Elaine Qiao commonspeak
To my 妈妈, who cannot sleep when I am sick and loves me with a capriciousness most human.
There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear.
–Audre Lorde, “Who Said It Was Simple”
Tongue-Tied
Mannequin on the Pavement
This is the skin of a killer, Bella.
PROLOGUE
EVERY NIGHT, I tell myself the same lie. Just 15 minutes. Then I’ll get up and do whatever I need to do, and I’ll be more productive for it. For the past three months, I have not gone to bed. I fall asleep, yes, but unintentionally, noncommittally. Every night, I get under the covers, makeup still on, contacts still in, just to “rest for a bit.” I doomscroll for an average of two hours before I pass out and stir awake, panicked about homework. Every time this happens, I fall back to sleep on instinct, and without fail, I don’t wake up until 5 AM. To combat this, I set alarms every 5 minutes for hours, but I’ve Pavloved myself to turn them off within seconds. Originally, this was so I wouldn’t wake dormmates, although now the effect has extended to myself. I’ve tried setting my alarm to Taylor Swift’s “22” or “Sucker” by the Jonas Brothers, vibrating alarms under pillows, complex alarms that make you solve a math problem or do a dance, or whatever, before the alarm shuts off. Somehow, I’ve trained myself to do algebra even in my sleep. To avoid doing my actual math homework, I’ve conditioned my subconscious to solve equations instead. The last time I recall solving a problem, I somehow factored 3x2+17x+28 in less than a minute. The first time I blacked out, I was convinced
I’d contracted something. Were the years of sleeping for four hours a night catching up to me? Now, at least, I get a choppy (thanks to all the alarms) eight hours. What was I doing in my half-asleep state that I just couldn’t ever seem to remember? How many times did I stir awake, slam my alarm, say something, get out of bed, take a drink of water, talk to someone? What does it say about me that I keep letting this happen? Unless I have some deadline at 11:59 PM, there is absolutely nothing on God’s green earth that could motivate me to not follow this ritual.
There are three things this tells me about humanity, or at least myself. One, my propensity to live in perpetual denial exceeds all earthly bounds. Yet I’m not fooling myself, I haven’t let myself do this on nights with a deadline, after all. My self-deceit is conscious, though it skates by unconsciously. Two, faced with little consequence for my actions, I will never change. Sure, my REM sleep is probably lacking and I’m likely deeply sleep deprived, but unless my procrastinator tendencies lead me to bombing an exam or missing an interview, I may very well be doing this into my forties. Three, there is so much in my mind that evades me, thoughts culminating into action, until I very well may be living a double life I have no recollection of.
Maybe the current administration has become too much for my conscious mind and now I resort to shitposting in my sleep. Perhaps sleep also
makes me an excellent mathematician. Maybe 23,576 * 7 comes more naturally when I’m unconscious. Perhaps in my sleep I am a quiet neighbor. Perhaps I’ve even given ballet a shot. Maybe I hit my degagés better when I’m snoring. I know I sleep talk, perhaps I’m a sleepwalker, too.
