Peng Tsu Ying: Singapore's Pioneering Deaf Educator

Nathaniel
So even things like the sign for “Singapore”, right, a very basic sign, has actually changed over time. It used to be, you used to tap your finger and your thumb together like this, and that would kind of represent the stars on the Singapore flag.

And this is the sign that was used by maybe some of the older generation of the deaf community. It's based more on Shanghainese Sign Language. But these days, the more common sign, and the one that I was taught, is you make a fist and you kind of circle your hand and you tap your fist to your hand. This is kind of like a sign for “island”, but your fist is making the letter S. So, S for “Singapore”.

And this is based more in kind of American Sign Language conventions. Yeah, so even simple signs like these are evolving over time as influences change. So, Singapore Sign Language is really like a living dynamic language.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore's past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

There’s a saying, it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. What activist Peng Tsu Ying did was to light many, many candles. When he first came to Singapore from Shanghai in the late 1940s, things were not easy for people who were deaf. Deaf individuals here had no support group or association. They had no way to meet other deaf people. There was also no school for deaf children either, which meant that these kids could not get an education. Peng started a class for deaf children in his parents’ home, and this class eventually turned into a school. He was also one of the early members of what is now known as the Singapore Association for the Deaf.

Thanks to the efforts of Peng and people like him, the situation for the deaf has greatly improved. With me to tell us more about this remarkable individual is Nathaniel Chew, a librarian with the National Library of Singapore. Nathaniel works with the Singapore and Southeast Asia Collection, and his research lies at the intersection of language and society.

Hi Nathaniel, how are you?

Nathaniel
Hey Jimmy. Morning, I’m great.

Jimmy
Welcome to BiblioAsia+, I’m really glad to be able to have you today. And thank you very much for writing about this gentleman, Peng Tsu Ying. What has he achieved?

Nathaniel
Yeah, as you mentioned in your little introduction, Peng Tsu Ying was really one of the pioneering deaf educators and advocates in Singapore. So, when he came to Singapore, there were no schools for the deaf. There was no real community for the deaf, for people to connect to each other and find each other and he really changed all of that with his work.

So, he started the first sign language classes for the deaf here in the 1950s, starting out in his parents’ house, as you said, to eventually raising money to build a school building that continued to grow over time to take in more students.

For many in Singapore’s deaf community, the prospect of education and meaningful employment was almost inconceivable until Peng’s trailblazing efforts made that a reality for many.

Jimmy
Well, tell me a bit about his background. I mean, where was he from? And was he born deaf?

Nathaniel
Yeah, so Peng, he was born in Shanghai in 1926, and he wasn’t born deaf. He actually lost his hearing at an early age, when he was five years old. And when that happened, his parents brought him to Hong Kong, where he actually got to study at a school for the deaf, the Hong Kong School for the Deaf and Dumb.

And during the Japanese occupation he returned to Shanghai, where he enrolled in the Chonghua School for the Deaf. So, at this point he became very well-versed in different kinds of sign language. So, both Shanghainese Sign Language as well as some American Sign Language. He learned both English and Chinese writing. And he even became a teacher at Schools for the Deaf during this time as well.

Jimmy
This was in Shanghai?

Nathaniel
This was in Shanghai. So yeah, he came to Singapore to join his family in the late 1940s, 1948, I believe. His father had come here first. He was running a greeting card business here in Singapore, and then tried to bring the family over but it was only after the war that they managed to come over and join him here.

Jimmy
Okay. And give me an idea of what Singapore was like for deaf people at the time, and the troubles that Peng went through when he first arrived in Singapore.

Nathaniel
So, Peng has this interview where he says this line that really jumped out at me, which is that when he first came to Singapore, he couldn’t find a single deaf person.

I don’t know how much of that is hyperbole, but we know that the situation at the time was that, you know, there were no real schools for the deaf. There was no society, no association. So, it would have been very hard for deaf people to find each other and to build that kind of community.

