On the day, Professor Graeme Clark spoke first, about the history of the bionic ear, his 33-year involvement and the many technical and scientific challenges that had been overcome. President Jiang Zemin then told the gathering, ‘Your work has brought so much joy and happiness to so many profoundly deaf people around the world.’
When it was Sophie’s turn, she delivered her speech beautifully, as clearly as I’d ever heard her speak: ‘Mr Presiden, welcome to Austraia. I would like to presen you with this gif – a bionic ear, jus like the one inside my hea.’ And she presented the president with her gift, a replica of the cochlear implant. I was bursting with pride. There was my deaf daughter, speaking on behalf of the Bionic Ear Institute and meeting the president of China. It was one of those very special moments for us. Only we knew how far she had come and all the work involved to get her to this point.
Once the rhythm of our new way of life began to settle, I started teaching more classes at Dance World. As my reputation as a teacher grew, some of the dancers from the Australian Ballet asked me to coach them privately. This was what I’d hoped for. Working hard to refine my own body and technique in my career had certainly helped me to be analytical and inquisitive. I constantly thought about how I could help the dancers discover their potential. I was home, doing what I was born to do.
Li, on the other hand, fully embraced his new life as a stockbroker. As with everything else, he committed himself totally to his work, and stockbroking soon became his passion. He loved learning, loved a challenge, and always strove to be the best. He was a visionary, big-picture person – like Neil George, I often thought. He was also in the right place at the right time. It was during these first couple of years that the technology side of the market became hot, and somehow Li managed to tap into a network of tech-savvy people. It was an exciting time. It was his first bull market and he was riding it. But Li, always with an eye to the future, knew this once-in-a-lifetime technology boom wouldn’t last.
‘Mary, make sure you remind me to get our investments out of the stock market before May next year,’ he urged me time and again. ‘Don’t let me get carried away. The bubble has to burst sometime and we want to be out before that happens.’
Sophie’s reading was improving. She graduated from her beloved Tintin and Asterix books straight to Harry Potter, and reading soon became her passion. This was a breakthrough. I was relieved to see she was starting to comprehend much more about daily life. But there were other issues.
We were about halfway into the school year when I received a troubling call from Mr Prideaux. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘I am really concerned about Sophie.’
My stomach flipped like it always did when something wasn’t going well for Sophie. I took a deep breath. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘She is doing well, but she isn’t mixing with the other fourth-graders. She is still playing with the Grade 2s.’
‘I see,’ I said, instantly deflated, and then told him, ‘Although she’s eleven, her speech and language skills are still like a seven-year-old’s. She can’t possibly keep up with the speed of language in her peer group. I appreciate you letting me know, though. Let me think about this.’
I had always thought we would get to a certain point and she’d just take off. After seven years with her implant I had been imagining that her language acquisition would get easier. During these prepubescent years, it was very challenging for Sophie, me and Li. If I thought too much about it, it would make me cry. I questioned myself after a setback like this. ‘I’ve put her on this track of mainstreaming and there are no other options. What have I done? How will she ever be independent?’
But, as always with my crises of confidence, Li would remind me, ‘Mary, her deafness won’t go away. But just look how far she’s come.’ There was nothing else to do but move forward.
I asked Sophie why she was playing with the girls in Grade 2. She told me it was easier to join in younger children’s ball games than catching the conversations of her classmates, and then she said, ‘I don’ ’ave any frien’ in my clas’.
Times like this were like a dagger to my heart. How I wished that life would just get easier for her, but every time I thought she had made a breakthrough, inching closer to her peers, I’d be reminded again that they had raced on and left Sophie further behind.
Tom was now eight and was instinctively wise about Sophie and her needs. ‘Tom,’ I asked him, ‘do other eleven-year-olds play with the Grade 2s? Is that normal?’
‘No. Girls in Grade 4 don’t play much. They sit around and chat together,’ he explained. ‘That would be too hard for Sophie. She wouldn’t fit into a group like that.’
This gave me new worries. How on earth could I help?
I was always looking for ways to expand Sophie’s vocabulary through new experiences, and thought it was the right time for her to learn an instrument. This would give us a new topic to talk about, and she might make new friends her own age. With music lessons she would learn new language as well as musical terms, and further broaden her vocabulary and comprehension. I didn’t mind which instrument – perhaps something small, I thought, but she insisted on cello.
We never knew the quality of sounds she actually heard from the cello. We understood that the implant produced mechanical sounds and that recipients drew meaning from those sounds. Each person would interpret them differently, depending on the benefit they got from their implant. We assumed that Sophie enjoyed the sounds she made with the cello, and were just delighted that she liked practising it. Amazingly, right from the start, her playing was beautiful.
All this coincided with another change. For a few months, we had been considering buying a new house for our growing family. Li cashed in some of his share-market profits so we could put a deposit on a new house, 74 Park Street, St Kilda West. St Kilda is a dynamic area, once a popular tourist mecca, just one block from the iconic beach. It was an excellent location that happily suited our needs. The house was quite a bit larger and nicer than our townhouse, and many of our friends were living in the area. Our new address was still close to the ballet school and everything else we needed. We had four good-sized bedrooms, a proper sitting room at the front, steps down into a family room with a fireplace and a big courtyard, and a 1500-bottle wine cellar under the kitchen floor. There was a tram line out the front and we were next to a small park, with a little coffee shop nearby.
We were sponsoring one of Li’s nieces, his third brother’s daughter Lulu, to come to Melbourne to do a TAFE diploma, and we would have room for her to stay in the new house. This made Li extremely happy. Li’s family, my family, they were simply the most important thing to us. If you know that and feel that, then you are always happy to go the extra mile.
Lulu was twenty-one when she came to live with us, Sophie eleven, Tom eight, Bridie nearly three. We moved Bridie and Sophie into one room so Lulu could have her own room. She was a confident girl with a sweet nature and would often help me in the kitchen or babysit Bridie.
Lulu didn’t speak a word of English when she arrived. She started an intensive English course immediately and soon got a job at the local supermarket, which really dropped her in the deep end. Adding another person with English-language difficulties to our already frantic family was extra-challenging. Every time I got frustrated, I kept reminding myself that Li had always dreamed of being able to help his family. How could I deny his generous wish? I had to make it work.