Bad daughters don’t let mothers
Chew on your teeth
Bite the hangnails off your feet
And know that you can’t save her
It’s always about what you deserve
So burn the optic nerve &
Resist the urge to shave that stiff head of hair off
There’s oil in a glass
Run it under the faucet
Let it bubble
Feel the slip between your fingers
Look
You sit on carpet and line gray hairs along a sheet of Bounty
You couldn’t snap if you tried
You still can’t roll your R’s
Listen to Epicurus
You are happy
You love
You are loved
Feel the weight of it
Let it flatten you
To Baby Aveeno
MY SWEATER collar itches. I scratch hard enough to pull skin. By then the skin has reddened, threatening to flake. These days, I moisturize like it’s my ticket to the afterlife. Working handfuls of CeraVe into my skin, I apply yet another layer until the cream begins to pill. My mom would boast of eating tons of fruit during her pregnancy. That’s why my skin was so naturally smooth, she’d claim, happily sighing and saying the three apples and carton of blueberries a day were all worth it. So when I first broke out in eczema, my first thought was that I did wrong by her. The way the cells on my skin seemed to rise, clump, and crack felt like judgement. But I take such good care of my skin! I moisturize twice a day! I defended myself in the mirror, prying at my skin even though I knew it would only irritate it more. When denial ran out I tried everything. But after every baby cream formula and fancy Japanese serum didn’t do its job, I let the flakes fall where they may and my jar of CeraVe sat collecting dust in the corner of my bookshelf. When even the non-eczemic parts of my skin itched from the dryness, I’d scratch so mindlessly and ruthlessly I’d draw blood, scabs forming on my pores. I’m surprised now how I let this compulsion go on for so long. My skin was practically shedding. On a self-
help run, I decided to fix my snakeskin. But I keep my nails longer now—easier to scratch with. Writing this now, even with smooth skin that shines under the light, I feel an itch. Someone has pulled me aside and my sweater collar shifts. I must scratch again.
I am water.
Greeting
I am water, I say.
If I say it enough times, I’ll surely drown under its weight. Words carry meaning, so I’ll try to speak meaninglessly. I don’t want my words to mean things, as words do. I’d rather drown.
I am water. I am water, I say.
Fluid, I refuse definition. Ice cold, lukewarm, then boiling, warmed by the air around me, set ablaze by the fire at my feet. Water cannot catch fire, as words do. And yet water is word, just as word becomes water, flowing out of the mouths of the careless whose words want meaning: love, hate, forgiveness.
I am not red, not blue, but transparent, and intention flows through me. I only slow, I cannot stop.
I am water. I am water, I say.
I hold no shape, I nourish, I kill. Stop. I resist mean-
ing. Engulfed by the force. I want to drown under my own weight, remold and mold again from the pieces of my own tears. If things are circular, I want to end up back here someday.
I am water.
Good things come in threes, so by now I’ll surely have drowned. I want to flood the air out of my own nose. I want the pinching pressure at its bridge.
Revival
BUT SHE loved it all. The overindulgence, the haze of everyday, she adored the experience of self-loving and self-loathing. And she would question herself to ease the anxiety in her lungs, in every caught breath. During sermons she’d sit and listen— she always listened. She wasn’t a cheap cynic. Yet, some nagging worm tugged at the strings within her, inching her towards the Truth, she’d thought. That a church was just a building and a priest was just a man and the Bible was just pages out of a book someone wrote too long ago.
But she was terrified of death. She lived to live, drank all the wildness she exuded only to spring it back forth dreaded fading into dust and being blown away.
Her mother loved her ferociously, all of girl’s wildness became mother’s love. And she felt this, the girl, felt all the thousand pebbles that mount from a life’s worth of wishes lost. She felt the weight of her mother’s hand when it glided past her ear to tuck a strand of fallen hair, the way it curved around her jaw and fought the urge to choke. But nothing steals words like the cutting of air.
She hated her father, Father’s selfishness and the domination of the house, of the home, of that importunate, odorous presence that killed mother-girl both. Her mother had died long ago, and she, too,
could not quite breathe. To claim ownership without committing care, to demand cleanliness and admonish cleaning, to relish attention but disdain voice, to need hate but want love. That is to be a man. That is to be Man.
She feared it all, ran from her mother and yet startled, stumped at Father. Sometimes at night she would climb under her bed and let out silent screams, feeling the expression mold itself into her face, into the very textile of her skin.
But she loved Him. Deeply. Romantically. Even in fleeing the church, abandonment of pious thought, she could not stop. He knocked and entered the door of her heart and split open its muscle. Love is ripping. Love is tearing to shreds. And her love tore itself into pieces. It nestled deep into her gut, wormed into her feet, and she could not feel the sun on the pavement.