So when he first came, the first thing that he tried to do was find employment. But again, he found that the conditions were not very welcoming, not very accessible for deaf people. He came in with quite a lot of experience and qualifications. He had bookkeeping skills, he was able to read and write in English and Chinese, he even had some teaching experience. But he was turned down from many jobs that he applied to simply because he was deaf.

So, he tells the story of going to look for the manager of this company, Roneo Limited. A man called Mr. Adams. And Mr. Adams was actually quite famous in Singapore for having hired deaf employees in the past, and so Peng went to him, thinking that he would be a sympathetic employer, asking for a job, but he was told, “You know, I already have two deaf employees I can’t take on anymore.” So that was, that really kind of paints a picture of what the working conditions for deaf people were like at the time. It was very hard for them to get a job.

Jimmy
Okay, so how did Peng find other deaf, you know, I think one of the first things he did was start a class for deaf kids. How do you go about doing that?

Nathaniel
Yeah, so, he was really quite undaunted by his repeated efforts to find a job. He actually approached the Department of Education and Social Welfare and he was told that, you know, there was no school for the deaf set up yet. So, he thought, “Why not do this myself? I can start this.”

So, he put out an ad in the papers, the Chinese papers. I wasn’t able to find this ad in my research, so if any of you listeners have any leads, do let us know. But basically he did get some families, some parents responding to these ads saying, “Hey, my child is deaf. Can I enroll my child in your classes?”

And he didn’t have a school, so he used the room in his parent’ home, which could only really hold a handful of students. His first class, I think, was just four students. But yeah, he started teaching these children sign language, the Shanghainese Sign Language that he learned in his own education.

Jimmy
And then what happened? I mean, I guess it snowballed.

Nathaniel
Yeah, that’s right. So, as interest grew, as word of mouth spread, there were more and more deaf children really starting to find this community. And so, his waitlist for the classes grew and he knew that eventually he would have to get a bigger building, more teaching facilities to meet this demand.

So, what he did was he became a fundraiser. He became this door-to-door activist really, going around soliciting donations for the school. And single-handedly, he managed to raise $3,000 towards the construction of a proper school building for the School for the Deaf. And he, along the way, managed to get the support of some of the Chinese merchants in Singapore who became donors and funders for his initiative.

Jimmy
And that sounds really amazing. When did this Chinese school, the School for the Deaf, when was this set up?

Nathaniel
So about three years into Peng’s teaching at his parents’ home, he managed to raise enough money to set up the school. This was in 1954 and the school was called the Singapore Chinese School for the Deaf.

It was set up on Charlton Road in Upper Serangoon. And it was really not much to look at. It was an attap house. It was described as quite shabby, but there was space in it to hold more students and he was able to bring his classes to a wider audience.

Jimmy
And apart from being a deaf educator and obviously an activist and a fundraiser, he had other interesting extracurricular activities as well, right? He had a very interesting hobby.

Nathaniel
Yes! So, when I was doing my research, I was mainly looking up a lot of newspaper articles in NewspaperSG, which is NLB’s online newspaper database. And I was so surprised to find that when I searched for Peng Tsu Ying, beyond all his work with the Singapore School for the Deaf, I also found a lot of results on racing in the Singapore Grand Prix and the Malayan Grand Prix.

And I was like, "Oh, are these two different people?" But no, they were one and the same.

Jimmy
So you confirmed that they were the same person.

Nathaniel
They were, in fact, the same person. So, Peng Tsu Ying, beyond his work as an educator, was also a very accomplished race car driver in Singapore and in the Malayan circuit as well. He was quite famous for having driven in various cars, but most famously in his Lotus Super Seven car. We have some photos of that in NAS [National Archives of Singapore] Archives Online, if you would like to have a look at that. But yeah, over the course of his racing career, he racked up, I think, 36 trophies.

Jimmy
Not bad.

Nathaniel
Including his crowning achievement of getting third place in the 1965 Malaysian Grand Prix. And in all of these races, of course, he was the only deaf driver on the field, so that made it even more impressive, I think. You might be wondering, how does it work, you know, if you are deaf and driving a car, is that safe to do? And so, we have the report of one of his observers who sat in the car with him, who said he was amazed and that Peng was really the best driver that he had ever seen.

