Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  I met Jacob shortly after he graduated from the School of Visual Arts at twenty-eight. He had settled in New York, and both his parents came to see him frequently; despite speech therapy, he is unable to speak in a way that is consistently comprehensible. “I’ve been sorry for myself for a long time, for being deaf,” Jacob said. “Last year I tried to kill myself. It was not that I wanted to die, but I felt like I had no control over my life. I had a really bad fight with my girlfriend, and I took a whole bottle of Klonopin. I just wanted to give up. I was in the hospital for three days, unconscious. When I woke up, the first thing I saw was my mom’s face, and the first thing she said to me was ‘Stop the world. I want to get off.’ That’s exactly how I felt.” He sees a psychiatrist for medication; they sit side by side and type back and forth. The real trick, however, is finding a signing therapist. Jacob may have inherited his edge of despair from his father, who has struggled with depression through most of his adult life. “Then you mix in the deafness,” Michael said. “But Jacob is tough. If the Holocaust came, he’d get so pissed off, he’d figure out a way to get through it. I hope he figures a way through normal life.”

  Megan has none of Michael’s or Jacob’s depressiveness; she is a woman of action. But she still has a sadness about her. “I’m sixty years old,” she said, “and I sometimes wonder what I would have done if he’d been hearing.” Michael said he didn’t allow himself that fantasy. “I think somehow Jacob’s been selected to be deaf and fucking figure it out, and that’s his path,” he said. “I’ve wished he could hear things, but at another level, I never think about what it would be like if Jacob wasn’t deaf. I don’t know if he’d have been happier. I don’t think I would. He’s just my son.”

  I wondered why Jacob’s sense of struggle persisted in the face of so much acceptance and love. Jacob said, “Three nights ago, I went out for drinks with the other people in a class I’m taking, and all of them are hearing, and we just wrote back and forth. But there is a point where they’re all chatting, and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ I’m lucky that they’re open to being with me, but I’m still left out. I have a lot of hearing acquaintances. But, good friends? No. Deaf culture teaches me how to see the world, but it would make surviving the world a lot easier if I could hear. If I were going to have a Down syndrome child, I think I would abort. But what if my mom had found out I was deaf when she was pregnant and aborted me? I don’t want to be racist, but walking alone at night, I see an unknown black person approaching, and I feel uncomfortable, even though I have black friends. I hate it. So it’s the same when I make people uncomfortable because I’m deaf: I understand it, and I hate it. I just hate it.”

  • • •

  Having a vision can be a lonely business, and no strategy can unfold in its full glory without other people to carry the banner. What Megan first imagined at Tripod was extended and refined by those who followed her. Chris and Barb Montan’s younger son, Spencer, was born deaf a decade after Jacob. “I had never met a deaf person,” Barb said, “so I can only describe it as free-falling.” Chris is president of Walt Disney Music, and his whole life has been sound. When Spencer was diagnosed, he was “rocked, devastated.” Chris said his mind went down blind alleys. “What’s going to happen to him? How can I protect him? How much money should I set aside?” Barb contacted Tripod. “They said they would mail me a package right away, but I couldn’t get through the weekend,” Barb said. “So I went to the Tripod offices. Michael and Megan had had to create a net; I had one swoop out underneath me.”

  Barb went on, “In the beginning it’s all sadness and woe and horror. My mother said, ‘He’ll end up in an asylum.’ In her generation, you were deaf and dumb, you were sent away. But I had this gorgeous, blue-eyed son who just beamed at me. It didn’t take long for me to say, ‘Who has the problem here?’ Because he was perfectly fine.” The Montans decided almost immediately that they would learn to sign. “Spencer would take speech therapy, but we would learn his language and culture,” Barb said. “I’ve got to go where he’s going. I can’t let any cognitive delay happen.” Chris worried that the language gap would undermine his ability to be a good father. “I was scared that Spencer wouldn’t know who I was as a person at the level of his older brother, who could hear my inflections. I said to Barb, ‘We can’t have Spencer feel like he grew up in a hearing household and got left out.’”

  Deaf students from Cal State, Northridge, came over to instruct Spencer and his family in ASL. “They pulled into my driveway and began signing. ‘Spencer, how are you? I see you have a car!’” Barb recalled, signing as she spoke. “I don’t know how he knew it was language. But he was totally attentive. Week after week after week. ‘Hello, how are you, are you ready to work?’” Barb and Chris created such a strong signing environment that Spencer didn’t know he had a disability until he was four or five.

  Barb has a nearly photographic memory and turned out to be a natural at Sign. Chris’s years playing the piano made him extremely dexterous, and he became a fluent finger-speller. Spencer could interpret and understand his parents’ signing as well as full-fledged ASL. “When he was born,” Chris said, “I was working like crazy, building a company with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. I could have gone to work for twenty hours a day. Barb turned to me early on and said, ‘I think you’re doing an okay job as a dad, and I know you’re building your career at Disney, but I need more. I need you to be more of a person—a deeper person, a less selfish person.’” Chris told his colleagues at work that he’d have to cut back. Nils, the Montans’ elder son, has been diagnosed with both severe asthma and attention deficit disorder. “I would say Nils had a harder time growing up,” Barb said. “Spencer was easier. Nils is very cerebral, and Spencer is much more visceral, there’s so much more kidding around, a tremendous amount of humor, play on words, play on signs.”

