Tan Ting was born in 1992 into an ordinary farming family in the remote Daliang Mountains of Sichuan, China. When she was eight years old, she lost her hearing because of an illness. Her childhood changed overnight. She could no longer hear the voices around her and was forced to leave school. While other children carried their schoolbags to class, Tan could only watch them from home.
Her parents refused to give up on her. They spent years taking her to different hospitals, using almost all of their savings in the hope that she could hear again. When Tan was 13, they finally found a special education school in Xichang that was willing to accept her. For Tan, returning to school felt like being given a second chance at life.
She knew she had fallen far behind her classmates, so she worked hard to catch up. She studied whenever she had the chance, sometimes reading under a blanket with a flashlight after her classmates had gone to sleep. Even when she was sick and receiving an IV, she continued studying. Her determination eventually paid off. She progressed rapidly through school and, in 2013, was admitted to Chongqing Normal University, where she studied special education.
At first, Tan planned to become a special education teacher. Her career path changed after she graduated in 2017 and came across a recruitment notice from Tang Shuai, a lawyer who had been providing legal services to deaf people.
Tang was born into a deaf family and had learned sign language from an early age. After becoming a lawyer, he began working extensively on cases involving deaf people. He found that many deaf people faced serious barriers when dealing with the legal system. The problem was not simply a lack of legal knowledge. The natural sign language used by many deaf people could be very different from the formal language used in legal documents and courtrooms. Misunderstandings could therefore have serious consequences.
Tang wanted to train deaf people who understood both sign language and the law. Tan joined his law firm as a deaf assistant. At first, she mainly handled basic tasks such as organizing documents and receiving visitors. But as she encountered more deaf people seeking legal help, she gradually realized how large their unmet legal needs were.
Many of the people who came to the firm did not know what their legal rights were or how to protect them. Some were dealing with domestic violence or marriage disputes. Others had been deceived or defrauded. Tan often found that before she could address a legal problem, she first had to explain the basic legal concepts to the person seeking help.
This convinced her to study law herself. The challenge was enormous. Tan had no formal legal education, and legal textbooks were filled with unfamiliar terminology. Many online law lectures had no subtitles, making them difficult for her to follow. She relied on speech-to-text software, dictionaries, reference materials and help from her colleagues. She studied before work, after work and during every spare moment she could find.
She took the national legal qualification examination twice and failed both times, missing the required score by 10 points the first time and four points the second. She refused to stop.
In 2020, shortly before her third examination, Tan received devastating news. Her mother was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Tan wanted to stay with her, but her mother insisted that she take the examination. Her mother told her that she should live for herself as well.
Tan eventually went to the examination. She answered the questions while fighting back tears, knowing that every minute away from her mother was a minute she could not spend at her side. This time, she passed.
Tan became the first deaf person in China publicly reported to have passed the national legal qualification examination. For her, however, passing the examination was not the end of the journey. It brought another question: how could she actually serve deaf clients in a legal system designed primarily for hearing people?
Because of the communication barriers involved in courtroom proceedings, Tan could not simply work in exactly the same way as a conventional courtroom lawyer. Instead, she and Tang focused much of their attention on legal consultation and public legal education for deaf people.
Tan began receiving requests for help from across the country. Some people traveled long distances to meet her. Others contacted her through video calls and social media. A consultation that might take a short time with a hearing client could take three times as long or even longer when sign language communication was involved.
She gradually became a bridge between deaf people and the legal system. She helped clients understand their situations, explained what the law required and showed them what options were available. In many cases, the first step was simply helping people understand what the law meant.
Tan also began using short videos and livestreams to provide legal education. She explained everyday legal issues such as divorce, unpaid debts and fraud through sign language. At the same time, she used her platform to introduce hearing audiences to the experiences and communication patterns of deaf people.
She also decided to relearn how to speak. After losing her hearing as a child, she had gradually stopped speaking because she could no longer hear her own voice. To improve her communication with hearing people, she used speech-recognition software to check her pronunciation. She repeated individual sentences again and again, sometimes dozens of times, until the software could recognize them correctly. Even a simple sentence such as “Nice to meet you” took months of practice.
The effort gradually changed her daily life. Today, Tan can communicate using both sign language and spoken language, allowing her to interact with a wider range of people.
Her work has also shown her that one person cannot solve the shortage of legal services available to deaf people. She hopes more professionals will learn about deaf communities and develop the ability to communicate with them. She believes that deaf people need not only lawyers who understand the law, but also legal professionals who understand their language, culture and everyday experiences.
In 2021, Tan began teaching at Southwest University of Political Science and Law. She hopes to help train a new generation of professionals who can provide legal services to deaf people.
Tan’s journey began in a rural village in the Daliang Mountains, where losing her hearing forced her to leave school and made her feel isolated from the world around her. Years later, she entered university, learned law from scratch, failed the legal examination twice and finally passed it on her third attempt.
She has continued moving forward through education, legal work, public legal education and teaching. Her goal is no longer simply to prove what one deaf person can achieve. She wants to help create a future in which deaf people can understand the law, seek legal assistance and participate more fully in society.
For Tan, the law is another language that needs to be made accessible. Through her hands, her words and the knowledge she has worked so hard to acquire, she is trying to bring that language to people who have too often been left outside the conversation.
Source: people cctv, sohu, jfdaily