Another interesting thing is that he had his brother in the car with him for many of his races and his brother would kind of communicate with him using sign language in the middle of the race to tell him, “You know, oh, you’re in what position now? Here’s how the race is going.” And he would be doing that while driving.

So, it’s quite amazing that sign language went from this thing that, you know, no one was using in Singapore to actually being used in even our races, or these high-speed environments.

Jimmy
That really does sound amazing. And I think he married someone who was also deaf, didn’t he?

Nathaniel
That’s right. So, his wife, Ho Mei Soo, was also a deaf educator. And so after a few years, she joined him in Singapore, and they taught together for a long time starting at his parents’ house in that small class for the deaf students and she moved with him as well when he went on to found the larger Singapore Chinese School for the Deaf, Singapore Science School for the Deaf, and became a teacher there. And this is while Peng assumed the role of principal of that school.

Jimmy
What’s interesting to me is that in your article you talk about how around the same time the Red Cross were trying to do something?

Nathaniel
Yeah, that’s right. So, around the same time that Peng started his school, there was a kind of a concurrent effort that was coming out to provide education to the deaf community in Singapore. This was run by the British Red Cross Society here and they took a kind of a different approach.

So, while Peng was using sign language to teach students in his classes, the British Red Cross adopted what’s called the oral approach, which involves a lot of lip reading, training deaf children to make use of their residual hearing, to understand spoken English and to be able to speak it back to some extent.

So yeah, two very different approaches. But what was interesting was that over time as the deaf community grew, and eventually when the Singapore Association for the Deaf was formed, these efforts kind of coalesced to bear fruit together. So, they formed a single school for the deaf, and this was at Mountbatten Road. And yeah, there was both a sign section and an oral section at the school at the time.

Jimmy
Okay, okay. And so now there’s something called the Singapore Sign Language, isn’t it? Is that like a Singapore dialect of American Sign Language? I mean, what is the Singapore Sign Language?

Nathaniel
Yeah, it’s kind of like a dialect, I guess. But it’s also its own unique sign language. So, it’s something that’s as unique to Singapore as something like Singlish is, right? It’s a characteristic of our country. So, we’ve been talking a bit about how Peng used sign language in his classes and how he grew up learning Shanghainese Sign Language. So how do we get from that to Singapore Sign Language? It was kind of a natural evolution. So, like Singlish, Singapore Sign Language is kind of a rojak, melting pot of different influences. So, Peng was teaching Shanghainese Sign Language in school. Over time, especially as he brought in more educators, some of whom had been taught in America, they started incorporating things like American Sign Language into the teaching, and that influenced the kind of blend of signs that the students ended up learning as well.

And of course, we were also very creative and inventive. Our local deaf community, they introduced local signs as well. And these got added to the Singapore Sign Language lexicon. So, it’s hard to say that it’s a dialect of any one language, but it’s really the collective growth of different speakers, different signers over time.

Today Singapore Sign Language is the most used sign language in our Singaporean deaf community. Last year there was discussion, and it was reported in newspapers that the Ministry of Social and Family Development was reviewing the possibility of making Singapore Sign Language a national language of Singapore. And I think that was met with a lot of very welcome responses from the deaf community.

It was seen as a way to really recognise this key cultural identity that they all share and to legitimise sign language as a valid and an important means of communication for them in Singapore.

Jimmy
Okay, I’m not an expert on sign language by any stretch of imagination. But certainly in English, you would imagine that you designate the alphabet that one can sign and one can spell out words. But presumably sign language also then, rather than spelling out an entire word, if it’s a common enough word or phrase, you can just compress that into a sign. Is that correct? And so, Singapore Sign Language does something similar for like very Singapore-specific things.

Nathaniel
Yeah, that’s right. Singapore Sign Language is really its own language. It’s got its own grammar. It’s got its own syntax. Yeah, so for example – it’s hard to show you over a podcast – but if you wanted to say like, “What did you eat yesterday?” The way that you would sign it in Singapore Sign Language would be more along the lines of like, “Yesterday you eat what?” Which is, which kind of sounds like Singlish.

