Now, it's my deep privilege
to introduce Apryl Chauhan
as our keynote speaker, she will be.
The title of her presentation is today,
today is These Roots Run Deep.
Apryl is a dedicated American Sign Language interpreter,
parent advocate for deaf children, and an outspoken
supporter of LGBTQ children
with a passion for advocacy
and a dynamic career that spans various domains.
She has spent the past 20 years deeply embedded in the deaf community,
family support, and community activism.
In addition to serving two terms as president of California's
Hands and Voices, she and her family were featured in
Andrew Solomon's best selling novel, Far from the tree.
The California Department of Education, Through Your Child's Eyes,
and if you are watching carefully, Disney World's national commercial,
There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. Apryl continues
to set an example of how a multicultural family
navigates deafness, gender identity, race and culture in our current times.
And I was looking over the chapter last night, in Far from the tree
where, April and her family is,
is talked
about in the chapter on deafness, and the author said, every deaf person
I met in California seemed to have been to parties and Apryl and Raj's house.
So, while I don't think she can fit
all of us here and her livingroom tonight,
this morning, what a great opportunity for us
to be a part of the experience and Apryl's life.
Why don't you help me
welcome to Apryl to the stage.
Hello.
[...]
Thank you. Good morning. Good morning.
Hello. Oh.
I want to recognize in
this moment, it’s very special.
I am a hearing mom.
And this plenary is just
and the plenary speaker. Tomorrow
the closing presenter is going to be
Paul Ogden.
Oh, my goodness.
He's a leader in deaf education,
he has been such an influence for my family.
I feel so very honored to be here.
Thank you.
I will be presenting today in spoken English.
The reason being this story is very personal.
It's very emotional.
And so please, please enjoy this presentation.
Thank you so much for having me here.
I'm sure
when you saw my name on the internet,
you're probably wondering who in the world is this?
I don't have any fancy credentials.
I don't work in the medical field.
I know nothing about audiology
beyond the banana.
I'm not a reseracher so
don't quote me on anything.
I am a parent.
This is us.
I have been coming to this conference for 16 years.
Just as a parent.
This conference has made a huge impact on my life.
And I really want to acknowledge the other parents
who traveled from all over the country for one reason.
Their children.
So how many parents do we have in the audience today?
Can you guys raise your hand?
Let's give a round of applause.
Over the
years at this conference, I have had those Oprah like
ah ha moments. Moments of inspiration and celebration.
I've also had moments of self-reflection,
and honestly, I've had many tears
filled moments at this conference. Why?
Because this all boils down to my being.
I think that all of us here today
recognize that conferences like
this can be a wonderful resource for families, for all of us.
In fact, we get together to share ideas.
We share resources.
We have these cool brainstorming moments in the lobby.
But often times when I attended this conference, there was something missing
and that was a reflection of my family
and more importantly, of my child.
Because after the conference,
when I would get back on the airplane, heading back to California,
it was just me, my husband and our family,
and I had to figure this whole thing out on my own.
This is us.
A typical family
and the other reason why I'm here today.
For families like mine and like my son,
we are a family that's certainly benefited from everything that we learned
from language, communication, technology, education and culture.
These were great, wonderful resources.
But I'm a black woman, born in Los Angeles, married to an Indian man
who was born in London and raised in Georgia.
And together we are raising
three beautiful multicultural children.
But we're still the family that's sitting in your office.
We're still the family that is in your classroom
and attending your events.
And we are a family of so much more than just those parents of that deaf child.
I believe that the
definition provided by the National Center on Parent, Family
and Community Engagement best describes family culture.
It is a complex
system that is influenced
by many factors like tradition,
country of origin, geographic
regions, ethnic identities,
cultural groups, community, sexual orientation,
gender identity, education, personal choices,
and [...] language.
This is just a taste of my family.
Even if you notice
my husband's bobble as being an East Indian
with Hindu and Muslim culture combined,
that in of itself is very deep.
