Listening Outside the Box: On Reynolds’ “Fearless Voice”
Autism mother Shelley Hendrix Reynolds is the co-founder of Unlocking Autism and its current president. In today’s Huffington Post, she writes about how she, a daughter of “fearless women,” had gone from being “fearless” to a “shell of a woman.” Reynolds describes how she saw herself “disintegrating” in a failing marriage and wondered “How would I make it on my own” as a single mother with two young children, including an autistic son.
Reynolds notes that she came to ask herself “What kind of example was I setting” for her three-year-old daughter, Mairin who “was watching her mother melt into a puddle every single day.” (Reynolds does not note the effect of her “melting” on her autistic son; this is a post entitled Fearless Women Raising Fearless Women.)
I am something more than disconcerted by Reynold’s description of how she decided to teach her daughter to “step outside the box,” by doing “anything and everything I could to embarrass her in public places.”
I spoke with a British, Chinese or Mexican accent while shopping in the grocery store. I kicked my legs out to the side while pushing the cart. I ran down the aisle making monkey noises, picking up a banana and answering it as if it was a phone. It was the perfect plan. We were around disposable people that we would never see again, so I had no fear about what they thought of my lunatic behavior.
Since when is speaking with a “British, Chinese or Mexian accent” a way to deliberately “embarrass” one’s child in public? Especially when speaking with such foreign accents is described along with “making monkey noises”? Reynolds’ use of the phrase “disposable people” to describe the onlookers of her actions is troubling in light of the use of these very words “disposable people” to refer to disabled persons such as our autistic sons.
Growing up in a large extended Chinese American family in the San Francisco Bay Area, the sound of a Chinese accent is one that I am familiar with; is one that, when I hear it, I feel a sense of home. It is indeed the case that Asian American literature contains more than a few accounts of the American-born children of immigrants from China and other Asian countries feeling embarrased to be in the company of their parents with their “funny” accents. A third-generation Chinese American whose parents spoke only English, I have learned to value the different cadences of a Chinese accent (and of an English, and of a Mexican, one), and often think that my familiarity with so many foreign voices has more than helped me understand my son Charlie’s less than articulate and much delayed speech.
When I hear a British, Chinese, or Mexican accent, that is, I feel something very far from the embarrassment Reynolds intends her daughter to feel when she uses these accents, or her approximation of them. A Chinese accent—and a British one, a Mexican one, a Louisiana one—all make up a spectrum of voices that, like the varieties of autism experience all across the autism spectrum, are good to hear and learn from.
And never something to be embarrassed, or ashamed, about. Learning to hear the unique tones of a spectrum of voices is to be able to listen outside of the box.
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POSTED IN: Asia, China, Family, Language, Parenting, Stereotypes
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