Jimmy
Yeah, it does sound like Singlish, doesn’t it?

Nathaniel
Yeah. There are actually several forms of signing that are used in Singapore. So, we’ve talked about Singapore Sign Language as kind of the main language that people use to communicate with each other.

But there’s also this other system called Signing Exact English. It’s often abbreviated to SEE. So, this is used very often in schools to teach deaf students English as well. So, in Signing Exact English, you have, as you were saying earlier, a kind of one-to-one correspondence between the signs and the English words.

So, you would sign, “What did you eat yesterday?” And the idea is to really make English easier to learn for deaf students when you have that clear correspondence, and it’s to help them to succeed in our mainstream education system as well as to be able to use English effectively when they graduate and enter the workforce.

Jimmy
And where does one learn sign language now?

Nathaniel
So, there are a lot of ways you can learn sign language. For a long time, the only way you could do it was to enroll at SADeaf, the Singapore Association for the Deaf. They run classes. But now, I think technology has made it a lot more accessible. So, in addition to physical classes I took my own class online with SADeaf in 2021.

I was really interested in learning sign language to incorporate in my library programmes for children. And I did the whole class on Zoom. It was really kind of a bit confusing at first because you would have to, like, try and look at what I was doing in my own screen, but my video was mirrored, so I would raise my right hand, but see my left hand being raised.

Yeah but it was a really fun experience and I learned a lot from it. But besides classes, you know, the first book on Singapore Sign Language was published by SADeaf in 1990. It was called Sign for Singapore.

Jimmy
What kind of book was this?

Nathaniel
So it’s a book of signs. It’s really like a kind of a dictionary almost. You would have pictures of the signs in the book and it would tell you what the English word was. And you can find a copyin our Lee Kong Chian Reference Library.

Jimmy
So what kind of Singapore specific signs were there?

Nathaniel
So you have things like Jurong Bird Park, Marina Bay Sands, you know, very location specific type things. You also have more of your Singlish slang type of signs. So, things like kaypoh, which is just a K and a P.

I really like your sign. It’s got a lot of flavour when you sign it. Something interesting that I found out when I was doing my research was how Singapore Sign Language has actually evolved over time.

So even like things like the sign for Singapore, right, a very basic sign has actually changed over time. So, it used to be like you tap your finger and your thumb together like this, and that would kind of represent the stars on the Singapore flag.

Jimmy
Ah, okay.

Nathaniel
And this is the sign that used to be used by maybe some of the older generation of the deaf community. It’s based more on Shanghainese Sign Language. But these days the more common sign and the one that I was taught is you make a fist and you kind of circle your hand and you tap your fist to your hand. This is kind of like a sign for island, but your fist is making the letter S. So, S for Singapore.

And this is based more in kind of American Sign Language conventions. Yeah, so even simple signs like these are evolving over time as influences change. So, Singapore Sign Language is really like a living dynamic language.

Jimmy
And what struck me when just listening to you [that] it also means it’s very specific geographically, doesn’t it? So, someone who is in Malaysia, for example, might not understand the sign for Singapore.

Nathaniel
Yeah, that’s right. So, there are many, many different sign languages used all over the world. People usually only think of the main ones like American Sign Language, British Sign Language, for example. But, pretty much, I would imagine that every country has its own sign language. Even multiple sign languages depending on which region you’re in or which communities you’re a part of. So, during my research, I found some interesting stories in the newspapers about how actually deaf visitors from other countries would visit the Singapore Sign School for the Deaf when it gained international recognition.

So, they would come for tours to see how things were being run here. And the visitors would try to communicate with the students of the school in their sign language. I think there was one group that came from Japan, and it was reported that everyone was at a total loss of communication because they’re totally different sign systems. They didn’t understand each other. They had to resort to their English interpreters to help them communicate. So, it’s just as different as English and Japanese.

Jimmy
Right, right. So, if I spoke to you in English and you replied in Japanese, I would not understand.

