THE QUESTION IS THERE almost all the time. If I tell someone from an English-speaking country that I write, more often than not they will want to know: do you write in English or in your language? Do you write in your language first and then translate everything into English? These questions, issued out of, I hope, pure curiosity, have unexpectedly come to be felt as an act of kindness, for they assume that there exists a single language I see as my own, though I am not sure about that myself. There are languages I speak, languages I understand, languages in which I write and even dream; but I don’t see any of them as mine, not completely. And if I am to consider that phrase a little longer, I will have to admit that I don’t know what makes a language ‘mine,’ ‘yours,’ or anyone else’s, for that matter.
My parents and grandparents on either side all speak different dialects, having moved to and settled in Hangzhou from different regions of China. This city, in turn, has its own dialect that each of them also learned to understand and later speak. A dialect is not a language, or at least not often regarded as one, and I suppose the dialects spoken by my parents and grandparents are varieties of Mandarin, since they all use the same writing system and have very similar grammar structures. Yet from very early on, Standard Mandarin Chinese has been promoted within the entire country at the expense of the ‘non-standard’ dialects. In kindergarten we were taught to speak in Standard Mandarin. In grade school there were posters hung on the wall in every hallway to remind us: Please speak Standard Mandarin. And, precisely because of that, to chat in the local dialect within a classroom setting became an easy act of rebellion. From when I was in the fourth grade till I finished high school, only those ‘backwards’ students would talk in dialects. It became a symbolic act, as if saying to the adults, ‘I refuse to be disciplined in any way.’ It was their way to strengthen bonds of friendship, also a barrier that kept out those Mandarin-speaking top students who were so often a bore. It was fascinating to see a student, in most cases a girl widely considered to have ‘good behavior,’ drop a dialectical word or two in a sudden burst of defiance and immediately get jeered at. Somehow a boy speaking in the local dialect, regardless of his grades, was less vulgar, less of a trespass.
In a way I found all of them endearing: one dialect in which my mother would sing to me when I was little, another in which my father and my grandfather would coo over me as a baby, yet another in which my grandmother taught me to address her (not as grandma or gramma or nana or… but as a bu), and Standard Mandarin Chinese as well, which I have always spoken at home as my way around the complex switch between dialects. Consequently, I can’t speak any of the dialects, though I understand each one of them. When I was still at school, a quiet kid who was surprisingly often accused of indifference, I could not turn to the same act of dialect speaking as a proof of my secret hope to be part of one group, and my refusal to interact too much with the other had long shut my door to them also. Surely my inability to speak a dialect means that, though I hold it close to my heart, I can’t really call it mine? And Standard Mandarin Chinese, despite being a language I’m fluent in, is what has claimed a diverse linguistic space for itself and no other. Even if it hadn’t, I would have been hesitant to call it my language just the same, if only for its origin in North China, not the part I come from. It is, essentially, not my dialect.
My generation of Chinese people from the city usually start to learn English in third grade. It was about the same for my parents’ generation. My maternal grandparents, on the other hand, started late, not until high school. Later they entered the same university and were faced with the same choice: to learn, besides English, either Japanese or Russian. It was the early 1950s. My grandmother chose Russian, my grandfather Japanese, and later he learned German too. Once he tried to persuade me to study German. He said it’s easy. I never asked, but I am certain that neither of them would see any of these languages as theirs: they were their ‘first and second foreign languages,’ as commonly called in China, part of the requirement if they wanted to graduate college. And now I can’t help wondering if, during his time in the US, my grandfather had encountered that same question too: do you write in English or in your language? I wonder how he would have answered. Was it different for him, was the expectation different, because he was already an established scholar when he first went to the US, because he studied chemistry, which is almost its own language because K, Ca, Na, Mg, and Al are symbols that will not fail you domestically or abroad, and (C3H6)n means what it means wherever you go? I wonder if he felt more assured because he knew what he wrote on the board would be understood, and if those formulas and equations, not the dialect he grew up speaking, nor Mandarin Chinese, nor English or Japanese or German, were what truly counted as his language. Such a standard romanticization of what it means to be a scientist.
