Sign-Language Archivist Lin Ya-hsiu

It's noon at a farmhouse in Taichung's Tachia Township, and the home's owner, Ho Chun-kuei, is serving a plate of pineapple. A volunteer from Taichung County's Lotus Heart Service Organization asks her if it's sweet and where she bought it. Ho makes a gesture in front of her mouth with her right hand and sticks out a long tongue. The man of the house, Tsai Yi-hsing, uses his right hand to indicate the number two and wiggles his bent left thumb slightly.

What Ho said with her gestures was: "I bought the pineapple at the No. 2 Market. There's a temple near there, right? The one to Qi Ye and Ba Ye...." Tsai added: "The pineapple is really tasty. Two of them were only NT$50." The old couple's soundless conversation lasts only seconds, but their vivid and intensely visual language of limbs makes a lasting impression.

To capture this scene, Lin Ya-hsiu had quit her Taipei job and moved to Tachia, a town she didn't know. Her aim is to capture forgotten natural sign languages on tape. But this is only her first step. She plans to spend another 1.5 to 2 years traveling Taiwan and its outlying islands making a documentary and archiving Taiwan's distinctive natural sign languages, thereby adding Taiwanese data to the database of global sign languages.

Though "natural sign language" is pictographic in nature, context is essential to making the meaning of individual signs clear. The sign in the leftmost photo means "tree," with the upright forearm representing its trunk and the fingers its limbs.

Not hearing your own words

Lin was among the 2007 winners of the Keep Walking Fund fellowship, a financial prize intended to help people realize a dream. In Lin's case, her dream grew out of a chance encounter. Lin had joined a sign language club just for fun during her junior year at university. While she was a member, the club received a request from a parent asking for someone to help his hearing-impaired child with her studies.

Like her father, five-year-old An-an was severely hearing impaired. An-an's father knew that she would be unable to use signing to communicate with most people, and that gestures and grunts only elicited odd looks. Hoping to save her from a repeat of his own experience, he forbade her to learn signing, and instead sent her to a speech pathologist to struggle to learn to make sounds she herself couldn't hear.

Curious to learn more, Lin met the family and watched as An-an spent a whole afternoon learning to make just three sounds: bo, po, mo. Whereas most girls An-an's age were already chattering away using a large vocabulary, Lin learned to her dismay that An-an could only express herself through tantrums. An-an was in no way intellectually impaired; she simply didn't have access to either signing or spoken language. Lin wondered why the hearing impaired would reject signing and struggle to imitate the language of the hearing. After all, even famous hearing-impaired individuals figures like Sue Wang were unashamed to have sign-language interpreters with them at public speaking engagements. Why should An-an be forced to wander the limbo between the "hearing" and "deaf" worlds? Lin felt for her.

Lin learned that the recent focus of special education programs on "character sign" education has made it difficult for young hearing-impaired persons to chat with older ones, much less delve into one another's inner worlds. She also discovered that the deaf were losing their "mother tongue"-natural sign language-and the significance of that loss.

Though "natural sign language" is pictographic in nature, context is essential to making the meaning of individual signs clear. The sign in the leftmost photo means "tree," with the upright forearm representing its trunk and the fingers its limbs.

Searching for forgotten gestures

Most sign-language enthusiasts are largely oblivious to the doubts and difficulties the hearing impaired face. But Lin has taken them as her field of study and even made their documentation her profession.

She began her research by gathering documents, tracing the origins of Taiwan's education of the hearing impaired to the Japanese era. Early signing in Taiwan relied on "natural sign language," which is graphic and iconic, and relies on everything from hand shapes to facial expressions to convey meaning. The "naturalness" of this kind of signing can be seen in the instantly recognizable sign for "eat," which requires holding the fingers as if they are grasping something and stuffing them into your mouth. Though direct, the approach is primitive and struggles to express deeper meanings. It is also unsuited to abstract or complex grammars, yielding instead sentences such as "I eat no want" and "He angry very."

As deaf education moved closer to mainstream education in the 1980s, education departments developed "character signs" that made teaching easier. Formed by the hands in the shape of individual Chinese characters and used sequentially in sentences that adhere to Chinese syntax, character signs differ significantly from natural signs. With the change in educational policy, they have also begun to displace them.

Six years ago, Lin took the Taipei City Department of Labor's sign-language interpretation course and became a sign-language interpreter assisting the hearing impaired. Though interpreters can go months at a time between projects, Lin was determined to be available for any interpreting opportunity that came along and so avoided supplementing her income with a part-time job. When not working on a project, she honed her skills and waited. "I just really love the work," she says.

In 2007, she stumbled across the Keep Walking program, winning a fellowship that allowed her to begin realizing her dream. She decided to quit her job and travel all of Taiwan to interview and record the life stories of hearing-impaired senior citizens born during the Japanese era.

Lin sets up a camera in Li Yang-hao's shoe shop to record a conversation in sign.

Reading a wordless tome

Lin carried a 7-8-kilogram backpack containing a computer, a camera, and other equipment with her when she went to visit 74-year-old Tsai Yi-hsing in Tachia. She filmed Tsai as he tended his vegetables and attended a croquet match, and tagged along like a paparazzo when Tsai visited an old friend in Changhua. Lin watched them gesture and become excited during their silent conversation, searching for signs no longer widely used as they joked and bantered.

She then headed back to Tachia to see 78-year-old Li Jung-hua, a senior citizen who lives on his own. Li's life story came spilling out the moment they met, but when the conversation turned to his wartime childhood, his facial expression became savage and his right hand cut fiercely across his stomach. Lin didn't know if his startling gesture was a reference to ritual suicide or the cruelty the public experienced during the war.

Lin typically returns to her rented room in the evening to begin organizing her footage, which can amount to as much as four or five DV cartridges a day. She examines her tapes seeking "words" in the gestures and expressions of her subjects, watching bits she doesn't understand repeatedly until she gets them.

"Reading the tapes is the most exhausting part of what I do," she says. "It takes many times more time than shooting them." She sometimes even dozes off while watching her "silent films."

Liao Ting-li (center), who teaches at a school for the hearing impaired, takes her students on a field trip to the Peitou incinerator.

Signing dialects

In mid-May, she rode her scooter from Tachia to Tainan to visit some senior citizens. Some weren't the right age for her research, others were in poor health, and still others didn't want to be interviewed. After exhausting her contacts and asking every hearing-impaired group she knew, she still hadn't found an interview subject. She decided to scour the streets on her scooter, and finally picked up a lead in Tungshan Township. Only after tracking down her subject did she realize that the person was on her list, but was in too poor health to be interviewed, leaving her right back where she started.

When she found 77-year-old Li Yang-hao, a shoe store owner educated under the Japanese, in Paiho Township two months later, Lin packed up her belongings and set out for Paiho for a three-month stay.

There she once came across Li's wife pickling fragrant manjack fruits. Taking a bite, she signed to Li that it was salty. Li looked confused and signed back, "There's no salt in it, only chilies. Salt is bad for you. We've never added it...." A similarly confused Lin replied: "It's not spicy. It's salty. Wasn't a bunch of salt just added?" In fact, she'd filmed the ladles of salt. Only after Li had pulled out pen and paper to clear things up did she discover that her sign for "salt" was Li's sign for "MSG," and that Li's sign for "salt" was very similar to the one Lin had learned for "chili."

What Li had meant was: "There's no MSG in it, only salt. MSG is bad for you and we've never added it...." Once they got it worked out, Lin found their miscommunication hilarious.

Though "natural sign language" is pictographic in nature, context is essential to making the meaning of individual signs clear. The sign in the leftmost photo means "tree," with the upright forearm representing its trunk and the fingers its limbs.

A signing world rich in diversity

Over the next few months, Lin learned many old signs and discovered differences between northern and southern Taiwanese signing. For example, in new natural sign language, you represent "bank" by using the thumb and index finger of both hands to form circles ("money"), banging them together, and steepling the remaining fingers (suggesting a roof over the money). Members of the older generation, however, hold their left hand open, form an "o" with their right hand, then stamp the right hand down onto the left as if stamping a seal. The sign represents putting a seal on a form to withdraw funds.

The signs for "Taiwan" are another case in point. In the new natural sign language, the sign used is that for "chew sugar cane" (the right hand is made into a fist, then twisted in front of the mouth). Under the Japanese signing system used by the older generation, Taiwan is "beautiful country" (the signs for "beautiful" and "country").

Examples abound. In the northern part of Taiwan, the sign for "milk" is an index finger crooked above the lip. In the central and southern parts of the island, it is far more graphic-the hand makes a "milking" motion in front of the chest. In the north, the sign for "train" is an open left palm, representing a rail car, with two or three fingers of the right hand, representing the wheels, turning by its side. In the central and southern parts of the island, the left arm is used to represent the track on which the right palm, representing a rail car, advances from station to station.

Lin believes that natural sign language is easier for the typical hearing-impaired person to understand than character signs. For example, expressing "network" in character signs requires making four signs-two each for characters for "net" and "road"-that individually (or in pairs) have little to do with the actual meaning being conveyed. Similarly, expressing "high-speed rail" in character signs requires signing a total of five characters to express the words "tall" and "rail," and doesn't convey the sense of "rapid rail." In contrast, the natural sign for "high-speed rail" is the sign for "big nose" (a high-speed-rail locomotive) plus "train," which is both vivid and easily understood. For this reason, many hearing-impaired children have taken to using character signs in class, and natural signs elsewhere else.

Then again, natural language can't seem to develop signs fast enough to keep up with all the new concepts emerging in the information age. But, given time, the deaf do develop new words. "E-mail" is a case in point. The natural sign for it is a combination of the English letter "E" with the natural sign for "mail," expressing both the word and the idea.

But abstract concepts, professional terminology, and proper nouns are harder to express in natural signs and require supplementation from character signs. If the hearing impaired wish to learn something technical or engage in deeper analytic thinking, they must rely on character signs. But the hearing impaired are accustomed to thinking visually, so they have a hard time grasping character signs. As a result, they only half understand many words, and must exercise great patience to learn to use them with facility.

Though "natural sign language" is pictographic in nature, context is essential to making the meaning of individual signs clear. The sign in the leftmost photo means "tree," with the upright forearm representing its trunk and the fingers its limbs.

Everybody sign!

Three months with Tsai and his wife also acquainted Lin with the old man's frustrations. His children, who have normal hearing, don't sign, restricting his communication with them to just a few words. Their inability to just "talk" puts distance between them, giving rise to a sadness that people with normal hearing may find difficult to grasp.

"Actually, people who hear normally can communicate with natural signs, too," says Lin. "They don't need to avoid them." She relates a story of a family with a hearing-impaired mother and a hearing child: when the family's fish died one day, the child invented a sign for a fish floating belly up. The mother understood immediately.

Lin sees natural signing as a dying language, disappearing because the elderly who "speak" it are passing away and young people aren't learning it. She gazes at the dozens of tapes she's already shot, her brain mulling the lively gestures and expressions employed in scenes never seen in the literate world. She tells herself she must do her best to record them to create an archive of natural signs for the hearing impaired and to preserve a record of their struggles to express themselves to one another and to the hearing world.