Zhou, 21, received the admission notice from the Washington- based Gallaudet University, and was asked to take up education at the university in six months.

Zhou was enrolled into Liaoning Normal University in northeast China's Liaoning province at the age of 16 majoring in education science, thus making her the first deaf college student in China.

She graduated last year from the college with a paper entitled "The Way Deaf People Adapt Themselves to Mainstream Society," an article she wrote based on her own experiences and feelings.

The paper, which was appraised as excellent by her tutor Professor Zhang Ningsheng, was later published in the "Popular Psychology" magazine catering mainly to deaf people.

Zhou was found to be deaf and mute when she was three and half years old.

Using his own method, her father Zhou Hong taught her to speak and write, and several years later she surprised her parents by uttering sounds and talking.

With a hearing aid, she entered one of the best middle schools in Jiangsu province, while her father was hired as a deputy principal of a school for deaf and mute students in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province.

After passing a unified English language test, Zhou said she used emails to communicate with the American university to promote herself and eventually she succeeded.

During the coming six months, she plans to write a biography titled "Song Without Words" just as Helen Keller, a successful American deaf woman, did decades ago.

(People’s Daily 03/25/2001)