Two young women have won accolades for their performances in a small-budget film, which is a true-to-life depiction of their experiences overcoming hearing impairments and battling discrimination.
Chiang Wen-yi (江文頤) and Lin Ching-lan (林靖嵐), who were cast in the leading roles, attended the film’s premiere on Wednesday last week to meet the audience and speak about their experiences.
The film, Use Your Heart to Listen for Happiness (用心聽見幸福), was based on true stories of the struggles and difficulties encountered by people with hearing impairments.
Photo: Wang Chun-chung, Taipei Times
The storyline revolves around two friends who have hearing impairments, with Chiang in the role of Hsiao-yun (曉雲), and Lin playing her namesake, Ching-lan (靖嵐).
Hsiao-yun is an office worker and, due to her impaired hearing, she has to put in more effort and time than her colleagues to succeed at her job.
Due to her persistence and determination to achieve success at work, she is finally accepted by her in-laws.
Ching-lan is a young woman with a passion for dance.
By practicing diligently, she fulfills her dream of becoming a professional dancer and subsequently founds Taiwan’s first troupe for hearing-impaired dancers, giving them the confidence to strive for their dreams.
The storyline closely mirrors the pairs’ real-life experiences while giving insight into the inner world of the hearing impaired, which is seldom touched upon in commercial films.
Both women are amateur actors and others in the cast were also hearing impaired.
“Hearing impairment is like being near-sighted for most people; it causes inconvenience in daily life. Vision problems can be corrected by wearing eyeglasses. Hearing problems can be helped by wearing a hearing aid, along with learning sign language, lip reading and undergoing speech therapy,” Chiang said.
“When these hearing aids and skills can be utilized, our intelligence and ability to work will not be affected much. On the contrary, when a hearing impairment can be overcome, it can stimulate hidden potential and bring out further capabilities,” she added.
With a moderate degree of hearing impairment, she has worn a hearing aid since childhood.
Thanks to her parents’ whole-hearted support of her education, Chiang underwent speech therapy, and made good progress in school.
She is a role model for other hearing-impaired people as she passed her examinations to enter university and obtained a post-graduate degree from the College of Management at Yuan Ze University in Taoyuan County.
She currently works at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s top contract chipmaker.
Lin has been severely hearing impaired since birth.
She graduated from university with a degree in special education while keeping up her love of dancing.
In the Taipei Deaflympic Games in 2009, Lin won a silver medal in dance.
Later, she started a dance troupe to teach dance to physically challenged children.
The film was produced by an organization for the rights of the hearing impaired — the Sound Home Alliance Association.
“We cannot change their conditions. Some people are born deaf, but through education, they can break out from their silent world. We can lead advocacy campaigns for the public to understand the inner world of deaf people,” association honorary chairperson Mo Su-chuan (莫素娟) said.
“We want to show society: Do not let hearing impairments impede social interaction. It is also our aim to inspire deaf people, to allow them to understand that the road to success can be made only by hard work,” Mo said.
Several screenings of the film with panel discussions are scheduled for cities across the nation over the next few months.
The film is also available on YouTube.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching