When my grandmother started losing her hearing a few years ago, I found myself scrambling to find new ways to connect with her non-verbally. We started cooking together, playing mahjong, and gardening. Once her hearing had declined to the point where she could only understand me when I was speaking loudly right to her face, we started to use physical gestures for convenient, quick conversations. Yet a communication gap remained, and the limitations disconnected us.
Around the same time, my school was offering an introductory course in ASL. I decided to give it a try. I have always been fascinated with ASL, this language that looks almost like a dance, expressive and captivating–just remember last year’s Super Bowl halftime show with Justina Miles interpreting for Rihanna! But the thought of learning it priorly hadn’t crossed my mind. In the class, one of the first signs that I learned was “cat”: to sign it, I put my right thumb near my cheek with my hand facing forward, then pinched my thumb and index finger together as I moved my hand to the side. It felt like I was stroking invisible whiskers–natural and playful. But it also forced me to physically take up space in a way that I wasn’t used to. I had to push my shoulders back, stand upright, and make direct eye contact with the person before me, all while making demonstrative hand gestures in front of my face.
Since then, I’ve used ASL to talk with a soda stock boy in the Wegmans Food Court, who taught me the sign for orange soda, conversed with another artist on her unique perspective as a Deaf painter, and helped a family’s Deaf son to pick the best cupcake at my favorite bakery. Prior to learning ASL, I dreaded these social situations: speaking in front of others, or worse, directly to strangers. Any interaction that made me vulnerable to their judgment twisted my stomach. The twist carried upward to my head: my voice was soft and hesitant and my eyes locked downward. Learning ASL changed this–it taught me how to take up space in conversation to better connect with others–but also with myself.
For years now, educators and advocates involved with the Deaf community have been calling for teaching ASL more widely, for instance by making it part of the standard high school curriculum. Doing so would lessen the burden on Deaf individuals to cater to hearing society, create job opportunities for Deaf people, and set an example for how we can be more inclusive toward other marginalized groups, too. And yet, ASL is still rarely offered in high schools, despite the fact that learning sign language can also have vastly positive developmental effects on hearing individuals, especially on teens like myself, who experience what I will call social reluctance.
This is in part because, on top of its thousands of distinct hand gestures, a significant part of ASL grammar is made up of facial expressions and non-manual signs. Your facial expression, for example, must match the emotion you’re trying to convey, otherwise what you’re saying can be read as sarcasm. For yes/no questions, you need to raise your eyebrows, lean forward, and hold the last word you signed. Crucially, whenever you’re signing, eye contact is both essential and good etiquette. Like this, ASL forced me to be louder, more present, and more open in a non-verbal way.
It was, however, a rare opportunity for a high schooler like myself to receive: ASL is not typically offered among the standard high school language catalog, despite the fact that some half a million people in the United States use ASL as their native language. It’s not for a lack of demand either: ASL is the third most studied language in college, after Spanish and French.
But there are additional cognitive advantages to learning ASL that spoken languages like French or Spanish can’t necessarily provide. Research shows that ASL, because it’s a visual language, can also improve one’s ability to mentally picture things in space, like how your next Tetris piece will fit, and it helps activate spatial memory, which is the part of the brain responsible for remembering things like where you’ve parked your car.
The downstream effects of learning ASL have already washed up on my shores. I started introducing more three-dimensional elements in my own practice as a visual artist, stacking and cutting open canvases, or layering multiple drawings and textures like in a scrapbook.
Learning ASL bridges the Deaf community and the rest of us. Discrimination and societal pressures to assimilate into hearing culture, often through controversial means such as cochlear implants, meet Deaf people in many places. These interventions equate Deafness and medical disability — something that requries a cure — and burden people with hearing deficits with the job of proving why they’re like everyone else.
We live in polarized times; many people have shrunk from interpersonal interaction because there’s too much conflict. ASL can make connections that words can’t.
These days, communication with my grandmother feels simpler, smoother. She hasn’t learned ASL because the classes are conducted in English and Chinese has its own signs; there’s no universal sign language. The limits of speech don’t frustrate me anymore even if we still can’t communicate perfectly. A nod while we’re cooking or a simple hand motion during a game of mahjong says more than 1000 words.