The thing about language is that it can and will fail, regardless of whether it’s your language or not. This might be why, standing in a hospital room last summer, staring at my grandfather’s swollen face, I thought of two completely unrelated incidents successively, while remaining silent. I thought of one English class in junior high, when I said, ‘I would like to take a walk,’ and a boy shouted, ‘Take a shower!’ for no apparent reason, and I was nicknamed shower for a year. I thought of that name. Then I thought of the only time when my grandfather wrote me an email, several years ago, and he wrote it in English. I had felt confused, curious, but later it occurred to me that he may not have had a chance to learn the romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese, and without that knowledge it would be much easier for him to just type English. He had signed off as a die die, which is, strangely enough, the romanization of the word by which I address him, except when I say it I always say it with the accent of his dialect, so it should have been a dia dia instead, had he followed the romanization system properly. Then, unrelated to these unrelated incidents, I thought of the time when someone pronounced my name as ‘urine.’ I stood there thinking of these names, all of which I wished had never been, as if remembering all three at once could even them out to a certain extent. But I didn’t say anything. My grandfather also said very little. He was looking up at the ceiling most of the time.
In which language can you possibly say, ‘I wish you had not signed off as a die die’? ‘I wish you had written grandpa, just to keep it all in the same language, though I never called you that’? ‘Because even at that time when nothing had happened a word with die in it seemed too much like a bad omen’? Because death, especially when it has not happened, but is in the room, on the tip of everyone’s tongue, is the hardest thing to talk about, to think of. It is a word you just can’t pronounce in any language, any dialect, a word that refuses to be dreamed, to be broken down into scientific symbols and a neat equation. It is a place where language disintegrates and what is yours and what is not cease to matter.
Ever since my grandfather was hospitalized, he has been talking almost exclusively in the dialect of his home region. And because my mother can’t speak that dialect, she responds in the dialect of Hangzhou, where she was born and raised. Outside the hospital she continues speaking that dialect to me, and I answer in Standard Mandarin. Back at home when she and my father talk in the same dialect, hers is always with an accent. Sometimes I will correct her because though I don’t speak it, I know it when it’s spoken wrong. Then my father and I will tease my mother. And we will all laugh together. There was a time when my grandfather was continually being transferred from one hospital to another, and we had not laughed that much at home for a long while, maybe since my childhood, and it made me afraid, but what else could we do if not laughing till we broke into tears. I waited for the laughter to pause, like when you sleep in the same bed with another person and as soon as they begin to snore, you know you will spend the whole night waiting for the sound to catch itself all of a sudden, for it to halt, for something to happen. We laughed and I listened and waited, the taste of laughter bitter in my mouth like betrayal: I was betraying because how could we still laugh, betrayed because my parents had not talked to me in dialect since I started school and now that they were doing it, it felt unfamiliar, like a performance, and I had the feeling that they were not talking directly to me, that their words flew past me and landed on my linguistic absence. And finally, I was betraying them because I wrote down everything in a language they could not read, one that will often be questioned as something that does not belong to me by default. It is a language my grandfather used to speak and understand, one in which he used to write and even dream. In that, it is no different to me than his nearly inaudible and totally incomprehensible murmurs while he lies there motionless now, the way he said my name when I was two, eight, fifteen, twenty-four, or the letters he wrote and rewrote and rewrote again, before I was born, to tell his friends overseas that he was doing fine, to politely request the bank to wire him his money. All these languages are equally mine and not mine, sharing the same chance of being taken away from me, of failing.
One afternoon as I was going through my grandfather’s drawer feeling like a trespasser, I found three drafts of the same letter he was sending to a former colleague, now living in Arizona. There was no need to ask the question; folded up with the drafts was a small piece of paper, on which he had written the step-by-step instructions for using a translation website. I read through the drafts. I learned that my grandfather would sometimes mix up know and now and sometimes forget how many verbs he had used in a clause. He would say we do not please inviting women work help us, my son and daughter work in Hangzhou but we do not live in same hours, and we are still glad live. I put them down and read other letters too, some drafted more than twenty years ago. They were not composed by me or addressed to me, but when I picked them up they felt like mine, the language and every grammatical error felt like mine, for the simple reason that I could imagine him saying out loud what he had intended to write, in a language different from the one he wrote in, and his language became mine, for the brief moment I held the papers in my hand.
THE VERY FIRST FUNERAL I attended was for my aunt’s father, who had passed away after a long struggle with nasopharynx cancer. I was thirteen. It took place in a small funeral parlor, about an hour’s drive from the city. The parlor was crowded, both with guests and flowers, since my aunt’s father used to work in a hospital and had a lot of acquaintances. We stood around and listened to my aunt give the eulogy. The atmosphere was not particularly tense or heavy; it was understood that what we were witnessing, the passing of an elderly man more than eighty years of age, was not unexpected. He had had a rather happy life and enjoyed longevity. I remember hearing someone’s phone ringing once or twice. But still, my aunt cried. Standing near the back, watching her from behind all those grown-up hands and arms and legs wrapped in dark-colored fabric, I saw that her hands were trembling. Though really what I saw was the quivering of the two sheets of paper in her hands, magnifying their smallest motion like full-length wings on the tiny torso of a bird. Her voice chocked as she said, ‘Baba, we miss you,’ the only sentence I can recall from the entire eulogy. Now I wonder if my aunt also broke into tears because she knew she was losing her mother too. Even as she spoke, and her mother stood there listening quietly, there was another battle with another type of cancer happening in the room, within that calm, attentive, frail body. Her mother didn’t cry.
Yet there was something strange about the eulogy, not in itself, but in the way it was delivered. My aunt read the eulogy she had written in standard Mandarin Chinese, because it was the default, a language that every guest present should have no problem understanding, and also one that carried with it the seriousness of being the official language. But it was obvious that my aunt was not used to speaking it, or at least not so much at ease as when she spoke the Hangzhou dialect. I noticed that her tongue often forgot to roll up at the right places, that sometimes words were not properly nasalized, and these inevitably gave her an accent and made her struggle even more with her short speech. Before that day, I had rarely heard her speaking Mandarin. It was not how she had talked to her parents. Her parents, in turn, had communicated with each other in their own dialect. It was strange, hearing my aunt stumbling her way through, and I wondered if the other guests ever caught onto the same feeling: of sadness, and also, if not more, of helplessness. First she had to find words for her emotions and write them down, keeping in mind that they were not for her alone and thus required a certain amount of restraint and decency. Then she must read her words to a group of people in a language she didn’t speak very often. Had she wanted to say something directly to her deceased father, the most intimate way would have been to talk in her father’s dialect, but she didn’t speak that. For an alternative, she could have spoken in the way she had always spoken to her parents, in the dialect of our city, but it would have been considered inappropriate, not serious enough, just as in my school speaking in dialect was considered ‘backward.’ Mourning does not require language in the first place; in fact, it may even point to a rejection of language. But it is a different matter when you realize that you are to complete the ritual of mourning in a language not of your choice, one that you would not talk to yourself in and which did not reflect the deepest connection between you and the deceased person. And having lived with multiple dialects we are aware that on some occasions we are not to use them. We are always already preparing to mourn in a different language.
In my grandfather’s hospital room, I considered this for a second. Which language would he want spoken, for him? I used to think that, having left his hometown at a very young age and never been back since, maybe my grandfather did not feel as attached to its dialect, merely speaking it out of habit. But his utter refusal to speak any other language seemed to suggest otherwise. I imagined writing about him, about his life, in the dialect he spoke, which would be impossible because it doesn’t have its own writing system, just like the majority of the other dialects in China. In which language would he want to be known, be narrated and remembered? What difference would it make anyway? I thought of the letters my grandfather had written to his friends in Arizona and those he had received, the flatness of their tone that made them resemble passages taken from an English textbook. Our two granddaughters are in grad school. Last winter we vacationed in Pompeii, Italy, where the beautiful ruins are. John has started using a new email address. We have been getting a lot of snow this year. Sending our seasonal greetings and best wishes. It is a vocabulary that stopped short of spelling out what was actually happening beneath every action that required only one simple verb, because when you learn a new language the part that enables you to talk about internal suffering always comes the last, if it comes at all. But then again, when we were on our way to the hospital and then on our way back, when my mother tried to explain to me her nightmares and the trouble she had sleeping at night, in a language she had been speaking for more than fifty years, the only thing she managed to say was, ‘I don’t understand why he acts like this.’ And when I tried to respond I realized that words had deserted me too. In my mind I began drafting a letter, in the same simple, matter-of-fact way, devoid of emotions: dear Mr. J, I am the older granddaughter of Mr. Y. I am writing to tell you that Mr. Y has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and is now hospitalized indefinitely. Though it is sad, we feel lucky that the rest of the family are sticking together during this difficult time. Then I thought, would you say ‘difficult time’ when it doesn’t concern death? Are we really sticking together? But if not this, what else could I say? So my mother and I went on sitting quietly in the subway. And I thought, maybe, despite the difficulty over pronunciation, giving that eulogy in Mandarin actually lowered the risk of breaking into tears for my aunt, since there was a barrier that prevented her from diving too deep, going too close to herself, and forever leaving a shadow that would haunt the linguistic environment in which she felt the most comfortable. It seems that to mourn in a language from which you feel detached is the only way to mourn safely, for then it turns into some sort of a performance. Sending our seasonal greetings and best wishes. Only in separating language from the soft tissues of one’s body that recognize every word as an automatic reflex can one possibly write at all. Only in a language that is so obviously ‘not mine’ can I begin to picture illness and fragility without seeing it, because here a word does not naturally bring with it an associated image, and sometimes it feels like walking with my eyes wide open yet completely blind and somehow not tripping or falling, walking through a space I know is not mine but can make sense of. It makes me miss falling asleep listening to a mixture of dialects, believing that I am capable of understanding. Though, still, I wish I could speak the dialect of my grandfather’s hometown. I wished for this, more than anything, when we visited him for the last time before I left home. I had been afraid that he might not recognize me, but he said my name when we walked in. He said, ‘I hope you can grow up happily.’ I wished I could say something as a response, in his familiar dialect. In the end I said nothing. We smiled briefly and stopped. We looked at each other in the eye, in silence.
In a way I found all of them endearing: one dialect in which my mother would sing to me when I was little, another in which my father and my grandfather would coo over me as a baby, yet another in which my grandmother taught me to address her (not as grandma or gramma or nana or… but as a bu), and Standard Mandarin Chinese as well, which I have always spoken at home as my way around the complex switch between dialects. Consequently, I can’t speak any of the dialects, though I understand each one of them. When I was still at school, a quiet kid who was surprisingly often accused of indifference, I could not turn to the same act of dialect speaking as a proof of my secret hope to be part of one group, and my refusal to interact too much with the other had long shut my door to them also. Surely my inability to speak a dialect means that, though I hold it close to my heart, I can’t really call it mine? And Standard Mandarin Chinese, despite being a language I’m fluent in, is what has claimed a diverse linguistic space for itself and no other. Even if it hadn’t, I would have been hesitant to call it my language just the same, if only for its origin in North China, not the part I come from. It is, essentially, not my dialect.