  Because public education does not begin until age five, Tripod has a privately funded Montessori preschool program for deaf and hearing children. Spencer’s development in ASL was rapid; the hearing kids in the class learned nearly as fast. “Most disabled kids are always on the receiving end of help,” Barb said. “What does that do for someone’s self-esteem? But if a little hearing girl didn’t know what to do in math, Spencer could help her.” In the general population, she observed, you are learning to read until fourth grade, and you are reading to learn thereafter. The switching comes later for deaf children. “But once Spencer got it, did he ever take off,” Barb said.

  In 1982, Barb and a friend started Tripod Captioned Films, the first outfit that routinely captioned films to include all the nonverbal information: indications of music, of gunshots, of a ringing telephone or doorbell. When Spencer was nine, Lou Marino, a local youth coach, gave him a pitching lesson. Lou said, “I’ve coached for thirty years, how come I’ve never seen a deaf kid?” Lou and Barb set up the Silent Knights, which became a Southern California regional deaf baseball league. “He has incredible hand-eye coordination,” Chris said. “He saw the ball better than other kids.” Chris and Spencer practiced baseball together. “That was a way we talked,” Chris said. “I would occasionally sign, but mostly we were sharing this thing. He had quiet confidence, and when he was the pitcher, the team would settle around him.”

  The Montans did consider cochlear implants. Chris said, “In 1991, I wasn’t sure what way the technology was going to advance. If Spencer were newly diagnosed and thirteen months old today, I probably would implant him, and I say that knowing all the great Deaf people we’ve met, and as a strong supporter of Deaf culture. It’s a different question today, medically and politically.” If Spencer were to get an implant as a young adult, however, he would have to do auditory training to interpret the data it would produce. “He would lose a year of high school, when he is so socially on track and effective in his language,” Barb said. “I don’t think it would be worth it.”

  Spencer was refreshingly ecumenical about language, saying, “I know that my voic
e is useful, and I am glad to develop it. Mom and Dad went to take ASL classes so we could communicate. If they could learn ASL, I can do this, too. My main language is ASL. But by practicing and practicing, I don’t need tutors to help me with my English. I work on my voice, and the kids at my school and in my baseball league work on signing. We want to live in one world.” Barb has been frustrated by the antispeech sentiment in the Deaf world. “Spencer is fine signing with me the way I sign, with Chris the way he signs, with his deaf friends in fluent ASL. He is fully bilingual between written English and Sign.” At the same time, she recognizes the deep importance of Deaf society. “Every culture, you want critical mass, and he’s got it with his deaf friends. We all need our people.”

  Barb eventually became president of Tripod. “Last night, this mom walked in whose son is four,” Barb said. “She’s got nothing but worries. Spencer was doing his chemistry homework—moles, fractals—and I held up the sheet and said, ‘Your son will do this.’” Spencer said, “Parents of deaf kids should know not to be afraid, not to let their kid be afraid. My parents made sure I was never afraid.”

  • • •

  Debates still rage about oralism versus manualism, and whether signed teaching should be conducted in American Sign Language or with techniques such as Total Communication or Simultaneous Communication, in which Sign and English are combined to allow teachers to sign while speaking. These methods seek to provide deaf children multiple avenues of communication; however, problems can arise when one attempts to merge unrelated grammars and syntaxes. English and ASL are different in structure; one can no more speak English while signing in ASL than one can speak English while writing Chinese. English is a sequential language, with words produced in defined order; the listener’s short-term memory holds the words of a sentence, then takes meaning from their relationship. ASL is a simultaneous language in which individual signs are amalgamated into composite ones; one complex, fluid movement could mean, for example, “He moved from the East Coast to the West Coast.” Each sign includes a hand shape, a location on or near the body where the shape is held, and a directional movement. Additionally, facial expressions serve not just to communicate emotions, but as structural components of individual signs. This compounding works well for short-term visual memory, which can hold fewer discrete images than auditory memory. If one needed to make first the sign for “he,” then “moved,” then “from,” and so on, the mechanical effort would become tedious and the logic would disappear; the same unintelligible jumble would result if one needed to speak several different words simultaneously. Forms of manually coded English such as Signed Exact English, Pidgin Signed English, or Conceptually Accurate Signed English, which go word by word through a sentence as if it were being spoken in English, are usually preferred by those deafened postlingually, who often continue to think in spoken language; however, for children acquiring a first language, sign languages based on oral ones are cumbersome and confusing. A grammar inappropriate to the medium cannot be grasped intuitively.

  Gary Mowl, former head of the ASL department at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, in Rochester, often corrects his children’s grammar and usage in ASL. “People ask why you need to teach ASL to people who are already native signers,” Mowl said. “Why do you teach English to English-speaking students? So many people use the language badly.” There is nonetheless great variety in ASL users’ individual “voices”: some move their hands and faces precisely, some extravagantly, some playfully, and some with great solemnity. ASL has evolved, too; films of people signing in the early twentieth century show a different and less nuanced use of language.

