About Me
A few days ago before my 25th birthday on the cozy afternoon, I went to window shop with some of my Hong Kong friends in South Coast Plaza; when we walked through a corridor, there was an old man playing a big piano, and I absolutely didn't know what kind of song he was playing. But, both of my legs were fascinated in front of the piano because it reminded me of my old piano which I played during my life in Taiwan. One of my friends was very sweet to ask the pianist to play "Happy Birthday" for me. I was very touched and smiled with tears, although I couldn't hear a tone from the piano. In fact, I'm still not accustomed to be a different person than I was 17 years ago before my hearing got worsen, and piano becomes a bone thorn inside my soul. No matter how difficult I try to overcome it, I can't pull it out because it is already rooted my heart deeply and becomes a part of my soul, especially when I see someone play piano. Many feeling will topple all over me- envies, worship, jealousness, sadness, and pain.
Piano was my little paradise during my childhood. I started learning piano since I was age five because I was the first child in my family, and my parents put a lot of expectancies on me to take many different skills lessons. When I first got in touch with ballet and piano, they were like playing game to me. However, after two years, I lost the interest and got bored with ballet lesson; it was not fun for me anymore. Therefore, I began concentrating on the piano lesson. When I was age ten, I obtained the top grade in my class, and I got a big present from my parents- a big black piano. It was my first and last dream comes true in my whole life. I started playing the piano over night almost everyday before sleeping because I was very excited to have my own piano. Sometimes I practiced the piano in the afternoon. I could also hear the birds sing their own melodies outside the window, and I imagined that those birds were the musicians of nature and chorusing their compositions with my piano. It was an open secret- I wanted to become a pianist.
After one year, I was age 11, my hearing suddenly got worse for no reason, and all the doctors who I’ve seen in Taiwan could never find an affirmative cause. My mother searched information from the doctors so hard, and she wished there was a miracle to get my hearing back. In some ways, my life was exceedingly ordinary- going school with all the normal kids and taking piano lessons as usual. When I first found out about my hearing loss was when my teacher asked me to do a favor for him, and I misunderstood one of his orders. My teacher was the chief of the teacher department in the elementary school, and he was always being so busy to send the notes and messages to other teachers for a meeting, so he would ask some of his favorite students as the special monitors, and I was one of them. It was a very great honor to be a monitor to me, and I was very complacent of helping my teacher and making friends from different classes while I was informing my teacher’s messages from one class to another class. After being a monitor for one year and six months, I began to sometimes miss or misunderstand my teacher’s words, and I needed to ask other students to make sure of what my teacher had just said to us and me. Later, some students felt bothered that I asked the questions to them again and again, and my teacher believed that I was too tired or lazy to do my job. Yet I resigned my beloved job. I didn’t know what was going on with my ears, and I was very confused as to why I couldn’t understand people’s words clearly. Thus, I couldn’t explain my puzzlement and my feeling to anyone, especially there were too much of them to explain. Since I wasn’t the monitor anymore, it changed my personality to very quiet and lonely. It felt like I was dropped to the ground of the earth from a very high top of cloud. Meanwhile, my childhood ended up with a label “a failed monitor.” Piano became an instrument to vent my psychological plainness and loss, and I spent more time playing the piano to escape all the unhappiness because piano was the only place where I could cure the wounds and calm the emptiness. Perhaps I had been playing piano hard, and it made the sounds louder, so I didn’t realize my hearing loss.
The obvious period of my hearing loss was between age 13 to 18, and my school life became a long nightmare. I’ll never forget that day when a pretty young history teacher of the junior high school asked me a very easy question about the history of Taiwan, but I couldn’t answer her question because I couldn’t hear her voice and didn’t know what she was talking about. Some students who sat next to me tried to give me a pass of the answer by their lips. I never learned lip reading before, so it seemed like watching a silent show to me, and then I was scared to stand in the front of the 55 students in a very extraordinary quiet class which all of students were staring at me like I was an alien. I didn’t know what to do except stand still and look embarrassed until the teacher was disappointed and tired and asked me to sit down, and my head was all empty and dizzy. Afterward, everyone treated me like I was a little poor thing; the teacher probably shake their heads and thought of me as a stupid student who can’t studying books, and students might gossip about me over school and mock at me behind my back : “look at her, she couldn’t answer the easy question.” No one knows that history was one of my favorite courses, and ever if I got the good grade on the paper exam, everyone might suspect that I cheated because they had already stuck a mark on me as a bad student. I stopped the piano lessons and hadn’t played my piano for three years during junior high school; I was too scared to touch the keys of piano because it was the strongest implement to prove my hearing loss that I couldn’t hear and play piano well anymore.