Nathaniel
Right. Right.

Jimmy
Okay, that’s very interesting, and is it very hard to learn?

Nathaniel
I would say like any language, you need to practice it, so I wish that I had the chance to practice it more. I think I’ve forgotten a lot of what I learned in 2021 in my class but when you get the hang of it, it really can be quite intuitive. Like, a lot of the signs are very visual, and they are visual representations of the things that they’re talking about.

So if, for example, I mentioned Marina Bay Sands just now, the sign for Marina Bay Sands is you kind of like hold up three fingers, and then you put another finger lying on top.

Jimmy
Oh, so it’s like that. Is the Merlion someone vomiting?

Nathaniel
I don’t know. You should look it up and let me know, Jimmy.

Jimmy
Okay, okay. What got you interested in learning, you know, wanting to learn sign language?

Nathaniel
Yeah, well, a lot of things. I mean, I’ve always been very interested in language. I studied linguistics in school and sign language was really like, so totally different from any other spoken language that I’ve learned about, right? And as I mentioned, when I joined the National Library Board, I started off in the public libraries as an early literacy librarian.

So, working a lot with children I thought sign language would be a cool way to, you know, make programmes more accessible in a very fun way as well.

Children love signing as they sing songs and listen to stories and things like that. So yeah, I decided to take a class with some of my fellow librarians with SADeaf and that’s how I learned it.

Jimmy
Right, and then so you just became interested in that and then you did your own research into – is Peng Tsu Ying well-known in the deaf community?

Nathaniel
He is, he is. He was a really prominent advocate and champion of the deaf community in Singapore. I mean, we’ve mentioned that he taught classes and he set up the school but he was really involved throughout his life. So, things like, he would push for the more support for the deaf, he was a committee member of the Singapore Association for the Deaf when it was founded. So, he really advocated for a lot of inclusive efforts. He pushed, for example, for a vocational school for the deaf because he realised that it’s not enough to just educate the deaf, but we need to give them a future. We need to give them skills. We need to help them to integrate and get involved in society and set them up for success. So that was a big initiative that eventually did result in the setting up of a vocational school in, I think, 1971.

Jimmy
That’s really impressive.

Nathaniel
Yeah. And beyond that, he was really involved in public service, so another of his extracurriculars besides racing was he would volunteer as an interpreter in the courts, for example.

So, when there were deaf witnesses who were trying to give testimony or when there were deaf defendants, he would go in and help interpret, translate what they were signing for the courts so that they could make their statements.

Jimmy
Wow, this is like amazing.

Nathaniel
Yeah, and I think what to me was most memorable was that he really, I think, left a deep impression on the people he worked with. He touched a lot of lives. Many people in the deaf community saw him as a mentor and an inspiration. So, you know, one of the reasons that he became a race car driver was to kind of prove this point that you can be deaf, but you’ll still be able to do anything that you set your mind to. And he used his own example to really inspire a lot of deaf people, his fellow teachers too, you know, to join sports, to form organisations and, to show them that there were no limits, basically. And I think that it was really fitting that he was awarded the Public Service Medal posthumously, the year after he passed in 2018 in recognition of all he’s done for the deaf community in Singapore.

Jimmy
I mean, this is a man who clearly did not spend much time cursing the darkness. You know, he is very, very inspiring. It’s one man whose vision and his determination enabled him to make all these changes and touch so many lives, right? So it’s really, really inspiring.

You know, Nathaniel, we’ve sort of come to the end of the substantive part of the interview. And this is a part of the podcast where we talk about, you know, other things, right? Not necessarily related to the topic. So, you’re a librarian with the National Library. How long have you been there, and what do you do? I mean, do you just shelf books all day?

Nathaniel
So I shelf books for part of the day.

Jimmy
Can’t escape that.

Nathaniel
Yeah, no, I love books. That’s why I work here. I joined the National Library and the Singapore and Southeast Asia Collections team in 2023. About a year and a half now and I love my job. I see my role really as connecting people to our shared heritage, our shared history and in doing so connect better to each other, right?

