Deaf Children in China (review)

Deaf Children in China by Alison Callaway (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2000, xii, 320 pp., cloth, $49.95)

Alison Callaway, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, started learning Chinese in the early eighties while teaching at a medical college in Chongqing, Sichuan. Ten years later she began her research on deaf children in China for a Ph.D. at the Center for Deaf Studies of Bristol University and in 1994 conducted fieldwork in Nanjing. Deaf Children in China is based on her thesis.

The first half of the book is an introduction to the social and cultural context of Chinese families with deaf children as well as to the general situation of deaf people in China. It includes information on a variety of subjects ranging from family planning and child-rearing practices to the status of sign language, government policies for people with disabilities,¹ traditional Chinese medicine as a treatment for deafness, and the development of cochlear implants.

The second part of the book presents the results and findings of the author’s personal research in China. In order to investigate the reactions of Chinese parents to their children’s deafness, Callaway drafted an impressive questionnaire with 133 questions and interviewed the parents or grandparents of 14 children (instead of 26 as briefed on the back cover of the book)—nine boys and five girls, aged 3 to 7. None of these children has any physical or health particularities other than deafness. All of them are enrolled at the Nanjing Rehabilitation Center for preschool-age deaf children, a school sponsored by the nongovernmental Amity Foundation. The aim of the questionnaire was to gather firsthand information in order to draw a comprehensive picture of each family’s circumstances: the parents’ state of mind as well as their views on their children’s future. The author also studied a selection of 135 letters written by parents of preschool-age deaf children from all over China, addressed to Zhou Hong, then director of the school mentioned earlier and known to the public as a successful educator of his own deaf daughter.

A careful reader would notice that there was only one deaf family among the 14 families the author studied. This unexpectedly weak proportion of children with hereditary deafness in the author’s group was probably imposed by the low percentage of enrollment by these families. These children are turned away, probably not because of any direct administrative discrimination but by higher school fees and other related expenses such as the costs of medical consultation, the fitting of hearing aids, and so on, that deaf children’s families would have to bear in the private sector. Though no official statistics are available, it is generally believed that deaf families have a much lower average income than those belonging to the hearing community and thus might not be able to afford to send their deaf children to a private institution such as this Rehabilitation Center for preschool-age deaf children in Nanjing.

The interviews and the letters largely quoted and exploited by the author provide a fascinating insight into the lives and social values of mostly relatively well-educated Chinese parents living in urban areas. They reveal some fundamental differences between Chinese and Western parents in respect to the deafness of their children. Chinese parents perceive deafness not only as a handicap but also as a disease; their first concern is therefore to find a medical cure. They tend to engage pathetically in serial consultation of doctors or resort to traditional Chinese therapies, and it is often after an unsuccessful search that they finally turn to speech training.

Since 1979 China’s family planning has imposed a strict single-child policy on the urban population. Within this sociopolitical context, it is touching to learn that, although entitled to have a second child because of the disability of the first one, parents in China as witnessed by Callaway prefer to concentrate their resources and energy...