1 I was profoundly deaf

Chapter: 1. I was profoundly deaf Back to top

I was born and grew up in Hong Kong. When I was a few months old, my mum found out that I couldn’t hear anything when she accidentally dropped some pot plants on the floor and I didn’t react to the noise. A doctor confirmed that I was profoundly deaf, and my parents were very upset.

My parents wanted me to grow up to be a part of the “hearing” world, so they found a speech clinic to train me how to speak Cantonese. I spent a lot of my childhood in speech therapy sessions and doing speech training with my mum, so I didn’t have as much time to play around with other kids. My mum was strict like many Chinese mothers, a “tiger mother” I guess, and she always pushed me hard to study and controlled me in everything. I loved her but I was scared of her; I was also very dependent on her and couldn’t manage without her.

Unlike other deaf children, I didn’t go to a deaf school - my mum made sure I attended a mainstream primary school and high school. My speech in Cantonese isn’t as fluent as a hearing person’s, so my school life was very lonely.

I was bullied in primary school, but not so much in high school. I still didn’t have many good friends and wasn’t part of any group.

When I was in high school, I knew I was attracted to boys, especially when we were getting changed in the gym change room. It made me panic, as I knew nothing about gay life. Hong Kong in the 1990s was very narrow-minded and homophobic, with a lot of stigma around AIDS. I felt lost, with no one to speak to, or learn from. I did go out from time to time with one or two of the friends I had.

One school holiday in Summer, I was on a bus with one of them and we started talking about homosexuality. It turned out that she was a lesbian. “I’m gay too!!” I said. She was the first person I came out to.

She introduced me to her Deaf friends who are gay and communicate with each other using Hong Kong sign language, which I had never learned. I met one of them and he invited me back to his place. There he gave me a glass of wine and we watched a gay porn video. I was drunk and he started to make a move on me, and then suddenly it was all happening. Afterwards I was so upset, I cried and went home, had a shower and tried to clean myself. I felt so guilty and ashamed of myself.

My parents found out that I’m gay from fax machine messages from gay friends – at the time there weren’t any mobile phones with text and the internet hadn’t really appeared yet. We argued for weeks and I became very depressed. At the time I had completed a diploma but I couldn’t continue to study in university in Hong Kong because of my deafness. I decided to study overseas and my parents agreed.