But again, we are a typical American family,
and in 2024, we can no longer take
a passive approach to family culture.
The world around us is changing and evolving.
Gen Z is the most racially
and ethnically diverse generation in the U.S.
history.
They also have access
to information and resources about culture, race, language, community,
and traditions of the world in a way that, no other
generation before has had.
As professionals and parents,
we've arrived at this moment
when we have to be culturally relevant.
I'll let you in on a little secret.
The families that you work with,
they have the tools.
They have the tools to support the success of their child.
I believe that the reason why my deaf son is so live out loud,
vibrant, out there doing his thing is because of the resources
that I learned at conferences like this, my connections to professionals,
my connections to the deaf community,
but also because of our family's deep connections to our roots.
So this
morning, I'm just going to share with you my personal story,
and I hope that it will plant a seed in your mind
so that you'll start incorporating your own story into your work,
as well as the family's story.
First, I want to let you know that
I did ask Zee for permission to share this photos and his stories.
He's an adult now, which means that his story
is no longer just mine to tell.
Zee was born in Los Angeles at a private hospital
that did not have the newborn hearing screening.
He was not identified as deaf until the age of two.
My response?
I need to learn.
I need to study.
I need to obtain as much information as possible.
My husband's response.
I need to work harder.
I need to make more money.
And I need to do whatever it takes to take on this challenge.
The first ENT that we saw
after Zee was identified as deaf
said he has a profound bilateral sensorineural, hearing loss.
And you can never change and you'll never know the reason why.
And then he walked right out of the room.
Needless to say,
we did not return to that kind of institute.
I suspect that this doctor
had interacted with many parents who stunned and shocked,
and peppered him with questions, and he had his rapid fire response.
But we were young parents,
everything in this moment was a first for us.
Our curiosity to understand our child was valid.
Why is my child deaf? Will he always be deaf?
Did I do something to cause this?
I don't understand this.
When we're faced with the unexpected
and when we are, the answers are scarce.
Usually we turn to our inmediate resource of support, right?
Our family and our friends.
And we also look back at our past for answers.
Working as a parent leader in California, I have the privilege of engaging
with parents from multiple cultures, languages, races, religions.
And I remember working with another mother of color,
an educated, professional woman, who said to me, do you think he's deaf
because I walked under a full moon in my third trimester?
She did not need me to give her an answer.
She just needed to say the words out loud.
They were words that she was hearing from her family,
from the in-laws, the grandparents.
And she just needed someone to listen.
So, in response
I shared my own ancestral superstitions that I heard about my child,
and then we laughed about it
and we got to work.
I validated her desire to find an answer
just by listening and being present for her.
In many cultures, superstitions are practiced
as a way of carrying on tradition
and preserving that culture,
they are deeply ingrained beliefs and no matter how fantastical some may be,
they tend to linger in the back of our minds.
In fact, my husband,
who is a brilliant entrepreneur, had to walk down his own
path of his beliefs when our son was identified as deaf,
like the many immigrant families who moved to America.
My husband's family placed an emphasis on assimilation.
He did not celebrate Hindu holidays.
His parents did not raise his children to speak any other language
other than English, and althouh both parents
were fluid in multiple languages.
They practiced different religions.
Their idea of the American Dream
was to distance themselves from anything foreign.
My husband
went on to become a very educated, charismatic, outgoing,
hard working man who is also a really great dancer.
[...]
But this man
still had to walk down his path, and his first response
was to find an Indian Guru.
So we found an Indian Guru in Los Angeles,
and we had a spiritual session.
I'm not going to go into the stories of karma
and past lives, but did it do us any harm?
Never.
That is what my husband needed to do
for him to start that process of understanding
the unexpected.
It's important to remember that parents are juggling
not just the news of having a deaf child, but also how to navigate this world.
Many families are coming from a place with strong
cultural beliefs about language and disability.