  Benjamin Bahan, a professor of ASL and Deaf Studies at Gallaudet, is deaf of deaf. He has described poignantly how he grew up thinking that his mother, who had an oral education, was the smart one, while his father, who had grown up manual, was a bit dim-witted. When he returned home after studying ASL at college, he realized that his father “signed beautiful ASL with grammatical features and structure,” while his mother’s ASL was substantially less fluent. ASL grammar is a locus of both precision and pride. Many Sign translators miss half of what is said, mistranslate, and lose the thread of the conversation; I found this myself as I worked with translators, many of whom had been drawn to ASL more for its similarity to theater than for its status as language. The grammar is so conceptually different from oral grammar that it eludes even many people who study it closely. Fluent translators can find it difficult to rearrange ASL structures into English ones, and vice versa, and lose the patterns of meaning. Accent and intonation tend to disappear entirely.

  Hearing people often mistakenly assume that there is one universal sign language, but there are many. Due to the work of Laurent Clerc, ASL is closely related to French Sign Language; in contrast, ASL is very different from British Sign Language, which many ASL users contend is less sophisticated. “We don’t have so many puns; we don’t play with the words the way you do,” conceded Clark Denmark, a lecturer in Deaf Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. “It’s a more literal language. But it has strengths of its own.” Some are concerned that the spread of ASL as a kind of lingua franca for deaf people will lead to the loss of other sign languages. No one has been able to assess how many sign languages there are, but we know of at least seven in Thailand and Vietnam; Iran has both Tea House Sign Language and Persian Sign Language; Canadians use both ASL and Québécois Sign Language.

  • • •

  The issue of deafness in most societies is one of linguistic exclusion, and I was interested in the idea of a context in which Sign was universal. In the small village of Bengkala in northern Bali, a congenital form of deafness has persisted for some 250 years and at any time affects about 2 percent of the population. Everyone in Bengkala has grown up with deaf people, and everyone knows the unique sign language used in the village, so the gap between the experience of hearing and deaf people is narrower than perhaps anywhere else in the world.

  Bengkala is also known as Desa Kolok, or Deaf Village. When I visited in 2008, forty-six of the village’s approximately two thousand residents were deaf. Because this deafness springs from a recessive gene, no one knows when it will emerge in his family. I met hearing parents with deaf children, deaf parents with hearing children, deaf families with deaf parents and children, deaf or hearing parents with a mix of deaf and hearing children. It’s a poor village, and the general education level is low, but it has been even lower among the deaf. Kanta, a hearing teacher in the village, introduced a program in 2007 to educate the deaf of Bengkala in their own sign language, Kata Kolok; the first deaf class had pupils from ages seven to fourteen, because none had had any formal education previously.

  The life of villages in northern Bali is based on a clan system. The deaf can both participate in and transcend their clans; for their children’s birthdays, for example, they invite their own clan as well as the deaf alliance in the village, while hearing people would not invite anyone outside their clan. The deaf have certain traditional jobs. They bury the dead and serve as the police, though there is almost no crime; they repair pipes in the often troubled water system. Most are also farmers, planting cassava, taro, and elephant grass, which is used to feed cows. Bengkala has a traditional chief, who presides over religious ceremonies; an administrative chief, chosen by the central Balinese government to oversee government functions; and a deaf chief, traditionally the oldest deaf person.

  I arrived in Bengkala with the Balinese linguist I Gede Marsaja, born in a neighboring village, who has studied Kata Kolok in depth. We climbed down into a canyon where a river rushed under a two-hundred-foot, sheer rock wall. Several deaf villagers were waiting for us by the water, where they keep a farm with a grove of rambutan trees, some elephant grass, and a variety of extremely hot peppers. Over the next half hour, the rest of Bengkala’s deaf arrived. I sat on a red blanket at one end of a large tarp, and the deaf arranged themselves around the edge. People were signing to me, confid
ent that I could understand. Gede translated and Kanta, the schoolmaster, provided further assistance, but to my surprise, I could follow fairly well and quickly learned a few signs. Whenever I used them, the entire group would break out in smiles. They seemed to have multiple levels and kinds of signing, because when they were signing to me, they were like a bunch of mimes, and I could follow their narratives clearly, but when they were signing to one another, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying at all, and when they were signing to Gede, they were somewhere in between.

  The Kata Kolok sign for sad is the index and middle fingers at the inside corners of the eyes and then drawn down like tears. The sign for father is an index finger laid across the upper lip to suggest a mustache; the sign for mother is an upward-facing open hand at chest level supporting an imaginary breast. The sign for deaf is the index finger inserted into the ear and rotated; the sign for hearing is the whole hand held closed beside the ear and then opened while it is moved away from the head, sort of like an explosion coming out of the skull. In Kata Kolok, positive words usually involve pointing upward, while negative ones involve pointing downward; one villager who had traveled told the others that the raised third finger is a bad word in the West, so they flipped the sign and now use a third finger pointing down to indicate horrendous. The vocabulary is constantly evolving, while the grammar is fairly static.