Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg

me for stray hairs, unnoticed stains, and scuffed shoe leather, we descended in the elevator to the ground floor. After a final careful look at each of us, my father pushed open the heavy ornate glass lobby door, and we exited, linked together in a line, my parents arm in arm at the center, I holding my father’s hand, my brother holding my mother’s hand, all heading toward Kings Highway. As we walked up our block, eyes straight ahead, we would be closely watched by every one of our neighbors, who behind my back made their unfailingly unchanged comments: “Considering they’re deaf-mutes, they dress well.” “See how nice the deafies dress their boys.” “The father’s a deaf-mute, but he has a good job.” “The dummies are taking their kids to the ‘Chinks.’”
    This last was, sadly, an all-too-common term in our neighborhood, generally used by us Jews, the same people who were appalled when the Irish in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn called them “Yids.” And as if that were not irony enough, even to my young ears, these were the same people who publicly objected to the treatment the Chinese had experienced in Manchuria at the hands, and bayonets, of Japanese soldiers, who were of course known as “Japs.” Anyway, I reasoned, in some small though misguided attempt at rationalization, this circle of unthinking prejudice was large and inclusive; no one was immune. The Irish and the Jews called the Polish “Polacks” the Polish called the Italians “Wops” the Italians called the Irish “Micks” and the Irish called the Chinese “Chinks.” Thus the circle of casual discrimination was complete.
    What the Chinese called all of us, I had no idea.
    As for the neighbors’ use of the term “dummies,” I had heard it from an early age, but it seemed somehow worse to me than the ethnic epithets because those words were group names, whereas “dummy” was personal; it referred specifically to the only deaf people the neighbors knew, my father and my mother. Nonetheless I was numb, if only from constant exposure to it, and did not allow it to interfere with my enjoyment of our monthly family outing.
    The Chinese restaurant was located on the ground floor of a row of connected two-story wooden buildings. The street-level spaces were all filled with shops: bakery, poultry, hardware, vegetable, pharmacy, barber, beauty, and of course the neighborhood candy store.
    As far as I was concerned, the highlight of this eating-out ritual was the sight of my father conversing in broken gestures with our Chinese waiter, while he in turn responded in broken English. Both of them studiously navigated their way through the dense, food-stained menu, filled with columns of incomprehensible Chinese characters, alongside garbled English translations. The waiter screamed good-naturedly at my father the contents of the day’s specialty of the house, as if sheer volume alone could get my father to hear the description of that delicacy. My father would just as loudly scream his gestures of approval right back at the waiter. Their heads nodding in perfect smiling agreement during this astonishing performance, neither one of them had any idea what the other was saying.
    As for me, what would otherwise have been a situation of stinging embarrassment was rendered funny, as the other diners were regulars and were quite used to this scene. It was clear to me that they were staring at our table not in disgust but in tolerant amusement. I would settle for that.
    One Saturday we had our usual Chinese lunch, beginning with the specialty of the house (it was always the same, month after month), an inedible, bone-laden, soggy bleached white fish with the most amazing pair of bulging sightless eyes staring at me in mute accusation. This was followed by two choices from column A (always the same choices, month after month) and one from column B (ditto), washed down with an undrinkable, thinly colored green liquid filled with floating black