Theme:
"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for"

It all started a few years ago during a cool summer night, when I was abruptly waken up by the sound of hustling on the street, just under my second floor bedroom window. It was around 2 AM so the streets were desert and there were 3 persons visibly angry with each other near a car with all 4 doors opened. My first thought was: There you are, some other drunk people arguing... again. It seemed to be a couple's fight... A young woman was being very aggressive and loud towards a young man, who was very loud himself too. The third person was an older lady that was trying without success to set them apart. They were so loud and physical that I got scared they could get seriously hurt. So I put my head out of the window and shouted I would have called the police, for which in response the older lady showed me her middle finger. But the more I watched the scene the more I thought there was something very unusual... all that grunting and groaning, the pulling and pushing without a word... and then I realised they were deaf! Initially I was very surprised, but soon after that, a feeling of self-awareness and guilt hit me, just like when I was a kid and would comment in my mind that the little black boy sitting in front of me in class was probably very poor, because that was the general image I grew up with when I lived in Brazil. I felt awful every time I caught myself “measuring” others according to the expectations I was taught to have from them. Each person belonged to a group, a category... a social position. Being a weird girl in the 70's was a struggle itself, put the fact that I was one of the only Asian immigrants in town on top of it and you can see why I hate labels, standards and preconceptions. Nevertheless I am not free from their influence and that night I was proven it. Deaf people fight too. They get mad, argue, cheat, hate and love just like any other person... so why was I so surprised? Because I had never expected to see deaf people in a situation that would have been more than ordinary for so many other people. I didn't sleep the rest of that night. Ashamed of how judgemental I had acted, I started researching online for “deaf and mute”. The first thing I learned was that the term deaf-mute is obsolete and potentially offensive as the majority of deaf people do have the ability to speak. And I learned that there are many different sign languages in the world, that vary according to the country language and even differ as region dialects ( e.g. in Italy ). Many matters can effect the use of sign language in a community. For instance, when South Korea was dominated by Japan (1910 to 1945), Koreans ( deaf or not ) had to learn and use the Japanese language. After its independence (1948), for many decades deaf Koreans still used Japanese sign language.