CODA

Straddling two seemingly opposed cultures hasn’t always been so easy for Bill. “It’s difficult,” he explains. “I think every child wants their parents to be like everyone else’s parents, and having Deaf parents makes your parents different. When you fall down and get hurt, usually you scream and your parents come running. When you have Deaf parents and you fall down and get hurt, you go running to them. Sometimes, you even have to go looking for them.”

Bill realized his family was not like others after he entered grade school. “My parents were going through a divorce, and my mother moved to Arizona. I was in second grade, and the teacher said, ‘You know, you talk funny.’ She thought I belonged in Special Ed.”

The communication issues his teacher flagged were a product of Bill’s upbringing, as Deaf people do not observe the same social norms as hearing people. “It had very little to do with my ability to learn,” he says. “I had grown up being around Deaf people, and it was pretty much all I ever knew. The culture of my parents is different from the culture out in the world. Most people just assume that Deaf people are hearing people that can’t hear, but that’s not true. They’re a cultural and linguistic minority. I grew up with that very embodied in my life. Even today, my children tell me, ‘Dad, hearing people don’t do that,’ and I say, ‘How am I supposed to know this? I grew up with Deaf parents.’”

As a child of Deaf parents, Bill had more responsibilities than the average grade-schooler. “I remember being taken out of school to go to my parents’ appointments and interpreting for them. It’s how I found out my mother had a heart attack.”

Bill was praised early on for his fluency. His father regularly pushed him to be an interpreter—an honored position, considering that though many hearing people may know sign language, only a talented few are singled out to serve the community as an interpreter. “There was a time period, back then, where Deaf people kind of hand chose [hearing] people in the community that signed really well and said this person should become an interpreter.”

“My father would introduce me to his Deaf friends and there would always be a qualifier, so like, ‘This is Billy, my son. He’s hearing, but he signs well.’”

It was during such an encounter that Bill finally found the spark of determination that would later drive him to become an interpreter. “A lady was at our house for a birthday party—my birthday party—and asked where my dad was. I told her that he was downstairs, and she asked if I was Deaf. I said no, and she looked at me and said, ‘You act like a Deaf person.’”

“It was like my whole heart exploded. I felt so different,” Bill recalls. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to become a master of this language.’ I have never worked in an unrelated field. Everything I’ve ever done has been about deafness. I’ve never not done this.”