Yet she feared death more than even Him. To let Him feast upon her, let him flood over her nose and breath. For He had whispered, and it had been done, and He had given her breath with His very own. Such is love. She wanted to love. More than she wanted happiness, more than she wanted freedom, more than she wanted life. If to be saved was to let live, she’d be saved. She’d kneel and clasp her hands and whisper desperately, amorously, willingly, just for that taste of wildness, just to never throw that first pebble down the well.
Archetype
A KNOCK on the door. 女儿 quickly turns off her phone. 妈妈 walks in, gaze downcast not out of surrender but resentment. She wordlessly sets down a bowl of apples, cut and peeled, atop a napkin so the sweating ceramic doesn’t damage the IKEA particleboard.
女儿 (avoiding gaze): Thanks.
妈妈: I’m making steamed cabbage for dinner. Have some, or not. 你爱吃不吃。1
女儿 doesn’t respond.
妈妈 sighs audibly, then walks away. The door closes more heavily than it needs to.
女儿 waits a bit, reopening TikTok and scrolling, before grabbing one of the toothpicks lodged in a slice. She chews carefully, biting off first the slivers of apple skin 妈妈 missed.
妈妈 storms back in.
1 I never did care for steamed cabbage. 东北菜.The watery chew with the moist rice leaves my teeth wiggling.
妈妈: 你要是继续这样的话以后我真的不管你 了。2
女儿 blinks.
妈妈 pauses for a response, then starts again.
妈妈: 你这样跟你妈妈说话你心不疼吗？
女儿 (pained): 心疼。3
妈妈: 那你是为什么呢？
女儿 (eyeing the apples): Okay I just don’t think this is fair. Can we stop? I don’t even understand why we started arguing and you didn’t pull your punches either. I think we both need to take accountability. I’m really sorry for hurting you.4
妈妈: Watch your tone. 这是道歉的态度吗？你这 么骄傲有趣吗？
女儿: You didn’t apologize either. 5
2 I’d cling to her guidance whenever she threatened to rescind it, but that rebellious preteen impulse still festers.
3 There’s nothing more heartbreaking than my mother crying. Anger infinitely softened by feminine tears. I’ll never feel more helpless than when I’ve hurt her.
4 The closest I get to mansplaining.
5 Say it, please. I need to hear it.
妈妈: 真心跟你妈妈道歉这么难吗？我从小到 大就没有什么好东西。没人照顾我。没人管 我。You don’t know how lucky you are.
女儿 nods.
妈妈: 你让我太心寒了。
女儿: 妈妈让我自己待一会儿可以吗？I’ll come down for dinner. Just leave me alone for a bit.
妈妈: 随便你吧。
女儿 puts another slice of apple in her mouth.6
6 There’s a special sourness that comes with apology apples. Tangy, and there’s a bit more give in the flesh. I eat them so often I forget the taste of regular apples. Fujis without the awkward regret are a bit too sweet for me, anyway.
Fried Fish
Once I accidentally swallowed fish bone and all—
No choking
There’s fish in the sink
It stinks now, soaked with the dishes
A finger digs into fisheye Curiosity blinds the dead
Smooth, smooth, smooth
Glide, tail to head
But teeth saw I wasn’t built to be a one-take wonder
Watch its phantom flops
Its clown frown
Listen to all its glub glubnese
姥爷 always fries them, no batter
Fish taste better with a metallic twang Drier, please
I trust in the feeling
Let it swim down
Garra rufa
Place your feet in a tub
Let the starved eat off your skin
Tongue-Tied
IN THE bottom left corner, I see a swan-like toucan. Above it, a judgy hamster. To the left, tulle and three packages of earrings. I see a mirror in the back, and five roses. Next to the mirror, a violin.