My generation of Chinese people from the city usually start to learn English in third grade. It was about the same for my parents’ generation. My maternal grandparents, on the other hand, started late, not until high school. Later they entered the same university and were faced with the same choice: to learn, besides English, either Japanese or Russian. It was the early 1950s. My grandmother chose Russian, my grandfather Japanese, and later he learned German too. Once he tried to persuade me to study German. He said it’s easy. I never asked, but I am certain that neither of them would see any of these languages as theirs: they were their ‘first and second foreign languages,’ as commonly called in China, part of the requirement if they wanted to graduate college. And now I can’t help wondering if, during his time in the US, my grandfather had encountered that same question too: do you write in English or in your language? I wonder how he would have answered. Was it different for him, was the expectation different, because he was already an established scholar when he first went to the US, because he studied chemistry, which is almost its own language because K, Ca, Na, Mg, and Al are symbols that will not fail you domestically or abroad, and (C3H6)n means what it means wherever you go? I wonder if he felt more assured because he knew what he wrote on the board would be understood, and if those formulas and equations, not the dialect he grew up speaking, nor Mandarin Chinese, nor English or Japanese or German, were what truly counted as his language. Such a standard romanticization of what it means to be a scientist.
The thing about language is that it can and will fail, regardless of whether it’s your language or not. This might be why, standing in a hospital room last summer, staring at my grandfather’s swollen face, I thought of two completely unrelated incidents successively, while remaining silent. I thought of one English class in junior high, when I said, ‘I would like to take a walk,’ and a boy shouted, ‘Take a shower!’ for no apparent reason, and I was nicknamed shower for a year. I thought of that name. Then I thought of the only time when my grandfather wrote me an email, several years ago, and he wrote it in English. I had felt confused, curious, but later it occurred to me that he may not have had a chance to learn the romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese, and without that knowledge it would be much easier for him to just type English. He had signed off as a die die, which is, strangely enough, the romanization of the word by which I address him, except when I say it I always say it with the accent of his dialect, so it should have been a dia dia instead, had he followed the romanization system properly. Then, unrelated to these unrelated incidents, I thought of the time when someone pronounced my name as ‘urine.’ I stood there thinking of these names, all of which I wished had never been, as if remembering all three at once could even them out to a certain extent. But I didn’t say anything. My grandfather also said very little. He was looking up at the ceiling most of the time.
In which language can you possibly say, ‘I wish you had not signed off as a die die’? ‘I wish you had written grandpa, just to keep it all in the same language, though I never called you that’? ‘Because even at that time when nothing had happened a word with die in it seemed too much like a bad omen’? Because death, especially when it has not happened, but is in the room, on the tip of everyone’s tongue, is the hardest thing to talk about, to think of. It is a word you just can’t pronounce in any language, any dialect, a word that refuses to be dreamed, to be broken down into scientific symbols and a neat equation. It is a place where language disintegrates and what is yours and what is not cease to matter.
Ever since my grandfather was hospitalized, he has been talking almost exclusively in the dialect of his home region. And because my mother can’t speak that dialect, she responds in the dialect of Hangzhou, where she was born and raised. Outside the hospital she continues speaking that dialect to me, and I answer in Standard Mandarin. Back at home when she and my father talk in the same dialect, hers is always with an accent. Sometimes I will correct her because though I don’t speak it, I know it when it’s spoken wrong. Then my father and I will tease my mother. And we will all laugh together. There was a time when my grandfather was continually being transferred from one hospital to another, and we had not laughed that much at home for a long while, maybe since my childhood, and it made me afraid, but what else could we do if not laughing till we broke into tears. I waited for the laughter to pause, like when you sleep in the same bed with another person and as soon as they begin to snore, you know you will spend the whole night waiting for the sound to catch itself all of a sudden, for it to halt, for something to happen. We laughed and I listened and waited, the taste of laughter bitter in my mouth like betrayal: I was betraying because how could we still laugh, betrayed because my parents had not talked to me in dialect since I started school and now that they were doing it, it felt unfamiliar, like a performance, and I had the feeling that they were not talking directly to me, that their words flew past me and landed on my linguistic absence. And finally, I was betraying them because I wrote down everything in a language they could not read, one that will often be questioned as something that does not belong to me by default. It is a language my grandfather used to speak and understand, one in which he used to write and even dream. In that, it is no different to me than his nearly inaudible and totally incomprehensible murmurs while he lies there motionless now, the way he said my name when I was two, eight, fifteen, twenty-four, or the letters he wrote and rewrote and rewrote again, before I was born, to tell his friends overseas that he was doing fine, to politely request the bank to wire him his money. All these languages are equally mine and not mine, sharing the same chance of being taken away from me, of failing.
