For more than half of his life, Anthony Chong Vee Yee, 38, felt the same. Born deaf and with no voice to express himself, he soon began to realise just how different he was from others. And the realisation stung.
“My parents never told me about deafness as a linguistic identity. I was told it was a disability. In reality, these two concepts – the linguistic identity and the disabled identity – are completely different,” says Chong.
He tells FMT how life as a deaf boy was tough and oftentimes lonely.
He studied at SRK (2) Sultan Alam Shah but it wasn’t easy interacting with the hearing kids at school. So, his circle of friends was limited to those, who like him, attended the school’s programme for deaf students.
Those were long years of isolation and alienation. But things took a 180 degree turn when he least expected it.
“When I was 18, I went to the US to attend the Deaf Way 2 Conference. It was here that I learned there were many people like me outside Malaysia and they were just as capable as hearing people.
“I only saw non-capable deaf people in Malaysia. But this conference inspired me to embrace the deaf linguistic identity, not the disabled identity,” Chong says.
He returned to Malaysia pumped. He threw himself into his studies and became the first deaf student to be accepted by KDU in the Faculty of Information and Multimedia Technologies.
He went back to the US and completed two master’s programmes and is currently pursuing a doctorate on research and anthropology at Universiti Malaya.
Today, Chong is very much involved with the local deaf community and has been co-writing sign language reference books to help hearing people communicate with the deaf.
Before venturing into the field of writing, Chong worked as a production editor for a publishing company, formatting text and adjusting alignments. He never thought of writing textbooks until the YMCA Kuala Lumpur approached him about it.
Now Chong is part of a team that writes sign language reference books tailored for hearing learners so they can communicate with the deaf.
Chong and his team take what’s important for hearing individuals to learn, and adjust the content based on the levels of difficulty.
After gathering the content, Chong and his team list and label the various components they wish to teach hearing people. Once the content is checked and double-checked, a deaf person is asked to sign so it can be photographed for illustration purposes.
Chong explains that using the photographs taken, an illustrator painstakingly draws the individual hand signs, which is then checked meticulously.
He says this is an important aspect of their work as viewing a hand gesture from different angles could change its meaning altogether.
Chong explains to FMT that Malaysian Sign Language (BIM) and American Sign Language (ASL) share about 500 common ‘sords’ or ‘sign words’.
What makes BIM and ASL different is the cultural context of each and how users string sentences using the ‘sords’.
“The difference is not based on their ‘sord’ but based on their full sentence and how they use it,” Chong says.
Malaysia’s diverse cultural and multilingual context impacts how BIM is developed, the same way ASL is influenced by American culture and Americans’ use of the English language.
Most deaf Malaysians understand a little English and a little Bahasa Melayu, so the use of these two languages influence BIM’s development.
Chong says the common misconception is that BIM is based on Bahasa Melayu and ASL is based on English which is not the case as BIM is a language of its own.
“In the same way one language is different from another, BIM should not be used as a means to learn Bahasa Melayu or English,” Chong explains.
“For instance, literally translating ‘Apa Khabar?’ into English by signing ‘What News?’ is meaningless. This is because the literal translation does not take into account cultural aspects,” Chong says.
What about fairly new words like ‘selfie’? Who decides how it should be signed? Is there a certain methodology for creating new signs?
Chong explains that there are no rules and regulations when it comes to signing new words. It most likely starts with one person, then others pick it up along the way and it starts being used more extensively among the deaf.
“Language belongs to the people, so I would not create a hand sign myself and insist this is the hand sign for that particular word. In the world of the deaf, hand signs emerge organically.
“If people tend to use a certain hand sign to indicate ‘selfie’ and if others understand the sign and like it, they will start using it in their daily communication. And this hand sign will eventually be added into the BIM word bank.”
“BIM: Malaysian Sign Language for Daily Conversation” is now on sale. Those interested can contact Morley Ng from the YMCA at +60 16-203 2336.