So in an
ideal world, we would connect these families with someone
who represented that culture right?
But we know that is not always possible.
Parents sometimes have to get down and dirty,
roll up our sleeves, dig in deep into our own past,
into our own family, to find the resources and the resilience.
Over the years, our family we cultivated
this tribe of people deaf, two-spirit,
black, queer professionals, parents.
We got uncomfortable
to create our own community.
But no matter what,
I know that my own family tree
carries a wealth
of resources for our family to tap into.
We have multiple citizenships in this family.
In the spring of 2008, writer Andrew Solomon sat in our living room
interviewing my husband and I about our experience of raising a deaf child.
In this book,
Solomon focuses on families that navigate life with children
that are unique, and different and again unexpected.
I recently reread our chapter, and I realized all those years ago
that Solomon recognized how culture and our lived experiences
as people of color shaped the choices that we made for our deaf child.
During the interview, Andrew wonder why I was so comfortable
with the deaf community.
If you read the book, you'll see
my husband said
I grew up in a small town in Georgia where the KKK marched on weekends.
The black kids and the white kids sat at separate,
separate dinner table, lunch tables.
So deaf culture, black culture, Indian
youth get flexible.
I also shared how I was an activist as a kid
and at my high school in Los Angeles.
I had many queer friends, and we set up the first gay
and lesbian club in LAUSD.
As parents of deaf and hard
of hearing children, we tend to look to others for examples.
And yes, we should celebrate other parents.
We should celebrate deaf leaders, artists, trailblazers.
But how often do we look back at our own story
and we realize that we have what it takes
to do this job and to do it well?
Now, 16 years since the interview with Andrew Solomon,
I realized that yes, my child is not at all what we expected.
He's unique from every other person in our family
but the tree
that that odd apple fell from has deep,
strong roots.
Writer and feminist Bell Hooks said
if we give our children sound self love,
they will be able to deal with whatever life puts in front of them.
And this is a photo that a friend of mine captured of Zee and I first visit
to the Rochester Institute of Technology, and we were having a discussion
about all the possibilities that lay ahead for Zee.
At the same time that
it was important for me to tour the school,
it was just as important for me to take Zee to the Mount Hope Cemetery
so that we could stand in front of Frederick Douglass gravesite.
This was a man
enslaved from birth,
who went on to become the most iconic
civil rights leader in history,
a man who said things like, it's easier
to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Without a struggle, there can be no progress.
The soul that is within me,
no man can degrade.
My goal as a black mother is to make sure
that my children know that they are perfect as is.
Yes, that includes my deaf son.
Each of them.
They have a place in this world.
And within the rich tapestry of black culture, their lives,
lessons of resilience, perseverance, identity and community.
Tapping into these roots can be simple.
It can even happen over homework at the kitchen table.
Like many DHH children homework
was a struggle,
especially when it came to reading and writing.
But too often, parents are exposed
to a deficit mindset when it comes to language for their children.
Yes, learning a language is a challenge.
But when there's such emphasis on what they can't do and not enough
on the abilities that they do have, it harms both the parent and the child.
I cannot tell you the amount of hours that I put in educating myself
on how to support Zee and his language.
But it wasn't until I looked back
at my relationship with language that some things started to click.
For many of us who grew up in a black home,
we got to witness our parents manipulate
and willed language like a weapon.
I knew just by the way my mother answered
the phone who was on the other end?
If they were white, if they were a family member,
a friend, and bill collector, a person of authority.
It was all in the tone of her voice.
In our culture, we call this code switching and honestly,
that could have a presentation all of its own,
but when I looked back at how I grew up surrounded by so many different
forms of English, I started to reflect on the things that my mother told me.
This was a woman who loved Black American history,
and she taught me about African American vernacular
and the way that enslaved black spoke, and a dialect that was considered
ignorant
when in fact these were people
coming from different worlds and different cultures, different religions
and languages, and they were just trying to adapt and survive.
