Just Listen—the Key to Connecting
Winnie Wong is a Hong Kong-born Canadian, fluent in three languages. She has an easy, warm smile, speaks softly but clearly, choosing her words precisely even in casual conversation. She has a quick, efficient, pragmatism that instantly disarms you, making you receptive to her suggestions.
She works with older adults in Richmond as a hearing instrument practitioner, helping to reconnect these people with the world that has started to fade away. Unlike most people who need to use hearing aids or other hearing assisted technologies for the first time but don’t, her patients tend to embrace the help.
"I am better at my job than many of my colleagues because I am working in my second language," Winnie said. "As a non-native speaker, I have to listen more carefully. I choose my words deliberately and I follow non-verbal clues more closely."
Her training reinforced skills she honed as a new Canadian. Hearing instrument practitioners learn to enunciate each word, speak slowly, and make eye-contact with her patients. Everything she does in her office reduces social isolation and anxiety. Nothing puts pressure on them to speak faster or…show more content… As hearing falters, we compensate. We avoid crowded places, take notes, read lips, send text messages, avoid situations that may cause embarrassment or miscommunication. Our world gets smaller as we increase our isolation and social anxiety. Even Helen Keller understood the role of hearing plays in society. She said said that the problems of deafness were deeper and more complex than blindness since deafness breaks one's connection with people, language, and emotion. Sandy Neuman, a reporter for the Toronto Sun is more blunt. "The world of hearing loss [...] is also deeply stigmatized," she writes, "and linked inextricably to an image best summed up in the insensitive, erroneous and archaic phrase ‘deaf and