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.

"I have got so much respect and recognition from society. I have to work as hard as I can to repay it so that I will have no regrets if I die tomorrow," Cui said.

Financial difficulties

Cui's school has been struggling to make ends meet since the first day of its founding. In the early stages of running the school, Cui had to exploit her elder daughter, Mi En, by asking her to give up her job to work as her only staff member on a monthly salary of just 200 yuan.

Cui said she didn't make any money out of running the school for eight years, and the school is still desperately in need of money to update its basic facilities. At the end of last year when the school received government funding of 7,950 yuan, Cui purchased a new desktop computer to replace a 10-year-old one the school had been relying on. The new computer has become the centerpiece of the principal's office.

Although the monthly tuition at Cui's school is about four times that of their public counterparts, the school is facing much heavier financial pressure in part because most government funding and charity donations go to public schools. For about 30 percent of her students that cannot afford the tuition, Cui reduces or even waves the fees completely. For those from particularly poor families, Cui offers them free boarding and clothing.

What hurts her most is that about half of her students who are fitted for cochlear implants have to put off their surgery. This is true even for children who can get a free cochlear implant, which is sold at around 150,000 yuan in China. These families have difficulty saving up even 40,000 yuan for operation costs and 14,000 yuan for rehabilitation costs.

American grandmas and grandpas

In 2006 Cui purchased badly needed new chairs, desks, beds and book cupboards for her school. When asked who paid for the furniture, every student at the school, including kindergarten children, gives the same answer: "Our grandmas and grandpas from the United States."

At the end of 2004, when a delegation of the Pasadena Sister Cities Committee China Subcommittee visited Xicheng District of Beijing, a sister city of Pasadena since 1999, the officials from Xicheng's district government that received the delegation arranged a visit to Cui's school. "Cui had made her name for being a warm-hearted and caring teacher in Xicheng," said Liu Ke, an official of the Foreign Affairs Office of Xicheng District, who has facilitated many visits by the Pasadena group.

Touched by the caring teachers and the lovely children, the delegation members produced their wallets and donated as much as they could, with tears in their eyes. Their unexpected donation of nearly $200 became the first large-sum donation for the school, which Cui later used to purchase 12 suits of sportswear, plastic jigsaws, painting boards and paint for school.

The act of charity has grown into a donation program for the Pasadena group, which has volunteered to raise about $2,000 annually for the school for the last three years. The donation has been critical to Cui's school, since government funding, altogether less than 144,000 yuan, is rather limited. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Alan Lamson, Chair of the China Subcommittee, said the donation program is "the most gratifying thing" of all sister city programs between Pasadena and Xicheng.

A visit to Cui's school has also become a staple part of the itinerary for every Beijing visit by the Pasadena group over the years. Cui is more than happy to show every delegation photographs of the purchases made with their donations.

"I always tell my students who donates to us. I don't want them to be xenophiles, I just want them to be grateful," Cui said.

"I always tell my students who donates to us. I don't want them to be xenophiles, I just want them to be grateful," Cui said.