An Amazing Story

One interesting story my dad told me.

He's a pediatrician and there was this family who adopted children with special needs he knew about. They had 14 kids and one of the children was a 5 year old Chinese boy with Down Syndrome. They had adopted him at 3 months, from China.

When my dad first met the boy, at 5 years old, his parents told him that the boy wasn't learning English but was just babbling all the time. They thought it was the Down Syndrome. In the waiting room, there was a Chinese man who recognized the boy was Chinese too, and he knelt down to speak with the boy. The boy immediately responded.

He wasn't babbling for the first 5 years of his life, he was speaking Chinese! And he had only heard the language for the first 3 months of his life and hadn't heard it since. Yet he was able to speak and communicate in Chinese (but wasn't picking up English).

It's an amazing example of the mysteries of the human mind. They ended up moving to be near a university so the boy could be studied further.