Korean-born author tells how hearing loss actually pushed her to speak four languages


Kim Su-rim was 6 years old when she first experienced a painful fact of life ― that she had lost her hearing and could do nothing about it.

However, she turned her irreversible disability into a weapon, mastering three foreign languages.

Now, the 40-year-old Seoul native works at Credit Suisse Securities in Tokyo as Legal & Compliance assistant vice president, speaking Japanese, English and Spanish on top of her native Korean.

Kim comfortably communicates with colleagues in Japanese and English, although she cannot take phone calls or attend group meetings. She doesn’t use sign language.

“Although I cannot hear, I am able to speak by remembering the sounds I heard before I became deaf. I understand what people say by reading their lips,” Kim told The Korea Herald.

“There is no problem in carrying out my daily duties at all.”

She recently published a Korean-language essay, “There’s Nothing to Give up in Life ― How I learned to speak four languages with a hearing disability,” after her original Japanese book became a hit in Japan in 2011.

According to her book, hearing impairment was not the only problem in her life. Time apart from her parents at a young age kept her lonely and insecure.

She was abandoned by her father at age 4. Until she graduated from elementary school, she was left to her grandmother because her mother went to Japan for business.

Kim moved to Japan when she was 12, following her mother.

However, the teenage girl was sent to a Japanese man called Ishibashi, who was an acquaintance of her mother, because her mother wanted her to be fully immersed in Japanese language and culture.

At Ishibashi’s home, she lip-read what his family were saying and kept trying to link the words with things.

“Hearing loss was already a very natural thing for me and I did not have the luxury to think whether I could do it or not. I was desperate to learn how to lip read and speak in Japanese,” Kim said.

“I had no time to feel frustrated. I just kept studying over and over again.”

This stable life, however, did not last.

Four years after she moved in to Ishibashi’s, Kim had to either live with his family forever as a foster daughter or move into her mother’s house.

Kim chose the latter. She lived in the mother’s two-story bar for three years of her high school life, which she now describes as the “second dark time” in her life.

Graduating from high school, she seriously thought about how she had to live the rest of her life.

The only conclusion she reached was mastering English. She thought it would be a strong weapon for her to survive in a highly competitive world.

Kim persuaded her mother to send her to Britain to study English. There, she started learning the alphabet at a language school and was able to engage in daily conversations within six months, she said.

Her teacher, Linda, allowed Kim to touch her lips, tongue, teeth and throat to demonstrate how each letter sounds.

She had to practice speaking “I” by repeating the word for hours, she recalls in the book.

“Learning English was the first opportunity for me to understand what ‘study’ was. It was the first time I felt joy in studying something,” Kim said.

“Six months might sound quite short but I studied English for 3,500 hours during that time. Is this short?” she asked.

In her mid-20s, she entered Oji Paper, Japan’s second-largest paper manufacturing company, and lived a pleasure-seeking life for four years.

That was when depression hit her.

She felt something was fundamentally wrong, could not fall asleep at night and found it hard to wake up in the morning for work.

She quit the company and did not come out of the house for 10 months.

“I had no will to live. My mother sent me three meals a day to my room. I was not able to think at all,” she recalled.

Then, one day, she saw sunlight coming into her room and came to think that maybe she had to wander around the world.

She traveled 30 countries for the following three years. It took all the money ― about 4 million yen ― that she had saved while working at Oji Paper.

“I had always thought that there was only one right path to happiness and I was afraid to deviate from the path. But during the travel, I realized there were many different shapes of happiness in life,” she said.

She picked up Spanish while traveling.

“I was in Spain for seven months and all the Spanish-speaking people I met were bright and lively. I mastered Spanish to become friends with Spanish people,” she said.

Strongly appealing her language skills and her traveling experiences, Kim was able to get a job at Goldman Sachs. She obtained an investment consulting certificate while working.

Kim is now a wife, and the mother of a 4-year-old daughter.

“Sometimes, I wish I could hear my daughter call me ‘Mom’ but that doesn’t make me sad. When I gaze her playing with her dad, I feel warm inside, full of happiness,” she said.

By Kim Yoon-mi (yoonmi@heraldcorp.com)