Jiang Mengnan, a 2018 doctoral student at Tsinghua School of Life Sciences
The girl who was admitted to Tsinghua University by reading lips "touched China"
On the evening of March 3, the list of 2021 Touching China Persons of the Year was announced.
One of them is Jiang Mengnan, a 2018 doctoral student at Tsinghua School of Life Sciences.
This girl from the Yao minority town of Mangshan, Hunan, who became deaf at the age of half a year, created a "miracle" in the eyes of the world: she learned "listening" and "speaking" by reading lip language since she was a child. He became the only student in his hometown and small town who was admitted to a key university in recent years and eventually went to Tsinghua University to study for a doctorate.
Today, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in bioinformatics with the goal of solving the problems of life and health.
My parents don't give up on me
I won't let go
When he was half a year old, Jiang Mengnan suffered from severe neurological deafness in both ears due to drugs.
In the 1990s, her hearing condition was widely considered impossible to speak, so doctors advised her parents to take her to a school for the deaf.
However, she has a pair of parents who never gave up on her.
As teachers, they let their daughters feel the vibration of the sound by touching their Adam's apple, and feel the exhaled air with their hands.
Many methods are created by the couple, such as the mother holding her in front of a mirror and talking to her in the back, so that she can see the shape of her mother's mouth and her own.
The mother later obtained the qualification certificate for the first special education teacher of speech rehabilitation for deaf children in Yizhang County, Hubei Province.
It takes thousands of repetitions for each syllable to form muscle memory and master it.
But his parents taught Jiang Mengnan to speak more clearly and to distinguish between "flower" and "ha".
Jiang Mengnan even learned the dialect Yizhang dialect, and also learned to distinguish the four tones.
Later, she mastered a legendary stunt: lip reading.
Jiang Mengnan said: "My parents gave me a very special gift." Her parents never gave up on Jiang Mengnan, and she "can't let go of her demands".
Before getting a cochlear implant at the age of 26, she set the alarm on her mobile phone to vibrate every day during her studies, and held her phone all night so that she could wake up the next morning by vibrating.
According to Wang Yanwei, her roommate when she was a master student at Jilin University, Jiang Mengnan was always the first to get up in the dormitory, and she was almost never seen late.
Love beauty and fitness
Never pretend to be weak
With several times the efforts of his peers, Jiang Mengnan was admitted to the No. 6 Middle School of Chenzhou City with the second place in the city after "auditing" the ordinary elementary school in his hometown.
The 12-year-old girl took the 32-hour train to Chenzhou by herself and started an independent life in a boarding middle school.
In the college entrance examination 6 years later, her score passed the local first line, but she felt that she did not perform well, and insisted on repeating for one year.
In the second year, she was admitted to Jilin University majoring in pharmacy with honors, and she continued to study computer-aided drug design at Jilin University for her master's degree, which was the alma mater of her idol Zhang Haidi.
In 2018, he passed the doctoral interview of the School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University, and his research direction is immune-related machine learning modeling topics.
The hardships along the way, only her parents know.
The advice his parents gave to Jiang Mengnan was: not being able to hear is an established fact.
Jiang Mengnan himself said: "I have never put myself in the position of a weak person because I can't hear. I often tell others, don't lower the requirements and standards of me because I can't hear." Such a self He asked her to give up CET 6 and still get more than 500 points in the listening test, let her keep on exercising for two years, and let her keep repeating one year to be admitted to a key university until she was admitted to Tsinghua University.
In life, Jiang Mengnan also insisted not to identify himself as a vulnerable group.
She loves beauty, she often spends 5 minutes in the morning putting on makeup, and she also advises on the dresses of the girls in the dormitory; she often lifts weights in the gym, and is dubbed by her friends as a "hackboy"; when friends talk to her, she will move Be on the bench, put on myopia glasses, concentrate on "watching" roommates' complaints, and then explain and amuse them for them; when the students encounter difficulties in the experiment, she still finds time to help organize the literature until midnight.
After wearing a cochlear implant at an "advanced age" at the age of 26, new difficulties followed: in order to establish the connection between the sound she heard in the cochlea and the text, she needed continuous listening training, plus the heavy academic pressure of Tsinghua University , she has opened a new "overcoming difficulty mode".
Promote accessibility in Tsinghua Park
Practice the concept of popularization
In 2020, Jiang Mengnan was elected as the fifth president of the Tsinghua University Student Accessibility Development Research Association.
The founder of this association is her senior, Yi Xiaoyuan, who has been in a wheelchair due to severe illness since childhood, and just graduated from Tsinghua with a doctorate in computer science last year.
In this association, Jiang Mengnan saw Tsinghua's support and emphasis on "barrier-free".
After learning about the needs of students with disabilities, various departments of the school made great efforts to renovate the dormitory and teaching buildings without barriers; teachers from the Barrier-Free Development Institute ran around, and students from the association also actively participated.
In the three years of Tsinghua University, apart from the heavy academic and scientific research, she insisted on working with teachers and classmates to popularize the concept of accessibility to the public, teachers and students inside and outside the school, and promote the construction of a barrier-free environment on campus.
In 2018, she attended and spoke at the International Conference on Accessibility Development as a student representative.
In 2019, she went to remote areas to participate in educational public welfare projects, answering questions and providing help for local students.
In 2020, after she was elected as the president of the association, she drafted and released the initiative of "Being a "Barrier-free World" messenger with members of the association, and organized various activities such as accessibility forums, accessibility concept experiences, etc., to popularize the concept of accessibility to the public. .
Text / Yuan Wenhuan, correspondent of our reporter Lei Jia
Photo courtesy/Tsinghua University