When I arrived on the second floor of a commercial building in Manhattan for my first sign-language class, a man took one look at my tentative posture and held up some fingers. One? Two? I put up one finger, and he shepherded me to the Level 1 class. It was disorienting: Class time was strictly “voices off,” to encourage immersive learning and to show respect to the teachers at the Sign Language Center, who are all deaf. Without the power of speech, all my classmates and I could do was smile and nod at one another, sitting in silence as we took in the new vocabulary (or “ASLary”) presented to us.
Learning ASL was both a culture shock and a bruise to my ego. As a writer and journalist, I pride myself on a certain facility with language. I was taught that there’s an optimal combination of words that can most precisely communicate any thought. Often, my preoccupation with language as the primary tool for expression has meant that in talking or writing about my emotions, I have held them at a distance. This is compounded by the fact that learning a new language, or speaking in a language that I haven’t mastered, is always frustrating. It’s why I avoid situations where I’d have to speak Korean (I never spoke it growing up, and I communicate with the vocabulary of a 6-year-old). My deficits make me simple, unfunny, a bit childlike and too direct — not at all as I imagine myself to be.
With ASL, I expected to feel similarly, and thought fluency would come once I collected a critical mass of signs. The first thing you learn in ASL class is the alphabet. As my classmates and I asked and answered questions using words we didn’t have the signs for, those early weeks were filled with laborious spelling. This was embarrassing: Seeing a dozen politely smiling faces watching me as I slowly spelled, misspelled and restarted spelling words — often multiple times — was its own kind of purgatory.
Over time, I picked up on new conventions, like waving a hand or stomping on the ground to get someone’s attention, and gleaned that the light flashing in the corner of the classroom was the doorbell alerting staff to let someone in. My fingers stalled as they reached for new shapes, and I struggled to differentiate very similar looking signs (like “movie,” “Covid” and “cheese”). Eventually I realized that when you’re communicating in sign language, diction is not as important as the way you embody what you’re communicating. I once asked a teacher how to sign the word “desperate.” ASL doesn’t have a direct translation of every English word, he told me. If you want to sign “desperate,” you might just sign the word “want,” but with the appropriate facial and body posturing to show your desperation.
Shifting to a visual language teaches you that everything you want to say can also be shown. And not quite in the writerly “show not tell” way. Instead of saying “a dog jumped on my lap,” for example, a signing storyteller might show you how big the dog was, the angle it approached from and whether it ran over from a distance or just clumsily plopped down.
Letting go of the need for “precise” language, and the need to translate every signed sentence into an English one in my mind, was possible only after I embraced ASL’s emotionality. This was easier said than done, though: My facial expressions tend to be muted, so learning how to adequately emote while signing has been my greatest challenge. One day during a Level 2 class, a teacher called me out on it. “It doesn’t make sense for you to sign ‘frustrated’ if your face doesn’t look at all frustrated,” she told me — it’s like speaking in a deadpan monotone while claiming you’re angry. I felt as if I were back in kindergarten learning to distinguish among emotions. During those classes, feeling stiff and unwilling to make a fool out of myself, I’d avoid volunteering answers. My face softened over the months, but I could not — and still sometimes struggle to — intuit the lines between underemoting, emoting just enough for vibrancy and humor, and goofily exaggerating. Even now, with no way to hide behind my usual euphemisms or analogies, emoting still feels at times too frank and candid.
I’ve returned week after week to ASL classes for almost two years now. I can hear — and when I began studying, I did not know any deaf or hard-of-hearing people. My initial reasons were myriad and low-stakes: As children, my sister and I were obsessed with “secret languages”; a high school friend with a hard-of-hearing sister taught me to sign and got me hooked; I wanted the ability to “talk” in a loud bar without shouting.
But those reasons don’t capture what has made studying ASL so rewarding. If someone tells you how they feel, they might not say the words “astonished,” “affronted” or “overjoyed,” but they’ll show you with their face and body, and the showing will lead to something unusual for someone as invested in language as I am: You’ll understand because you feel it. While ASL may not wholly share a vocabulary with English, that doesn’t mean it lacks precision. Its precision, I’ve learned, lies in the common language of the body. The poet Adrienne Rich writes of silence as a “blueprint to a life” that has presence and form. For me, signing made that blueprint clear, showing me that the body is what gives language life. Access to that language required that I attune myself to emotion — both my own and others’.