One afternoon as I was going through my grandfather’s drawer feeling like a trespasser, I found three drafts of the same letter he was sending to a former colleague, now living in Arizona. There was no need to ask the question; folded up with the drafts was a small piece of paper, on which he had written the step-by-step instructions for using a translation website. I read through the drafts. I learned that my grandfather would sometimes mix up know and now and sometimes forget how many verbs he had used in a clause. He would say we do not please inviting women work help us, my son and daughter work in Hangzhou but we do not live in same hours, and we are still glad live. I put them down and read other letters too, some drafted more than twenty years ago. They were not composed by me or addressed to me, but when I picked them up they felt like mine, the language and every grammatical error felt like mine, for the simple reason that I could imagine him saying out loud what he had intended to write, in a language different from the one he wrote in, and his language became mine, for the brief moment I held the papers in my hand.
THE VERY FIRST FUNERAL I attended was for my aunt’s father, who had passed away after a long struggle with nasopharynx cancer. I was thirteen. It took place in a small funeral parlor, about an hour’s drive from the city. The parlor was crowded, both with guests and flowers, since my aunt’s father used to work in a hospital and had a lot of acquaintances. We stood around and listened to my aunt give the eulogy. The atmosphere was not particularly tense or heavy; it was understood that what we were witnessing, the passing of an elderly man more than eighty years of age, was not unexpected. He had had a rather happy life and enjoyed longevity. I remember hearing someone’s phone ringing once or twice. But still, my aunt cried. Standing near the back, watching her from behind all those grown-up hands and arms and legs wrapped in dark-colored fabric, I saw that her hands were trembling. Though really what I saw was the quivering of the two sheets of paper in her hands, magnifying their smallest motion like full-length wings on the tiny torso of a bird. Her voice chocked as she said, ‘Baba, we miss you,’ the only sentence I can recall from the entire eulogy. Now I wonder if my aunt also broke into tears because she knew she was losing her mother too. Even as she spoke, and her mother stood there listening quietly, there was another battle with another type of cancer happening in the room, within that calm, attentive, frail body. Her mother didn’t cry.
Yet there was something strange about the eulogy, not in itself, but in the way it was delivered. My aunt read the eulogy she had written in standard Mandarin Chinese, because it was the default, a language that every guest present should have no problem understanding, and also one that carried with it the seriousness of being the official language. But it was obvious that my aunt was not used to speaking it, or at least not so much at ease as when she spoke the Hangzhou dialect. I noticed that her tongue often forgot to roll up at the right places, that sometimes words were not properly nasalized, and these inevitably gave her an accent and made her struggle even more with her short speech. Before that day, I had rarely heard her speaking Mandarin. It was not how she had talked to her parents. Her parents, in turn, had communicated with each other in their own dialect. It was strange, hearing my aunt stumbling her way through, and I wondered if the other guests ever caught onto the same feeling: of sadness, and also, if not more, of helplessness. First she had to find words for her emotions and write them down, keeping in mind that they were not for her alone and thus required a certain amount of restraint and decency. Then she must read her words to a group of people in a language she didn’t speak very often. Had she wanted to say something directly to her deceased father, the most intimate way would have been to talk in her father’s dialect, but she didn’t speak that. For an alternative, she could have spoken in the way she had always spoken to her parents, in the dialect of our city, but it would have been considered inappropriate, not serious enough, just as in my school speaking in dialect was considered ‘backward.’ Mourning does not require language in the first place; in fact, it may even point to a rejection of language. But it is a different matter when you realize that you are to complete the ritual of mourning in a language not of your choice, one that you would not talk to yourself in and which did not reflect the deepest connection between you and the deceased person. And having lived with multiple dialects we are aware that on some occasions we are not to use them. We are always already preparing to mourn in a different language.
