Hi it's Chai,
So far, everything on this blog has been about clay. However, clay is only part of who I am. I used to wonder what my life would have been like had I found clay earlier and made it my full time job. However, as I have continued to hone my craft, I have realized that much of the inspiration for my ceramic art comes from the time I spend outside the studio, and from the other parts of my identity beyond an aspiring ceramicist. For example, here are two pieces that were inspired by my experience of hearing loss, and regaining some of it via hearing technology and cochlear implants.
Inspiration Gained from My Hearing Loss
Ring Flute
This ring flute was made as part of a larger project called Sounds like Ceramics. Prior to my cochlear implants, my audiologist and ENT doctor warned me that cochlear implant receivers may not perceive music the same way, and some do not enjoy it any longer post-surgery. Luckily for me, I can still perceive music, if possibly differently from how others hear it. To celebrate that, I decided to make ceramic musical instruments, including this ring flute. With 6 holes, this flute has a span of one octave (8 notes) on a major scale. I'm hoping to look into how the shape and size of the flute modifies its timbre. Here's a clip of me playing this flute.
Neural Beats (Udu Drum)
Another of my favorite pieces in the Sounds like Ceramics collection is this Udu drum. Udu drums are west African instruments made of vessels with two holes. My hearing loss is worst in higher frequencies, but instruments with lower pitch are still somewhat detectable to me without my cochlear implants. I am able to hear this udu drum in quiet environments, even without my hearing aids on. I combined wheelthrowing and handbuilding to make this drum. Then, I used sgraffito and underglaze to cover it with motifs inspired by neurons. The pitch and timbre of the drum changes depending on where you hit it and how much of the holes are covered. You can also give this udu drum a listen here.
1000 Hz and Beyond
There were many small pleasures and conveniences that I missed in the earlier days of my hearing loss. One of them was the sound of water - I would stare at streams and brooks on hikes and will myself to hear the happy babbling, or feel foolish for leaving the tap on because I could not hear the water run. Then, when I got my cochlear implants, my brain and to relearn how to process the sound of water all over again. Initially, every time I flushed the toilet it would sound like a flurry of song birds - quite a pleasant way to end a visit to the restroom, I might say! Now, I just hear water as...water. BUT every time I hearing it trickling, gurgling, dripping or splashing, I'm feel a fresh surge of gratitude for being able to access health care and benefit from hearing technology.
Yes, and...
Having a hear loss still sucks. Previously I wrote about the perfect imperfections in my ceramic art, as well as my hearing loss. In fact, I explicitly emphasize holding space for both my gratitude and grief for my hearing loss. Having written about the "gains" of my hearing loss, I should also give a candid account about the very real "loss" it is - and what better time to do that than September, Deaf Awareness Month?
This past weekend, I joined the throngs of people seeing Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm. I had heard that that it was a complex character study of a brilliant, seminal and controversial scientist in a critical time in world history. I had also heard that it did not give enough voice to the dire consequences of the atomic bomb. I was a bit skeptical that I'd enjoy a 3-hour long movie that I knew ended in death and destruction, but also felt that I couldn't have my own opinion unless I saw it myself, so I finally walked into a dark theatre on one of the rare sunny afternoons in San Francisco, keeping an open mind. Spoiler alert - I leave the movie theatre teary eyed.
"Oh, there is no close captioning for IMAX 70mm" - the staff said at the door. Wow, I did not expect my mind to be blown before the movie had even begun. "Wait, so deaf and hard of hearing people can't watch?" I asked. The staff might have perceived this is a cranky customer getting riled up, because he responded "Look, I can ask the manager to come speak with you, but he's going to say the same thing". And sure enough, the manager did. We had already bought the tickets, and we were going to be late, so my partner suggested I watch it for 10 minutes and see if I still wanted to stay.
"Why do they not just have open captions on the screen if close captioning is not possible with this format?" I asked as we hurried down the hallway. For context, closed captioning can be toggled on or off - on TV, there's usually a button for it; in a movie theatre, you have to ask for a device to bring into the theatre, it displays dialogue as well as descriptions of sounds or music via a little marquee of text. On the other hand, open captions are added directly to the video track, and are thus permanently on-screen. I grew up in a city where TV channels and movie theatres not only had open captions, they often had it in more than one language. In fact, I suspect that having open captions embedded into media consumption was one reason why I did not realize I had a hearing loss before I moved to the US. With this universal design feature in place, while I did not hear everything, I did understand most things, and so didn't I feel "disabled". I did not know about closed captioning until I came to the US.
So, when my partner responded, "Well, because most people don't want to see words on the screen", I was a bit baffled and, to be honest, miffed. "People don't WANT to see the words? Have they considered that some people NEED to see the words?" I thought. But at this point, we had entered the dim theatre where the movie had already started and I became preoccupied by figuring out how much I could understand with just my cochlear implants and lipreading skills.
