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By noon the Piazza fills with hungry students eager for a break from morning classes, and for anyone walking through the doors, the noise level hits before the smell of food does.However, the loud, friendly chatter in the crowded dining room doesn’t bother Vincent Cheung and Alexandra Hellebrandt. Born deaf and hard of hearing, respectively, they speak using sign language.

The two friends met last spring semester in the same American Sign Language class and bonded over a shared interest in animation. Seated between Hellebrandt and Cheung is their mutual friend, Maverick Ly. Bespectacled and soft-spoken, Ly watches the conversation more than he participates, but he smiles and signs occasionally, making his friends grin.

Born prematurely, Ly suffered bouts of illness that seriously affected his health and left him hard of hearing. Although he learned to speak English as a toddler, he did not learn sign language until he was 12 years old. Like Hellebrandt, he wears a hearing aid in both ears.

Cheung, an animation major with startling pale blue eyes set against the dark canvas of his face, first found out he could neither hear nor speak when 5 years old. Being deaf has affected him in school. “I have been struggling with hearing class since I have to speak through my interpreter,” Cheung said by email.

The challenges, experiences, and lifestyles that Cheung and his friends share make up part of what they identify as the “deaf culture,” a subculture separate from hearing society.

Also an animation major, Hellebrandt notes that two aspects unify the deaf and hard of hearing.

“What the two have in common is that we [both] learn sign language for communication and cannot hear well,” Hellebrandt said.

As Cheung, Hellebrandt, and Ly demonstrate, members of the deaf community find security in their shared condition.

During an interview, Hellebrandt and Ly transition smoothly between translating the conversation for Cheung and speaking. Although Hellebrandt and Ly can hear and speak, they seem more comfortable using sign language with each other after Cheung leaves for class.

As with any subculture, members of the deaf and hard of hearing community are sensitive to how others perceive them.

Less reticent than her two friends, Hellebrandt points out Ly’s 12-year-old brother as a culprit for calling Ly’s deaf friend “silent” in a Facebook post.

“We don’t like the label ‘silent’ because it’s an insult,” Hellebrandt said. “[What] his brother did was rude.”

Ly views the situation differently, not knowing what to make of his 12-year-old brother.

“My brother usually hangs out with his [hearing] friends, so he doesn’t know deaf culture,” Ly said, visibly less upset than Hellenbrandt about his brother.

Having given up on convincing her family to learn sign language, Hellebrandt mostly communicates verbally at home.

“No matter how hard I try to encourage them to learn sign language, some of them have no motivation to learn,” Hellebrandt said.

She relates her situation at home to that of a movie scene in which a deaf man and his family eat dinner. As everyone talks and eats, the deaf man would ask his mother or father to translate the conversation, but the parent would simply brush off the request with a “I’ll tell you later.” When no one explains the discussion to the deaf man after the dinner, he feels left out.

One hearing individual who made an impact on Hellebrandt’s childhood was her fun-loving aunt Cherry, who had learned more ASL than the rest of the family. Although her aunt died from cancer while Hellebrandt was young, she still thinks fondly of her close relative.

“I was and still [am] proud of her for all the efforts she had done so that she [could] communicate not only [by] speaking but also signing with me,” Hellebrandt said.

Communicating in a largely hearing environment like the Piazza doesn’t trouble the three friends, however.

“Some of my hearing friends [have] known ASL and some don’t, but that’s okay as long as we’re friends, no matter what languages we’ve learned,” Hellebrandt said.

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