As Zee was learning English and we were learning ASL,
I decided to change up the game.
A simple shift from that deficit
mindset to an asset mindset.
It was life changing for us.
We got this.
My husband calls his family in Pakistan.
and stumbles his way through Urdu.
My sister is currently learning Blackfeet language.
My father-in-law showed our children how to write their names in Sanskrit.
My two hearing children used ASL before English.
We are a language rich family.
So why have I been isolating my child
in his struggle to learn language?
Our so called broken English
became jazz, hip hop, rock n roll.
The contribution of African American vernacular continues every day.
Just as for kids, whether they speak a language or they sign a language
they know words and phrases that came from the black community.
In fact, Merriam Webster says
signs of a healthy language include words
being created, words being borrowed from other languages,
and new meanings, [...] given to existing words.
So in our homework sessions,
I started to tell my son, hey,
English is your second language, not the first.
That means you're going to have to check the grammar.
You're going to have to edit your words, and you have to work a little bit harder
when you want to express yourself in this language.
But you never have to feel bad about how you use this language.
Our family, our history,
and even our shared culture experiences can be assets to DHH children.
Changing my approach to language
alleviated the pressure
and the weight of all the statistics about deaf and hard of hearing children.
It was weighing us both down.
However, language
was only one part of our journey.
At the same time
that my husband and I were navigating our son's deafness
with speech therapy, hearing aids, family park days, deaf events.
We were also witnessing our child's gender come into being.
The question I often get asked is
when did you know your son was transgender?
My answer
always.
And in fact, there are many,
many people in this audience right now who walked that path with me.
And watched Zee grow up.
And I bet if I asked any of you out there, you would say the same.
Zee has always been Zee.
Long before he
had the signs or the words to clearly express himself,
he made it crystal clear he would never wear a dress.
Hated the puffy sleeves on his school uniform
and preferred to play Spider-Man than Barbie.
During one of our earliest IEP meetings,
Zee's kindergarten
DHH teachers
sat down with me and showed me Zee's All About Me poster.
You know that poster that everybody makes
where he clearly showed himself
as a little boy with spiky hair.
Those teachers
just gave me food for thought.
Something to keep in the back of my mind.
In no way did they make that experience negative.
In fact, years later,
when Zee was ready to share himself with the rest of the world,
those two teachers were some of the first people I contacted.
And I thanked them
from giving my son a space at such an early age
just to be who he was without judgment.
Years later,
Zee was ready.
He was ready to show himself to the world, and he decided he was going to do this,
oh, just a couple of months before graduating high school.
The reason
why is because he had just witnessed
a deaf transgender man doing a presentation.
I want you to think about this.
My husband and I and our friends our family,
we have always accepted Zee as is.
He always had a safe space to be who he was.
But it wasn't until he saw a reflection of himself
in another deaf transgender person
that he found the courage to be himself.
That representation is incredibly powerful,
and it may
look like our path here was very smooth and easy,
I’m going to tell you, it wasn’t.
It's because of my experiences here at conferences like this,
and my years of parent to parent support that, I knew,
okay.
We're really deep into this experience with our child, but I still need support.
And so I started to seek out the LGBTQ community, and I started to find
parents who were also raising transgender children.
And when I got into those parent groups, let me tell you,
I was shocked in the best way by how comfortable
and familiar it was.
They were just like us
parents, just trying to understand their children
and do right by them.
There were parents that also were struggling
with family tradition and ideas and superstitions as well.
I met a mother who wanted to blame herself
because she had always been a tomboy.
She always wore her hair short, never wore dresses,
and she had gone against her family traditions for years.
I met a father who had to cut ties with his own parents
because they refused to accept his child.
Just like that moment in the
audiologists office when I learned about Zee’s deafness,
I knew that I needed to seek out those parents
who were sharing this journey.
Parents had the same kind of questions that we have here today.
How do I explain who my child is.
How do I make the choices for my child's life?