I'm staring intensely at the screen even before we locate our row. It's a scene in a court room, the characters are seated, facing the camera head-on and stationery when they speak, and the camera switches from close-up to close-up as each character speaks in turn. Great, that's a good start. One person has an accent I am less familiar with, I squint at their lips, and strain my ears, my brain already reving up for what I dread will be 3 hours straight of cognitive gymnastics, trying to piece together what I knew about physics, the history of WWI, and whatever words I was able to catch from the movie, into some type of coherence. I anxiously wondered what contextual information I missed in the first few minutes that would be vital to my piecing together the dialogue. (Now, having read a New York Times movie review, I realize that movie does open by abruptly dropping the audience into a "whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods" and my confusion was likely shared by at least some of my fellow hearing movie-goers.)
We settle into our seats, and while my partner sits back and relaxes, I lean in and concentrate.I catch a few words in a rapid exchange between two characters, and guess from their facial expressions and the grave melody from the violins in the soundtrack that that must have been a tense conversation. My eyes dart from the lips, to the faces, to any written text I can find on the screen for an extra clue of what is going on, dismayed every time a character speaks off screen. My ears are straining for every syllable, and I feel a bit of irritation every time a character speaks with a breathy voice, or poor enunciation.
If you need a different analogy to imagine what having hearing loss is like, it's like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle while the pieces are being thrown at you in random order. You can't even catch all the pieces, let alone put what pieces you have together into a coherent picture. Oh, and while you are performing the cognitive gynastics, you are also mildly distracted by feelings of frustration, self-doubt, plus embarrassment about your hearing loss and all the ways it holds you back.
But perhaps what makes it harder is that it's not always impossible to put at least some of those pieces together. Had I meant completely deaf, I would not have had to think twice about turning back the minute they said no close captioning. The thing is, being hard-of-hearing, I can take a reasonable guess at the dialogue and plot using what portions I can hear, as well as other cues. Still, how much I am able to understand fluctuates with the speaker's voice/accent/pace of speech/enunciation, whether I can see their faces clearly to lipread, whether there is overlapping soundtrack or background noise, how much background knowledge I have and so many other factors. And because I can't hear what I can't hear, my assessment of how much I am following is based on a subjective sense of "where am I on a scale of utterly clueless to slightly confused?", rather than "what percentage of this am I getting?".
My partner checks in periodically, first whispering into my ear (I think we know how well that worked), and then gesturing with thumbs up/down with a concerned look on his face. I wave my hand in a "soso" gesture - I'm reluctant to call it quits because every time I feel like I've lost the plot, another scene begins where I seem to be piece together things a bit better, upping my hopes again. When he finally types out "we still have two hours of this". It's at this point that my rage flares up. It's not that I can't, somehow, get a rough idea of what is going on in the movie. But do I want to? Do I want to spend 3 hours deciphering an incomplete, Frankenstein approximation of the phenomenal movie Oppenheimer is supposed to be?
"Sit back, relax and enjoy the show"? Seriously, AMC? I wasn't super excited to be watching a 3 hour long movie with an ending I already know is one of the biggest tragedies in human history anyway and NOW YOU WANT ME TO DO MENTAL GYMNASTICS FOR IT WHILE FEELING STUPID?" I told my partner to stay, walked out of the theatre, got on a bus, and cried all the way home.
The caption-less Oppenheimer experience evoked a string of memories for me. Big and small moments where I had grieved my hearing loss, and the person I had been before it.
Social events with big crowds in loud and dimly light bars. Faking my way through a conversation, trying to blend in, laughing when everybody does even if I miss the punchline, nodding along, but also taking care not to make so much eye contact that somebody invites me to speak, lest I blow my cover. Trying to focus on catching people's words, but distracted by intrusive thoughts of "remember when your hearing didn't suck and you used to be the life of the party rather than on the fringes?" or "will it be awkward if I say something completely irrelevant to the conversation because I misunderstood what people are talking about?". The isolation hits extra hard when you are surrounded by people who are clearly enjoying each others' company.
I often share with my hearing friends how advanced technology is now, and refer to myself jokingly as a Ci-borg. But on that bus ride, I also remembered the time I packed everything I needed for a trip, but somehow forgot the charger for my cochlear implants. The feeling of panic that hit me as I realized I had a few hours, half a day, max, to figure out how to charge them in a foreign city before the world became muffled and confusing. Fortunately, my partner helped me figure out how to have the company UPS a new charger to our hotel, and consoled me as I cried "I hate having a hearing loss" and apologized profusely for ruining the first day of our trip with this emergency.
As the bus arrives in our neighborhood, and memories remerge. One time, a friend was complaining to me about their work (in a very different field from mine) at the end of the day, and then when I lose track, proceeded to complain about how I "don't listen", my "eyes glaze over" and I "don't even try" when they talk about their work. I spoke up for myself that time - I told them that, yes, sometimes I do not have the mental energy to keep up with everything they say all the time, but actually, because I cannot hear, I DO have to listen all the time, with 120% of my mental energy, which means by the end of the day I am exhausted and cannot be the attentive confidant to their complaints.