When I was seven, my mother showed me the infamous “stroke image.” I remember intuitively understanding it was some sort of prank, not wanting to look too closely. She asked me what I saw, and I began to describe an object before trailing off, unsure. When my grandfather had a stroke three years ago, I returned to this image. If I don’t look too closely at it, it isn’t too difficult to identify specific objects. Perhaps they’re different to another viewer. Some qualities are definitely inconsistent with their real-life counterparts. But it isn’t too difficult to make sense of something. The image isn’t indescribable, and so it is not incomprehensible. But there’s no assurance that what is comprehended is accurate—I’ll never know what the objects actually were.
I think about Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia when I think of my grandfather. There are few things more highbrow and white than psychoanalysis, but for me, it prompts my short, square-headed, stern, 相声-watching 姥爷. For Freud, mourning is the conscious process of grieving something iden-
tifiable. A person, a place, an object. Melancholia is the subconscious grieving for something we cannot define, pushing us into our subconscious, creating a permanent state of lack.1 Asian melancholia, as conceptualized by critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han, refers to the Asian American experience—a generational build-up of vague grief that causes self-isolation and lack of, or inaccurate identity.2 While my grandpa is not Asian-American, I think of him whenever Asian melancholia comes up (usually in my debate rounds). I feel disconnected from my Asian heritage because I am seas away. But I also think about my grandpa, physically in China, growing up under the Cultural Revolution. My mother doesn’t go in detail about the family tree, but I know my great grandfather was a merchant, and tortured so severely he lost his mind. I wonder how 姥爷 felt, then. Did he watch books going up in flames? Was he happy when the 高考 got cancelled? I’ve never met someone out of their mind, so I cannot even picture my great grandfather. I imagine dazed eyes, incoherent speech, a general lack of presence, an obscure ticking. I don’t know how 姥爷
1 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey. (Repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1999).
2 David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic LIves of Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
could go without mentioning it all these years. Maybe beyond the headline of the event, the details are so buried he can’t reach them anymore.
If I had to guess how my grandfather would get sick, I’d probably guess heart attack. Hypertension runs in the family, after all, and my grandpa was always rather tightly-wound. When I grew up in Beijing, the rule was to not talk back to 姥爷. He was the type of man who always had something to say. And if you got the better of him, he’d yell so hard you’d wish you just kept your mouth shut. 「 姥爷你不是说吃饭不该说话吗？ 」 「 闭 嘴，吃你的饭。」After moving to the US, I kept in touch with 姥姥, but never 姥爷. There was never a conscious decision to not speak with him, it just happened. I’ve never stopped feeling surprised at how much he’s mellowed out. Whenever I call grandma, he peeks in the background, smiling and softly asks how studies are going. He texts my mom that I shouldn’t overwork myself. I wouldn’t have bet my money on a stroke taking my grandpa out. Scientifically, the hunch is entirely irrational, since hypertension is a leading cause of stroke. But the symptoms—confusion, vision problems, difficulty speaking—just don’t line up with 姥爷. Much more like him to knock out cold, or carry on like nothing happened (an asymptomatic heart attack on the other hand feels entirely in-character).
In Chinese culture, we believe that sickness
is caused by a buildup of negative emotions, cancer the result of an inflamed heart that felt too strongly. In that sense, I wasn’t surprised that 姥爷 got sick. But I cannot dwell on the image of him panicked and confused, unable to put anything into words. I dreamed about it once, grandma rushing over, him clutching his chest even though it was his head in pain, general bedlam culminating in grandma rushing over a tub for him to vomit into. I wonder if their small apartment fragmented all of a sudden, if the flowery quilts grandma meticulously laid over the couch seemed kaleidoscopic, or if the fold-up chairs seemed limb-like. I haven’t asked him about it. I wonder now if I should.
The general stroke image still circulating through Reddit is the only one I know. But I can only imagine how much more terrifying it is to see your daily life shattered in front of you. Do you still know where the mugs in the kitchen are on instinct? Does your mind jump to the one uneven floorboard in that moment, desperate for anything familiar? When things within reach become intangible, and words on the tip of your tongue just dissolve, did he feel caged within his bones?