In my grandfather’s hospital room, I considered this for a second. Which language would he want spoken, for him? I used to think that, having left his hometown at a very young age and never been back since, maybe my grandfather did not feel as attached to its dialect, merely speaking it out of habit. But his utter refusal to speak any other language seemed to suggest otherwise. I imagined writing about him, about his life, in the dialect he spoke, which would be impossible because it doesn’t have its own writing system, just like the majority of the other dialects in China. In which language would he want to be known, be narrated and remembered? What difference would it make anyway? I thought of the letters my grandfather had written to his friends in Arizona and those he had received, the flatness of their tone that made them resemble passages taken from an English textbook. Our two granddaughters are in grad school. Last winter we vacationed in Pompeii, Italy, where the beautiful ruins are. John has started using a new email address. We have been getting a lot of snow this year. Sending our seasonal greetings and best wishes. It is a vocabulary that stopped short of spelling out what was actually happening beneath every action that required only one simple verb, because when you learn a new language the part that enables you to talk about internal suffering always comes the last, if it comes at all. But then again, when we were on our way to the hospital and then on our way back, when my mother tried to explain to me her nightmares and the trouble she had sleeping at night, in a language she had been speaking for more than fifty years, the only thing she managed to say was, ‘I don’t understand why he acts like this.’ And when I tried to respond I realized that words had deserted me too. In my mind I began drafting a letter, in the same simple, matter-of-fact way, devoid of emotions: dear Mr. J, I am the older granddaughter of Mr. Y. I am writing to tell you that Mr. Y has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and is now hospitalized indefinitely. Though it is sad, we feel lucky that the rest of the family are sticking together during this difficult time. Then I thought, would you say ‘difficult time’ when it doesn’t concern death? Are we really sticking together? But if not this, what else could I say? So my mother and I went on sitting quietly in the subway. And I thought, maybe, despite the difficulty over pronunciation, giving that eulogy in Mandarin actually lowered the risk of breaking into tears for my aunt, since there was a barrier that prevented her from diving too deep, going too close to herself, and forever leaving a shadow that would haunt the linguistic environment in which she felt the most comfortable. It seems that to mourn in a language from which you feel detached is the only way to mourn safely, for then it turns into some sort of a performance. Sending our seasonal greetings and best wishes. Only in separating language from the soft tissues of one’s body that recognize every word as an automatic reflex can one possibly write at all. Only in a language that is so obviously ‘not mine’ can I begin to picture illness and fragility without seeing it, because here a word does not naturally bring with it an associated image, and sometimes it feels like walking with my eyes wide open yet completely blind and somehow not tripping or falling, walking through a space I know is not mine but can make sense of. It makes me miss falling asleep listening to a mixture of dialects, believing that I am capable of understanding. Though, still, I wish I could speak the dialect of my grandfather’s hometown. I wished for this, more than anything, when we visited him for the last time before I left home. I had been afraid that he might not recognize me, but he said my name when we walked in. He said, ‘I hope you can grow up happily.’ I wished I could say something as a response, in his familiar dialect. In the end I said nothing. We smiled briefly and stopped. We looked at each other in the eye, in silence.
Yuxin Zhao is a writer from Hangzhou, China and currently based in the UK. Yuxin mainly writes experimental fiction and poetry on immigration, language, family history, and queer desire. Yuxin’s debut novel, The Moons: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog, is forthcoming from Calamari Archive.
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