When I attended the Catholic high school, my major was child development, and one of the obligatory courses was piano. I was one of a few students who had piano base, and I decided to wear the hearing aids even though they were very uncomfortable. Ironically, the school teachers praised me often and encouraged me to play the practice songs in class to show other students how to play the songs currently; in fact, I didn’t know if I could really hear the tunes from the piano or I was just playing with the notes from my memories. I was very self- contradictory with piano that I had the deep fear to lose my hearing little by little, and I was afraid to imagine when my hearing is completely lost, and then I can’t play piano any longer. One of my doctors in Taiwan once encouraged me: “I believe that you can be the second Beethoven. If you will become a pianist in future, I’ll invite one hundred of my folks to watch you perform.” As a person who played piano for 22 years, I can totally understand what kind of a circumstance Beethoven had been suffering and getting through after losing his hearing. When I read his story, I was looking at my surroundings with a mirror because we have so many things in common. For a long while, I was in a deep fear of dreaming to be a perfect pianist, and I tried very hard to constrain myself not to think and have such wild ideas of being short- tempered.
I moved to the U.S 9 years ago, and I spent 5 years to learn English and American Sign Language at the same time, and I never learned any sign language in Taiwan, so I had a very hard time to learn new languages in the first years in America. I remember that my mother had always tried to show me how to read lips and give the voices to speak the words right. She once tried to teach me how to speak “dessert” for 33 times until I could understand her lips completely, and I really don’t think anyone else could be this patient with me. Although she doesn’t speak English well, she still taught me how to speak as much as possible, and she’d rather to give up her hearing to make me play piano still because it was very bitterly painful for my mom to accept my deafness, and she wanted me to live normally as a hearing person instead deaf. Since my hearing was getting more worsen after moving to the U.S, I realized that I had to open another door for another hope, so I chose to major in fashion design in Mt. SAC College, and I received the fashion design Certificate on my Chinese birthday two years ago and another fashion certificate in last year. And I just be graduated in Mt. SAC this May and awarded the AS diploma on Oct 10. I am proud of myself that I never gave up myself ever since I only have a few friends supporting me in here. However, when I look back the past years of studying fashion design and learning new languages in the U.S, I feel deeply and bitterly suffering- my English and ASL were both not well enough to understand the teachers in the first years of college, and I couldn’t watch my interpreter’s signs, teacher’s explanations and doing the class projects at the same time, so I had to retake some fashion classes to strengthen my skills. In addition, it costs a large money to study fashion design that I had to buy the sew machine, sewing tools, a lot of fabrics and very expensive textbooks for the class assignments, so I usually ate once or twice everyday to save money to buy sumptuous textiles for my personal unique design products. For right now, I’m not a specialized fashion designer, but a perfectionist and dreamer. I just enjoy being myself of wearing all my own designs. Furthermore, I don’t think I was born to become a pianist or fashion designer. I’m not underestimating myself; I just think of myself as I drift with the tides and adapt myself to changing conditions in my tough life.
Since my hearing is getting more worsen after moving to the U.S, and I don’t have enough money to buy a piano and take piano lessons in America; my mother spent $40 to buy me an electric piano to keep me practicing the piano. Now, my hearing is almost completely lost, and still play the electric piano, but not as much or as well as before.
After all, I’m not Beethoven. I don’t have his talent, and I don’t want to end up like his tragedy when he died alone with pains, sadness, and loneliness. Moreover, I wouldn’t do the crazy things like Beethoven did in his life. For example, he cut off the legs of his piano and placed the instrument on the floor to feel the vibrations in the floor when he played the piano to make his own songs. For me, the piano is sacred. I would rather keep the piano in my dream, and I don’t want to break the perfect image of my little paradise in my childhood with piano. My goal now is to get BA from a fashion school or art university and become the fashion it girl in fashion circle; and when I become a peeress, I will buy myself a big piano to play on every night and every day before sleeping as silly as I did in my childhood, even though I can only hear very a little tune. I don’t know about my future now, and no doctor can forecast when my hearing will completely go, but I’ll keep going to find a place to improve myself and walk toward my own paradise.embed allowScriptAccess="never" enableJavaScript="false" src="http://lads.myspace.com/slides/slideshow_random.swf?u=8
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