‘One of China’s most inspiring people’: high achieving deaf woman sets mainland social media abuzz with news of wedding
- Loses hearing after given wrong medicine as baby, learns lip-reading
- Studies hard to become specialist in immunology, machine learning
A Chinese woman with a hearing impairment who has been an inspiration for her persistence and achievements has married, much to the delight of her many online fans.
Jiang Mengnan hails from a village in remote Yizhang county, central Hunan province. At six months old, she lost her hearing after being given the wrong medication for pneumonia.
With the help of her parents, she learned to lip read when she was very young. She did not attend a school for children with disabilities, but went to a regular state school where she sat at the front of the classroom so she could see teachers’ lips.
Jiang studied hard and achieved consistently high grades.
After sitting the competitive entrance exam, she was admitted to Jilin University, a top institution in northeastern China, where she received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree majoring in pharmacy.
In 2018, she was enrolled by the prestigious Tsinghua University’s School of Life Sciences as a PhD student in Beijing, specialising in tumour immunology and machine learning.