We live in a rural area.
Where do I find the resources and support?
Their journey was so similar
that it really made an impact on me.
Parents are just parents.
We're all wanting the best for our children.
However, once again, as I'm sitting in this room,
I'm still the only black mother raising
a bipoc, deaf, transgender child.
My journey included
finding not only the right pediatrician
and therapist, but also the right interpreter.
It's not easy.
My journey included
sitting down with world renowned
activists who had, never engaged with a deaf person.
My journey included fighting for language access
in a black transgender support group.
Pro-active parents.
Parents who want the best for their children.
Parents who have the same goal.
Wanting to understand their child and creating safe spaces.
That's who we are.
And honestly, I wish that people who are misinformed
about transgender children could sit in on those meetings.
The experience for me personally,
was a struggle.
No matter how much I accepted my child,
I knew that his journey was going to be unique.
This time,
there was a lot of fear and I laugh when
I looked back on my fear, used to be him learning to read and write.
And now my fear
is of him walking into public restrooms.
I'm struggling under the weight of all the statistics
of violence against black and brown transgender people.
And I was searching
for the right connection to someone who understood what it meant
to have both pride and fear
for your child at the same time.
I am still searching
for just the right connection.
But in the meantime,
I dig in to myself, to my family,
and to my roots.
I'm sure that many of you know
this word Sankofa.
Sankofa is a word from the Akan people in Ghana, and it means go back and fetch it.
Another translation might be
It's not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.
The symbol of Sankofa is a bird with its feet
firmly planted forward and its head turned back.
This isn't about being stuck in the past,
because the Akan people believe that there must be movement, forward movement,
but that you can tap into the past for the knowledge
and that it should never be forgotten.
Long before I knew what Sankofa was, as a black person living in America.
I was raised to look back for the knowledge that I needed to move forward.
And Sankofa has always been
a part of our family.
The son of Bob Marley said
I was born by myself.
But I carry the spirits, the blood of my father,
mother and my ancestors.
So, I am really never alone.
My identity is through that line.
When I go back and fetch it,
I find the lessons of my family.
My father was a black cowboy
who grew up in Wyoming.
His parents were country western singers.
He joined the military as soon as he could and was stationed in England,
where he found a sense of freedom
to be himself in a way that he would never find in America.
When he came back to the U.S., he moved to California
and made his way to the movie industry, eventually breaking the color lines
by becoming the first black sound engineer
for 20th Century Fox Studios.
I can proudly say that my dad
worked on Star Wars,
Close Encounters, Return of the Jedi and many great movies.
When I go back and fetch it, I see my mother,
a fair skinned, red haired black woman
whose first painful experience of racism happened at the age of four.
This is a woman who bravely moved on her own
at the age of 19 to California, searching for a more inclusive community.
She attended parties in San Francisco where the Black Panther Party would come in.
like celebrities.
She went to seances in old Hollywood
mansions with a young unknown and Jack Nicholson.
And my mother's favorite stories,
including her time working at MGM Studios,
where a young Elvis used to go out of his way
to hang out with the black employees during his lunch breaks.
I can also look back at my husband's family,
a family who moved from India to England and then to the southern United States.
Knowing no one.
They have the kind of resilience that you only find in immigrant families
willing to move to another country
to improve the live of their family,
to adopt a new culture and new language. They will always set
the standard for us to do whatever is needed for our family and our kids.
And I also see myself as a nine year old girl
moving from Inglewood, California to the oh my God
San Fernando Valley
in the 1980s.
I had to defend not only my hair,
my skin tone, but also the way that I talked.
The black people would call me an Oreo,
and the white people would tell me that I was too black.
At the very heart of our family story is being other,
knowing that we belong in the room no matter what.
Representing ourselves for ourselves.
Again,
being deaf and hard of hearing is only part
of our children's identity.
It's easy to see how
we get caught up in hearing levels, language choices, technology, education
and before you know it, your child seems foreign to you.
