Hello, my name is Iris Lau. I was born and raised in Hong Kong. I am a university graduate with a major in Bilingual Studies. I like foreign literature since I was in primary school. At home, I study and do creative work. I usually go to yum cha with my parents and read newspapers with my father in the mornings, sometimes go karaoke, shopping, or go to the library alone.
I have high functioning autism, urticaria, depression, speech disorder and adjustment disorder. In this highly efficient city, when I have no means of effective communication, I was so alone like a lost and lonely crow in the city. Nobody understands me, no matter what I did such as going wild, crying and screaming. Upon hearing the word “autism”, you may imagine a person who can’t speak well, cannot understand others’ feelings, and lacks imaginative abilities.
As a person who can only speak slowly, I do not fit into the world of must-speak-quickly. I had thought that I should write, so people can read my words and to know more about me. I thought that was a way for me to connect with the world. So I become a writer. Unfortunately, people in this highly efficient city do not like reading, so I need to write in English to connect with my readers.
Being a highly functioning autistic person, I may be thought to be unable of understanding anything, but I’m always listening to people around me. I watch TV and enjoy music. I also read a lot of books. Having wanted to be normal, I observed people around me. Even though I could not behave like they did, I observed the world of normal people, which seemed full of mysteries to me, as if I had been watching a space movie. Once I became able to write sentences, not only I wrote about my thoughts as poems but also I wrote stories in which I appeared as the main character living in the world of so-called normal people. By writing a story where I can imagine myself as a main character, I freely travelled through their world.
In a sense, as a person with high functioning autism, I may be unable to understand the behaviours and thoughts of normal people. As I write stories, I always wonder whether normal people can understand what I mean by my writings. So, when I write, I pay close attention to whether there are gaps between my own perspective and others’ perspectives. Thus, I get really happy when many people read my stories and I receive comments from the readers, because I feel like I got closer to this world.
I have hated not-normal myself for always causing people troubles and having nothing to contribute. I tried to be like everyone so I could live in this society. But I noticed that, while there were things I could do if I made efforts, there were things that I could never do no matter how hard I tried. In addition, there are differences between what I like or what is important to me and what others like or value. I was realizing the differences in values and ways of thinking between others and me in a way not to deny myself entirely.
I think that “the world of autism narrated by people with autism” is something to be revealed more and more in future. For instance, an example of how I experience the world may be different from how most people experience the world is my experience with rain. My first reaction to rain is to be surprised at its sounds. Though everyone seems to know it rain instantly from hearing its sound, I first become anxious, unable to tell what sound it is and where it comes from until someone tells me it’s rain. That’s why I stare at rain so I can connect the sounds to the rain. But then I become so absorbed in watching raindrops that I forget where I am now. The feeling of continuous raindrops coming down from the sky and falling through my body on the ground causes me to forget myself. Like this, in the world of autism, there are sensory perceptions and ways of thinking that only people with autism can explain.
Now I wonder whether everything about autism is bad. This is me- a person with autism. I dearly love people who love me. And I think there are great things too in the world of autism that only we know. Just as lives of each person has a meaning, I believe that my being born autistic should have a meaning.
Being understood with empathy by others greatly relieves our distressed hearts. So this is of particular value for me to be able to tell you about my thoughts here today. I think that mutual understanding is the first step toward tomorrow’s hope. I want to believe that we-you and us, the people with autism- share the same future and share this world together.