Another time, I was in the kitchen without my cochlear implants, because my hair was drying from a shower. A loved one was also there, and we were on different tasks, facing different directions when he blurted out an instruction at me. I only caught the word "towel" and left to see if I had left my wet bath towel lying around, and, failing to find it, returned and asked "what towels?". They got exasperated, and when I protested I had not heard them, they dismissed this and said that I had obviously heard as I was able to repeat the word "towel", and could I not infer what he might be saying, if the paper towels were right there on the counter? I was kind of glad I had a hearing loss then, because I did not want to hear the rest of their rant about how I was using my hearing loss as an excuse, as I hurried out of the house for some alone time.
I still struggle to understand exactly how my hearing loss impacts me, as well as how to coexist peacefully with it. There are good days, there are bad days, but the journey to embracing my hearing loss is ongoing and probably always will be. So having somebody close to me reject that same disability, or suggest that I was faking or exaggerating it was a low blow. You would never tell a blind person that bumped into you to watch where they're going, or a person in a wheelchair to "hurry up". Yet, for a disability as invisible as hearing loss (or autism, or depression or many others), where the limitations are often nuanced and specific to the situation, there is often a perception that our disability would not impact us if we "try harder". There is such egocentricity in dismissing a hard-of-hearing person's perspective and telling them what they can or cannot hear. So, even as those remarks echoed some of my insecurities about my disability, another part of me- the part that had chosen to make a career of empowering people with disabilities and building a more inclusive culture- was indignant and ready to kick their ass for such insensitivity.
That experience and many others evoke a very complex cocktail of emotions in me - shame, embarrassment, self-doubt, denial, grief, anxiety, frustration, confusion, loneliness, anger, you name it. However, caption-less Oppenheimer was the first time I felt full-blown rage. Even as I got off the bus, I was still trying to tease it all apart. Rage at what? AMC for not being more accessible? Hearing people for not understanding what being hard of hearing is like? The fact that I had hearing loss? All of them seemed silly reasons to be so so angry.
In fact, I recall seeing a video of a hard-of-hearing influencer/advocate on social media a few weeks before seeing Oppenheimer, venting about going to see Barbie only to realize that the promised open captions were not available at the theatre, and that she refused to use a closed caption device that required her to swivel her head between the device and the silver screen. To be honest, I was a bit doubtful about the righteous anger she was expressing at first - people with disabilities protest about not having accessible restrooms, or being limited in educational and work opportunities...but demanding entertainment with not just an accessibility feature, but a specific kind? Was that maybe asking for a bit too much? Having lived the majority of my life so far as a person with (close to) normal hearing, I had internalized able-ism and completely missed the point.
The point is not just whether there is open, closed or any type of captioning at all. The point is not Barbie, or Oppenheimer, or any movie. The point is, both of us were hard-of-hearing individuals who wanted to share an enjoyable experience with our hearing loved ones, and be part of a cultural phenomenon, but were excluded by the hearing mainstream. Ironically, our difficulty in understanding auditory input is often paired with feeling misunderstood (e.g. I'm not aloof or unfriendly, I just trying to keep up with a group conversation and have RBF when I'm trying to focus extra hard) or unheard (e.g. why is a hearing person brushing it off when I tell them they are damaging their hearing by exposing themselves to loud music for extended periods of time? Why are they telling me what I can or cannot hear?).
I want to be very clear, the hearing folks who have said hurtful things about my hearing loss, or have been inconsiderate, are not bad people. They are not less kind or less sensitive than you or me. They just happen to be people with normal hearing, who cannot know what they have not experienced. From my childhood to adolescence, I was one of them too. My reaction to the reel is proof that I STILL have able-ism and hearing-centric views within me. I look forward to the day when I can accept and advocate for my needs as a person with hearing loss confidently, and also do that for others.
If you would like to join me on that journey as well, here are some resources that are an easy way to start:
To get a sense of what having a hearing loss could feel like, take the Unfair Spelling Test - remember, each person experiences hearing loss differently, however, this is the closest simulation to the one I have
Check out Vox's interview of Amber Galloway Gallego, an ASL interpreter specializing in musical performances - bringing rhythm, melody and lyrics to life with not just your hands but your entire body is an art form in and of itself!
Watch a Movie with a Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Character, or, better yet, actors that are deaf and hard-of-hearing. I recent favorite of mine was Keivonn Montreal Woodard in The Last of Us - he even won an Emmy award for his performance! There are also many fascinating documentaries about deaf or hard-of-hearing people, like Deaf U and Audible.
Or, if you would like to take a deeper dive - reading is always the best window into somebody else's experience and a great way to build empathy. Books such as Shouting Won't Help: Why I - and 50 Million Other Americans - Can't Hear You , Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery and The Way I Hear it: A Life with Hearing Loss have made to laugh, cry and marvel at how the experiences of living with deafness or hearing loss can be. Additionally, many hard-of-hearing and/or deaf folks have their own blogs, because each experience is so unique and continues to evolve. Some of the ones I like are MamaHuHears, My Hearing Loss Story, Hear Me Out, and Living with Hearing Loss.
Thanks for hearing me out. Until next time, keep chai-ing:)
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