Sometimes I think in our pursuit to do right by our children.
We create more distance between the family and the child.
I want my children to know where they come from
so that they can see their way forward.
You will see here
a photo of my great grandfather, James Robert Gordon,
that we recently found through Ancestry.com.
The boy next to him is Zee.
You cannot tell me that this child does not belong
to this family.
Zee recently did a DNA test
because he wanted to know more about himself and about his culture.
And the more that he learned, the more he felt that he belonged
not just to us, but to the world.
Jamaican activist
and national hero Marcus Garvey famously said a people without knowledge
of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree
without roots.
So how do we cultivate roots?
How do we make sure
that our DHH children are woven into the fabric of our families?
Well, it begins with embracing
the similarities instead of solely focusing on our differences.
We welcomed the deaf community and ASL into our family
because we understood that it was just another culture
that made us who we are.
Do your own children know your family's journey?
Do they know where their own name is from?
Have you shared the family photos?
Have you reached out to family living in other countries?
We have all the technology at our fingertips that it's all possible.
How much of your story have you shared with your children?
You can still share the music that you loved,
the movies, in fact, before my son left for college.
I made it a mission to have weekly movie nights so that he could see
every single one of my favorite childhood movies, like The Lost Boys,
16 Candles, Labyrinth.
And did you know
that on YouTube you can find many,
many high school prom and graduation videos from the 80s and 90s?
I kid you not.
I was able to show my children my prom night online.
There are library events, cultural festivals, restaurants, cooking shows.
You don't have to be skilled in language
to share your family recipes.
If I could go back and speak to myself sitting out there
in that audience 16 years ago,
pregnant with my youngest child,
I would tell her
it's going to be better than okay.
Not only are you doing the right thing
by gathering all the resources, taking advantage of everything
that's available to you, making connections
to parents, professionals in the deaf community.
But girl,
no matter what happens,
you have what it takes to raise a successful child.
You've been through some things in your own life.
You have the experience and the resilience
and the strength to do this and to do it well.
In fact, if I went back
and talked to my younger self, I would tell her to dream bigger.
This is my baby Zee.
Zee now identifies as an Afro Asian deaf man.
He has made a name for himself
in the deaf community as a filmmaker and editor.
He attended RIT and the Franke Honors Program in Denmark,
and he now lives in Germany.
I'm happy to say
that Zee was just accepted to the School of Film
at Ben University in Berlin, and he will be the first deaf
student.
My son is a Globetrotter.
He has traveled to 17 different countries.
He went from feeling the weight
of learning language to loving language.
He knows international Sign language and German sign language,
and he can make his way comfortably with reading Danish, French and German.
He has navigated public transportation
in numerous countries, medical situations, education,
hiring interpreters, and the visa process all on his own,
as well as going to Octoberfest
and [...] Italy.
Currently, he's living a digital nomad life.
By working for a tech company based in the United States, where he is
also the only deaf employee, and more recently,
he was hired by the renowned deaf artist Christine
Son and Kim.
My child comes from strong roots.
He knows our history.
He knows that he's a part of it.
And now he gets to write his own chapters full of adventure
and breaking barriers.
Islamic
poet Rumi says maybe he was searching
among the branches for what only appears in roots.
I know that every person in this room
wants to see deaf and hard of hearing children succeed.
We attend this congress year after year, and others like it
to share our ideas, to brainstorm, to learn from one another.
So when you go back to your work, your office and your schools,
don't just involve parents that you're working with,
but empower them to go
out of your way, become uncomfortable.
Tap into your own story.
There's still work to do, but in this time we can show up.
We have the luxury of being who we are.
Some who argue when you sit down at the table with those parents,
and how are you encouraging them
to tap into their own family's culture?
Above all.
We should encourage families to look inward,
to know that they have what it takes
to support their child,
and we should support the efforts
to bring those deaf and hard of hearing children home.
Thank you.