Mannequin on the Pavement
Your parents fought once
Dad yelling so hard spit flings
You want to slap him, bitch-slap, no punch
Flat-palmed, hand sprawled so wide your fingers curl backward
66th Street
Stumbling in her block heel
Field mouse squeal
You feel it in the balls of your feet
Damn first person shooters
Street Fighter
Chun-Li’s killer thighs
The thing about men is they love noise
Fist bunched, thumb forward, You can hear the crunch of bone
This is the skin of a killer, Bella.
I’LL SAY it here and never again: Edward Cullen turned me straight. I was, and to some extent still am, obsessed with Twilight. In fact, in my supplemental essay to Columbia, I listed The Twilight Saga as one of the most impactful works in my life. I blame my rejection entirely on that fact. When I was in second grade, my mom told me a distorted synopsis of Eclipse on the walk to the bus stop. I got the gist, though. A werewolf and vampire both fall in love with a girl and fight to protect her, all while the vampire might snap her neck himself. From then on, Twilight became mythologized in my memory, some grown-up thriller for me to read when I was older. Yes, I approached Twilight thinking it was a gothic horror. In hindsight, it is closer to that than the young adult fever dream of a romance it was intended to be. In the words of Robert Pattinson, who portrayed Edward with a befitting constipation, “it was like it was a book that wasn’t supposed to be published.” But to fifth grade me, Twilight was the most enchantingly twisted love story, and I fell hopelessly in love with Edward. Angsty, brooding, self-loathing,
everything I wanted in a man. I wanted so desperately to understand the misunderstood, and to receive the same in return (I was, of course, unfathomably complex at age 11).
I remember when my childhood best friend, Sophie (whom I was in love with and in denial about being in love with), and I both read Twilight. I was always more into it than she was, and I remember being offended when she revealed herself on Team Jacob during a carpool. First of all, the fact that she chose a werewolf over a vampire was beyond me. Everyone knows vampires are hotter. But Jacob was probably the lesser of two evils. At least Jacob didn’t climb into Bella’s window every night to watch her sleep. At least Jacob didn’t stalk her, lock her away, constantly fight the impulse to kill her, and try to bribe her into Dartmouth. But the point is, I loved Edward, toxic as he was, because I, too, wanted to be saved from suburbia, from being othered, from an unexceptional life. And in a literal sense, reading Twilight did save me from that dreadfully enclosed townhouse. The year I started reading Twilight, my grandparents on my dad’s side were staying with us. My mom would often escape their lurking desire for confrontation by driving me to the library. No way to argue about dinner if we wouldn’t be home for it. And there, cooped up in a corner of the quiet second floor away from the children’s section, I read of Edward saving Bella from scary men late at night, en-
visioning that he’d do the same for me. I, too, wanted a supernatural, glittery boyfriend to sweep me into some chaotic, fantastical world and forever protect me.
Within that description, “boy” was always implied. Lisa Taddeo, in Three Women, wrote about “the idea of a man, the idea of someone who is larger, the idea of being ecstatically subjugated by masculine energy.”1 And while the language is a bit icky, I think it’s summed up so much of my relationship to love. More than I like men, I’ve always wanted the idea of a man.
In New Moon, Edward leaves Bella, afraid of putting her in any more danger with his presence (after throwing her into a mirror, of course), and Bella enters a catatonic state for months. Brushing her loving father and doting friends aside, she chases hallucinations of him that only come when she puts herself at risk. Cue getting on strangers’ motorcycles and cliff diving. Funnily enough, due to some disturbed domino effect, this prompts their reunification and eventual happy ending. I, too, in a partially subconscious effort to embody Bella, spent years chasing after boys, family and friends always second to playground love. Many a night spent crying until I went temporarily blind and countless thumb-numb-
1 Lisa Taddeo, Three Women, (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2019), 46.
ing paragraphs of text messages have taught me nothing. I’m simply biding my time until the next one comes along and leaves, taking my sanity with him.
