layer, right? If you were trying to lip read, impossible, right? But it gives us a little bit of an idea maybe of what she has to go through.

Christine Junge  29:44  
Yeah, because I did find particularly in the height of COVID when everybody was wearing like multiple masks and the face shield and the whole thing. I found it very hard to understand people when they talked like in doctors offices or hospitals like I found myself just being like "what, what?" you know, over and over again, and it was very frustrating. Oh, I had one other thought, which is that I was just reading this interesting article about how I don't know if you've found this Tavi, but more and more people are using the closed captioning watching television and movies, because flat screens are placed against the wall. And the speakers are in the back. So it's actually making it harder for us to hear television shows or movies. And yeah, I found that just to be really fascinating that, again, something that was closed captioning, which was created to facilitate deaf people being able to enjoy movies is now something that is helpful for the hearing as well.

Tavi Black  30:38  
Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think that we're all learning how to be more sensitive in so many different ways that, you know, someday, hopefully, like closed captioning, you know, maybe all podcasts will have transcripts.

Christine Junge  30:52  
Yeah, and a good shout out. If you're a podcaster. yourself to think about using transcripts.

Tavi Black  30:57  
Well, I really, really loved this essay. And we sometimes people submit to us, but sometimes we ask people if we could use their essays. And this was one that we found and asked Rachel, if we might talk about this on our podcast, and I'm so glad that she said yes.

Christine Junge  31:14  
Yeah. Thank you so much, Rachel. And thank you also for taking the time to have that wonderful conversation with us. We really appreciate it getting to know you a little bit.

Tavi Black  31:20  
Until next time.

Christine Junge  31:22  
next time see you guys. 

Tavi Black  31:24  
To learn more about this podcast, visit us online. At personalelementpodcast.com. There you'll find links to the essays we discussed, information on how to follow us on social media, and more.

Christine Junge  31:37  
And so you'll never miss an episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, whatever podcast app you use. Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai