I was bullied in primary school, but not so much in high school. My speech in Cantonese isn’t as fluent as a hearing person’s, so my school life was very lonely.
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. I loved her but I was scared of her I was also very dependent on her and couldn’t manage without her. 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 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 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. A doctor confirmed that I was profoundly deaf, and my parents were very upset.
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.
