In 1995, Peking Union Medical College Hospital conducted China's first cochlear implantation surgery on an adult man who had lost his hearing due to drug poisoning nine years earlier. Through implanting the biomedical device, which bypassed damaged portions of the ear and directly stimulated the auditory nerve, the man regained his hearing.

While starting a new life for the man, the operation shed light on a new cause for 51-year-old Cui Weilan, then a teacher at Beijing No.4 School for the Deaf. She regarded it as a brand new rehabilitation approach for her students, especially for those whose hearing damage was too advanced for a hearing aid to work.

She observed the first miracle created by a cochlear implant on one of her former students. The deaf boy moved with his family to Australia in the late 1980s and had cochlear implant surgery there. In 1989, Cui happened to see a videotape of the boy, whose hearing recovery had been so good that he didn't need to lip-read any more to speak with his mother.

Amazed by the effects, Cui tried her best to collect as much information as possible on cochlear implants in her spare time. This led her to become a pioneering post-implantation therapist, helping to build or rebuild the sense of hearing for recipients of the surgery once it was introduced to China.

In 1999, when Cui retired after teaching deaf children for 35 years, she gave up on the idea of an idle retirement life and opened a cochlear implant rehabilitation school in Xicheng District of downtown Beijing. Now, together with 55 teachers, she is giving speech-language therapy to 155 students, most of whom either use a hearing aid or have a cochlear implant.

Hearing through a cochlear implant is different from normal hearing and takes time to learn or relearn. While the process is easier for adults who have lost their hearing later in life since they are able to associate the signal provided by an implant with sounds they remember, for pre-lingual deaf children who have received a cochlear implant they can acquire hearing but cannot understand languages or communicate effectively without intensive pre-implantation and post-implantation therapy.

"I was doing things that had never been done before and the experience from abroad was not always useful since the Chinese language is so different," said Cui, whose school has compiled altogether 24 textbooks on offering speech-language therapy to people with cochlear implants.

Despite the pains she experienced as an explorer, Cui has never been more confident about the future of her students, especially those under six who are still at the critical period of learning speech and language skills and are entitled to free cochlear implants under government-sponsored programs. Now Cui's school has been authorized to conduct three-month pre-surgical therapy on free implant recipients, which focuses on nurturing the sense of hearing.

Dong Han, an eight-year-old student of Cui's school, is about to bid farewell to his "Grandma Cui" and her teachers who have taught him for three years. Less than two months after receiving a cochlear implant, he was able to understand conversations without lip-reading. "Although eight is not the best age for cochlear implantation, his rehabilitation with hearing aids at our school had well prepared him for this transition," said Cui, who is sending 28 students with wonderful recovery records back to normal schools this year.

Having undergone a major operation to remove stomach cancer in November 2005, 64-year-old Cui, who looks weak and pale for her age, says she has no plan to retire from her cause.