All in Due Time :

Meet Melody

Melody Tsai Stein was born in Hong Kong. Her parents didn’t know she was deaf until she was 2. Her parents noticed that she didn’t seem to respond to sound and they took her to be tested and found she was deaf. Her parents didn’t know what to do. They happened to meet Frances Parn from Gallaudet University. They were surprised to find out that a Deaf woman could become a teacher at a University. They asked for recommendations for Melody’s education. She recommended that they move to America. They didn’t want to move that far, and instead moved to the Philippines because they heard there was a good school there. Melody’s brother was born there and this time they were able to identify right away that he was deaf as well.

Neither Melody nor her parents were happy with her education at Philippines Association for the Deaf. She attended for a couple of years and her parents started looking for other options. Her parents had businesses in Hong Kong at the time and didn’t want to give them up and move all the way to the United States. They stayed in Asia. They found another school in Singapore; a private Catholic school with a deaf program, and sent Melody there. Melody was unhappy there as well. The teachers were very strict even to the extent of spanking kids if they didn’t have their homework done.

Her father considered transferring the kids to a school in Hawaii and allowing them to stay with relatives there. When he visited the school, he didn’t like what he saw and decided to go to Berkeley, California to check out their Deaf School. He met the superintendent of the school, liked what he saw there and decided that he would send the kids to that school. They moved to the United States in the fall of 1980.

When they went to take the kids to school that fall, they found the Berkeley campus closed and locked. The school had moved to Fremont that summer. Melody remembers how Fremont was really out in the country at that time, with nothing around it. She went to the school in Fremont and stayed for 12 years. She graduated and went to RIT for 2 years. Then she transferred to Gallaudet. Her brother was entering Gallaudet at the same time. She stayed at Gallaudet for 2 years and met Russell there. She was homesick for California and moved back home and graduated from San Francisco State University. She and Russell moved to Sioux Falls about 5 years ago.

They have two children, Taysia Ariel, 3 1/2; and Rylan Blake, 1 1/2.

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