In Taiwan, a medical script of " curing" deafness has dominated the discussion of cochlear implants. Many deaf adults pursue cochlear implantation, expecting themselves to become more like hearing people. This article adopts a sociolinguistics approach to explore how Mandarin phonetic variation (the high-falling tone) is appropriated to perform hearingness in the presence of the hearing researcher. This article argues that " improvement" in cochlear implant users' spoken language performance should be understood as the embodiment of social personae constructed by cochlear implant users, rather than simply a product of technological assistance.