Up to 30% of deafness among children in urban China may be caused by ototoxic antibiotics (gentamycin, streptomycin, kanamycin and neomycin) 'which are all relatively cheap and in widespread use, though they are often prescribed inappropriately.'

This is one of the more shocking revelations of what is by no means a polemical book, but a measured analysis based on extensive fieldwork and literature review. A study of the experience, attitudes and responses of Chinese parents with deaf children is supported by a discussion of the social, cultural and policy context that will be useful to readers interested in any or all kinds of disability in China.

The story is not a happy one. Disabled children are generally considered 'a source of shame for the family' and regarded as having little potential. Deafness is perceived as 'disease, abnormality and medical defect,' and parents' efforts 'are devoted to trying to normalize their child.' In the first place, this typically involves 'serial consultation of doctors and the search for a cure.' The families Dr. Callaway interviewed spent an average of CNY 10,000 - 20,000 (USD 1,500 - 3,000) trailing from one facility to another, often traveling to Beijing or Shanghai in search of 'the best', and trying first western medicine, then acupuncture, qigong (traditional breathing exercises), massage and/or herbal remedies - all of which had negligible effect on hearing loss that had been originally diagnosed as incurable.

The drive to normalise then switches to speech training. The current emphasis on speech in the education of deaf children is 'absolute'. Some of the parents Dr. Callaway interviewed even appeared to take their children's improved speaking ability, after attending speech classes, as evidence of improved hearing.

Dr. Callaway favours a broader, 'bilingual education' approach, which recognises the naturalness with which deaf children will begin to invent their own sign languages, and respects 'deaf culture' by encouraging creative communication and learning in signs, as well as helping children to communicate with non-deaf people.

Since 1995, the Amity Foundation, Nanjing Deaf School and the Centre for Deaf Studies at Bristol University (where Dr. Callaway wrote the PhD thesis that forms the basis of this book) have collaborated to establish an experimental 'bilingual' class which includes storytelling in sign language.

But this is as yet the only initiative of its kind in China. Special educators do not particularly value communication within the deaf community and sign language is seen as being valuable mainly as an educational tool to help children to learn to read. Indeed, indigenous signing has been standardised by educators to make an official Chinese Sign Language, precisely with a view to bringing it closer to Chinese syntax and grammar.

It also relies entirely on the hands, whereas indigenous sign language incorporates many other gestures, and is able to make fine discriminations. The official sign language, in Dr. Callaway's view, 'simply encodes spoken Chinese - it is not the separate, living language of deaf people.' In practice, the official China Sign Language is not used uniformly even in schools: there are local 'dialects'; and indigenous signing is still widely used.

Dr. Callaway draws not only on her own interviews but on 135 letters written during the early 1990s by relatives of deaf children to Zhou Hong. His book From Mute Girl to Child Prodigy had told how he taught his daughter, Tingting, who was deafened by ototoxic drugs at eighteen months of age, to speak and write proficiently and also 'to memorize the figure for pi to 1,000 decimal places, using a special mnemonic technique, when she was eight years old.' The letters, a selection of which are reproduced in full, are poignant records of confusion, hurt and hope. Tingting's story offers an ambivalent moral. On the one hand, it advances the claims of deaf people to equal consideration as intelligent beings. On the other, it seems an example of 'success' measured by the standards of the hearing world - which, sadly, is what appears to have motivated most of those letters.

DEAF CHILDREN IN CHINA by ALISON CALLAWAY
ISBN 1 56368 085 8
Gallaudet University Press, 320 pp., 2000