One day Li got off the phone with Sophie, stunned. ‘Mary, we just had a conversation in Chinese!’ he told me, really excited. ‘I can’t believe our deaf daughter is conversing with me in Chinese.’ After that, whenever she called, she would talk with Li in Mandarin. I had never seen him so proud and happy.
Then a week later Sophie called and told Li she had dreamed in Chinese. He was over the moon. ‘When you start dreaming in a different language,’ he explained to me, ‘it means you are thinking in that language as well.’
We were both thrilled. It was still unsettling to be without her, and it would be the first time she’d missed Christmas with us. In China they don’t celebrate Christmas and it was school six days a week.
Back home we were having Christmas with our Chinese relatives. Rong Rong’s parents came to visit, and Lulu and Yan Yan joined us for Christmas Day lunch. It was Cungui and his wife, Xiao Zhu’s, first Christmas experience. They were fascinated by the traditions and tasted turkey and lamb for the first time. And they loved it.
Sophie called her nana and yeye during her exchange, speaking in Chinese. They were speechless. The last thing they’d ever thought to hear was their beloved deaf granddaughter speaking to them in Chinese.
When Sophie returned home, her interest in learning Mandarin didn’t wane. I’ve never seen anyone put in more effort than her with Chinese. Her commitment was just relentless. After dinner, as part of her homework, she would write short essays and stories in Chinese. She worked extremely hard just trying to get the four intonations right, then there were the accents and pronunciation. She was quite frustrated with the limited lessons at school so she continued to rely on Li to help her, even waiting up late for him to come home so they could work on her Chinese together.
‘If anyone else with normal hearing and average intelligence was as industrious as Sophie, their Chinese would be impeccable,’ he told me.
Li continued working with Jan Sardi on the screenplay and now, a year and many edits later, they finally had one he was happy with. At one stage, he mentioned to Jane Scott that if she ever needed any help to finance the film, he had some leads. Ultimately Bell Potter came on board to back the project by offering the opportunity to their sophisticated investors. In the end, Bell Potter and Li raised the majority of the total film budget.
Bruce Beresford spent two days sitting at our dining-room table talking with Li. He wanted to make sure that the screenplay was a true representation of Li’s story. Bruce had a great sense of humour. He told Li that the biggest challenge would be finding a dancer of the same calibre who could speak Chinese and English and who was also handsome. They both laughed. Li assured Bruce that he knew a couple of very good Chinese dancers, but he didn’t know if they could act. Bruce responded confidently, ‘Unless they are totally stupid, I think I can teach them how to act.’
Li eventually suggested Chi Cao, a principal dancer with Birmingham Royal Ballet, and Chengwu Guo, a very good young dancer with the Australian Ballet. They were both engaged to play Li at different stages of his life. After Bruce’s visit, we gained more confidence in the project. We felt he was a man with integrity, experience and talent. We also discovered his love of music and were thrilled to hear that he wanted Christopher Gordon, a well-known Australian composer, for the film score.
While all this was going on, Sophie started her final year of schooling. It was 2008 and we were all thinking about what might lie ahead for her, whether she would get into university to study architecture as she wished. Architecture was a surprise. Perhaps Neil George had had more of an influence than we realised! But first she had to get through Year 12.
Academically Sophie was doing extremely well, and she hoped that Year 12 would bring a change socially. She had put her hand up for school captain for her final year. Although she didn’t get it, it was amazing that she had the confidence to go for it. She was still working hard on her dance subject. It was a relief for her not to have to sit down to study like in her other subjects, which included maths, chemistry, accounting and English as well as Chinese. Her VCE dance teacher told me she’d never received as many emails with questions from a student as she had from Sophie during Year 12. That reassured me. Sophie was motivated to do well.
Meanwhile, Tom was flying at school. He was playing inter-school tennis, Australian Rules football and basketball. He never seemed to do much homework, but his teachers told us that he was doing well in his academic subjects anyway. He was such an easy and happy boy.
Bridie had developed a big friendship group through tennis. Two days a week, the whole team would come across the road from the Fawkner Park courts after morning practice and I’d give them a snack, then drop them off to school. Bridie was always busy. Saturdays and Sundays included ballet and netball. She just loved being with her friends. She was a social butterfly bouncing in and out of the house. Like Tom, she didn’t do much homework.
What took our minds off exam pressure at this time was a speech that Sophie was invited to give in October as part of the inaugural Graeme Clark Oration held at Melbourne University. The oration had been established to honour Graeme’s achievements. In his own address he talked about his research and how it had led to his invention. Then there she was, up on the podium talking to hundreds of people about how bilateral cochlear implants had changed her life. Sophie spoke beautifully and people were clearly moved by her personal story and amazed at how far she had come. Our daughter had once again represented the hope that stories like hers could be replicated in the growing number of people, now more than 100 000, around the world who had received a bionic ear.
Sophie was then right back into exam mode for her dance subject. Her written subjects were still to come, but it was the performance component of the exam that mattered most right now. It would count for 50 per cent of her total mark. She was nervous but excited as was I. On the morning she headed off, her hair in a bun, her leotard, pointe shoes and audiotapes in her bag. I couldn’t wait for her to get home and tell me how it went. As I knew all too well, anything could happen in a live performance.
When I picked her up, she was devastated. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong without a lot of coaxing. Eventually I discovered that in the middle of the second solo, during multiple pirouettes, both of her implants had flown off. This never happened before. Oh God. I had helped her put them on so carefully, but they hadn’t held! Naturally this had affected her focus, but she’d kept going. She felt she’d done well up to that point, but we were concerned about her results.
It would be a long wait and I felt so worried for her. I could see Sophie was struggling. Eventually her spirits were lifted by the results of her hard work. She received an excellent mark for Chinese, but was even more thrilled with her dance results. She was awarded one of the highest scores in the state, which led to her receiving a Premier’s Award for Dance.
And then before we knew it, Sophie’s secondary schooling was over. The end of any year always rushes up to meet you, but this one seemed to come at us even faster than usual because so much had happened in those last twelve months. I looked back and wondered how on earth we’d done it all.
Sophie just had to wait to see if her application to Melbourne University to study architecture was successful. She also talked about going back to China for a gap year. This idea terrified me. Deep down I felt that at the age of nineteen she had not yet found a sense of belonging. It was something that kept me grounded even though I was away from Australia for twenty-one years. I wanted this connection for Sophie. I knew that having a home in her heart would allow her to spread her wings further.