The blind American woman was singing in Chinese -- one of her eight languages -- about the poor white-haired girl waiting for her father to bring her a red ribbon, her only gift, to celebrate Chinese New Year.

Several old men and women grinned broadly in recognition of the folk opera sung by the woman, Ceinwen King-Smith of Squirrel Hill, as part of a pre-Chinese New Year celebration at her home in advance of Thursday's holiday. Others in the group of about two dozen Chinese journalists who work for the Erie Chinese Journal and their friends from Cleveland and Pittsburgh dabbed at welling eyes with tissues, or simply wiped them away with the backs of their hands.

"It touched me," said Li Hua Feng of Cleveland, tearing up again later as she talked about hearing Ms. King-Smith sing. "She's a blind lady who can speak so many languages, and she has a caring heart."

Ms. King-Smith, 62, says she doesn't think of herself as extraordinary; like many women, she's a mother, a teacher and a homemaker.

She also happens to speak fluent Chinese, Russian, French, Polish, German, Spanish and Portuguese in addition to her native English, learning all but Russian and English with little or no formal instruction. She earned degrees from Stanford and Harvard universities. She traveled the world for 40 years. She trained herself to sing.

She also sings with four local choirs, makes bead necklaces for fund-raising auctions, has filled her home with masks, sculptures, statues and other artwork that could rival many museum collections, and has traveled to China 17 times to teach English as a second language.

Oh, and she was born completely blind -- "I don't see black, I see nothing" -- which, combined with her fluency in Chinese, her poignant singing voice and her other talents, has made her a minor celebrity in the region's Chinese-American community, and somewhat bemused her as a result.

"I'm always amazed that Chinese people think I'm so special," she said. "Yeah, I can't see, but that's not a big deal."

In China, however, blind children are sent to schools for the blind, where they are taught little, said Ms. King-Smith. Most, she said, end up working in massage parlors or with other blind people.

"They're not expected to do much for themselves," she said.

Ms. King-Smith's parents -- a German father and Lebanese mother who gave her a Welsh first name because they loved the 1939 novel "How Green Was My Valley" -- didn't discover she was blind until she was 6 months old, and decided they would continue treating her as if she could see, letting her find out her limitations for herself. She attended a mainstream elementary school in her hometown of Chicago that offered classes for blind children, but she never attended a school for the blind.

Even as a child, Ms. King-Smith did not feel particularly limited; when her father warned her one day that if she didn't stop digging in the yard with a spoon she would dig all the way to China, she was intrigued rather than intimidated.

"You can't get too far with your mother's spoon, especially when you're only 4, but I decided that someday I was going to China," a resolution bolstered by Ms. King-Smith's later realization that "there was a quarter of the Earth's population I couldn't even say 'good morning' to," she said.

After graduating from Stanford with a degree in Russian literature, Ms. King-Smith traveled with her husband to Poland for a fellowship, and later to Canada and Brazil for his job as an international tax lawyer for U.S. Steel Corp. Along the way, Ms. King-Smith earned her master's degree in education from Harvard, teaching math and religion and, in Pittsburgh, ultimately becoming supervisor of instruction for the Bidwell Training Center.

In 1986, Ms. King-Smith, by then divorced, made the first of many trips to China to teach English as a second language for the summer.

Her visit to China began a love affair with Chinese culture that inspired her to speak, and ultimately to sing, fluent Chinese -- a skill that wows her Chinese friends but that Ms. King-Smith downplays.

"I speak good Chinese if you don't speak Chinese," she said.

After all, she never did learn to write the language.

"I learned about 600 characters, and then I gave up."