We do this by making our collections come alive through programming, through creating engaging content like this podcast. So, one of the things that I was involved in recently was research on community in Singapore in the 20th century. And putting together exhibitions for that, giving public talks on that. So, I find that really meaningful.

Jimmy
And, you know, the librarians in the library focus on different things. And so within the arts and within the Singapore Southeast Asia Collection, what is your focus?

Nathaniel
So my own research interests, as I mentioned, lie in language, lie in community. That’s been kind of the common thread of the projects that I’ve been involved in, in the past year or so.

So, I was really focusing on telling the story of Singapore’s communities, looking at donations that we’ve received. I was looking at things like Housing Development Board documents that told the story of resettlement from kampungs to HDB public housing and how communities changed through that as well as the origins of Singapore citizenship. What was it like when the first Singapore citizens were registered and what kind of national community did that create?

Jimmy
That’s interesting. I’m sure you must have done some research or reading into Singlish, you know. What is your take on Singlish?

Nathaniel
Wow. So, I actually did study Singlish, but from a very technical linguistic perspective when I was in school, I wrote my thesis on Singlish and how that’s kind of...

Jimmy
I have to ask, and for people who don’t know, Nathaniel, you did your thesis, your university degree in Minnesota.

Nathaniel
Yes, that’s right.

Jimmy
The great state of Minnesota.

Nathaniel
Yes, I went all the way to Minnesota to study Singlish.

Jimmy
Was it hard to explain to people what Singlish was in Minnesota?

Nathaniel
Yes and no. It was hard to explain because as a speaker of Singlish myself, I don’t necessarily have like, an understanding of, oh, what I’m saying this because of this, right? It’s just like a native language.

Jimmy
You just pick it up naturally, right?

Nathaniel
Yeah, so it’s kind of hard to analyse.

Jimmy
And of course, you speak Singlish very well, Nathaniel, as you constantly demonstrate in this podcast. But tell us about Singlish.

Nathaniel
Singlish is really interesting. It’s changed over time as well, and I think it will be...

Jimmy
Has it really? I imagine it would, but in what way? I mean, you must know.

Nathaniel
I think earlier, so this is quite anecdotal, but earlier Singlish, I think had a lot more influence from different dialects especially because of Chinese, and as I think dialect use has been declining somewhat in Singapore, especially among the younger generation, that kind of lexicon is no longer in common use as much. So, you see kind of, a gap between older Singlish speakers and younger Singlish speakers.

Jimmy
That’s so interesting.

Nathaniel
Yeah, and I think it will be continuing to evolve as well, especially with so much of communication happening online on social media as well and having different conventions there.

Jimmy
Right, right, right. Okay, you know, this sounds very interesting. I hope that you will next write about Singlish for BiblioAsia. Speaking of BiblioAsia, if I say to you BiblioAsia is, what do you say?

Nathaniel
BiblioAsia is a labour of love.

Jimmy
Was it a labour of love for you to write this article?

Nathaniel
Yeah, I think this is something that I really enjoyed researching, and I’m happy to share with more people about, I hope it inspires people to learn sign language and there are many ways that you can do it now.

Jimmy
Okay, fantastic. Nathaniel, thank you for joining me on BiblioAsia+. You have to read Nathaniel's article, actually, Nathaniel and Rosxalynd’s piece, “Signs of Progress: Deaf Education in Singapore”. And you can read about it on BiblioAsia.nlb.gov.sg. Thank you very much once again for joining us, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel
Thanks, Jimmy. Happy to be here.

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast and the BiblioAsia  newsletter. Thanks for joining us on BiblioAsia+.

Rosxalynd Liu and Nathaniel Chew, “Signs of Progress: Deaf Education in Singapore,” BiblioAsia 21, no. 1.

Singapore Association for the Deaf, Basic Singapore Sign Language (SgSL), Level 1 Course (Singapore: Singapore Association for the Deaf, 2020).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Doppler Soundlab. The background music “Di Tanjong Katong” was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Nathaniel for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.