Sound Switch Wonder
By Christine J. Ko & Owen Whang
Illustrated by Katie Crumpton
Turner Publishing
Owen Whang hit some tough multiple-choice questions the other day in the midst of a 90-minute ninth-grade final exam in his “Revolutionary Freedoms” history course. He decided to exercise a particular freedom of his own — removing the coils of his cochlear implants.
He tuned out the sounds around him. He focused on the questions.
Five minutes in, he put them back in to make sure he didn’t miss any important remarks from an adult in the room.
His teacher, meanwhile, wears a “Roger” — a device that helps transmit spoken words even more clearly to Owen than he would hear them with his cochlear implants (CIs). (When the teacher forgets to turn off the device, Owen does occasionally get to hear the occasional “bad word” or remark unintended for student consumption.)
Welcome to the world of an estimated 65,000 deaf kids in the U.S., who can navigate the auditory world thanks to CIs. And tune out noise when silence beckons.
Whang and his mom Christine J. Ko seek to help people understand what that world is like, in a new children’s picture book called Sound Switch Wonder (West Margin Press). Christine, a Yale dermatology and pathology professor who hosts a weekly podcast (“Girl Doc Survival Guide”) aimed at helping “young doctors navigate survival mode,” crafted a fictional account of a boy loosely based on Owen for the book. The reader follows Owen as he seeks to help others understand what it’s like to grow up with CIs. And to explain what, exactly, “no sound” is like.
Ko began the book when Owen was 8 and enlisted him in vetting the story to make sure it comported with his experience. What, exactly, is “no sound”? Owen read the book aloud, and he and his mom discussed it, during an appearance Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
A second part of the book features short write-ups by mom and son about their experiences through the journeys.
“Owen taught me that being deaf does not have to be a ‘lack of’ or a ‘can’t.’ Deafness, the absence of sound, can be awesome,” Ko writes.
In his note, Owen describes the advantages (being “able to hear the world around me” while being able to “turn sound off” when “I need a break from the noisy world”) along with the disadvantages. (“It’s hard to hear when two people are talking at the same time. And sometimes my CIs quit working.”)
Sound Switch Wonder’s climactic moment occurs in a pool. The fictional narrator discovers that the auditory vacuum underwater — when the splashing, laughing, giggles, lifeguard whistling disappear — could describe “no sound” he experiences, followed by the return to hearing all that upon surfacing above water.
Real-life Owen gave his mom the go-ahead to include that scene in the story. “I was like, 11, 12, so I didn’t truly understand what the book was going for” at the time, he said during the “Dateline New Haven” conversation. But in his personal experience, the underwater metaphor doesn’t capture the total absence of sound he experiences without his CIs: “You’ll still hear the water around you. So in my opinion, I don’t think there’s actually a true way to get complete silence the way I hear it.” He does believe “it’s a good ending,” given the challenge of fully communicating what he and others with CI experience every day.
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with Christine J. Ko and Owen Whang on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
