She lost all her hearing due to severe nerve deafness caused by ototoxic drugs when she was six months old.

 

Since then, she has been living in a silent world, where she can only communicate with others by looking at their mouths and reading their lips.

When she first learned to read lips, Jiang touched her parents’ throats to feel the vibration when they spoke and tried so hard to imitate their lip movements in front of mirrors. Her parents needed to repeat a syllable for many times before she could learn it.

 

By doing so, Jiang finally was able to “listen” and “speak” in her own way.

 

Jiang’s parents, who are both teachers, love reading books and newspaper. It is because of their decision to encourage her to learn lip reading that Jiang could go further in her pursuit of study.  

 

Jiang has always been strict with herself. However, it’s not easy for her to “listen” to teachers in class like normal students.

 

Therefore, most of the time she had to read what teachers write on the blackboard and continue to study by herself after class in order to keep up with others.

 

In spite of this, she never attended any special education school but studied in public schools by virtue of her assiduity and persistence. 

 

Her determination and perseverance later also earned her the admission to Jilin University, a prestigious college in China where she got a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree, with a score of 615 out of a possible 750 points in national college entrance examination, or gaokao. 

 

Jiang revealed that the reason why she chose to enroll in Jilin University was that her role model Zhang Haidi, an outstanding woman with a disability, studied and graduated from the university. Moreover, Jiang majored in Pharmaceutics at the university because she had a “Hero Dream” of being a doctor to save lives.

 

“Make solid efforts for your goal and don’t worry about gains and losses,” Jiang said. In September 2018, Jiang was admitted as a doctoral candidate in the School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University.