There’s probably some moral here about impressionable young girls and the responsibility of authors who write to them, but that’s besides the point. The point is that Twilight enforced my compulsive heterosexuality. If there’s anything useful that Twilight taught me, it’s that love is a choice (save for the gross power imbalance between 16-year-old girl and 100-year-old vampire). God knows Bella had to go out of her way to be with the bloodsucker of her dreams. This is not to say I don’t involuntarily find myself drawn to certain people, but attraction isn’t the same as love, and as long as love is a choice I can always choose to love a man. In fact, wouldn’t it be selfish not to? If I can, since I always have, don’t I owe it to my poor Chinese, God-fearing parents to keep loving those grumpy boys?
Beyond the issue of family, I wasn’t even sure I liked women until last year. When you suppress it for so long, you start to forget what it’s supposed to feel like, I guess. Sara Ahmed gave a lecture on “Queer Use,” beginning with the uses of “queer.”
“Queer: a word with a history; a word that has been flung like a stone; picked up and hurled at us, a word we can claim for us. Queer: odd, strange, unseemly, disturbed, disturbing. Queer: a feeling, a sick feeling;
feeling queer as feeling nauseous.”2 For a long time, I was scared to use the word “queer.” Is it a word for me to reclaim? Am I queer? Do I feel queer? Even now, though I’d readily critique the Saga and its problematic, internalized-misogynistic narrative, I’m still hoping for some shiny vampire boy I can talk down and glean love from. I look for 2000’s Abercrombie long sleeves advertised as Bella Swan-core. My dream car is still a red Chevy pickup. I sleep in a Spencer’s shirt featuring Edward’s headshot on a glittery heart and the words: “I Love Boys Who Sparkle.” In the words of Julia Roberts, from my least favorite 90’s rom com: “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”3 Pick me, Edward. Choose me. Love me.4
2 Sara Ahmed, “Queer Use,” Kessler Lecture at CLAGS (2017). https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/11/08/queer-use/
3 See Notting Hill (1999). I didn’t care for Hugh Grant in that film.
4 See Grey’s Anatomy season 2, episode 5. I’m never letting Ellen Pompeo live this down.
继续走
IN AUTUMN, maple leaf pods fall in hordes, lining the sidewalks so thickly they form a kind of sludge after being stepped on a thousand times a day. By autumn they’ve faded to brown and descend in a fluttering spiral. I used to be convinced they were bug wings. Their veiny, bean-like shape reminded me of moths, and they moved like them, too. In Beijing, we walk thousands of steps a day. I used to think I had to watch my feet to move. Without my eyes glued to the road I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t fall, much less that I’d walk straight. But I could not watch the leaf pods writhe on the sidewalk. I’d avoid going out in autumn, but I could still see them flutter through the windows. Every morning I’d beg my grandpa to take me to school on his electric bike, but the walk home remained buggy. Much like my fear of butterflies and moths, there was no rational explanation for my fear of the leaf pods. Maybe it’s evolutionary instinct, but I doubt there was ever a point from Genesis until now where maple leaf pods posed a significant threat to my survival. I don’t see maple leaf pods blanketing the streets often now, but whenever I do I feel a full-body shiver and cannot walk quite right until two streets over. Still, I used to say autumn was my favorite season. Because of its seriousness, its
academia, because of the pretty maple leaves despite their disgusting pods. I’d forget about the pods until I saw them again. Only today did I find out what they were called. But even now I stiffen at the memory of a leaf pod fluttering its way down behind me, the way I’d shriek and cling to my grandmother’s arm, or silently trudge on in tears.
错别字
I GORGE myself on Korean pear because I can’t bear to be separated from you. 分离， 分梨。 Separation is a homophone for sharing pear. 「 吃， 」 妈妈 would command me , toothpick spearing a cube of pear held straight to my mouth. 「 你不 吃的话爸爸妈妈就会分离了。」No two people could share pear, you ate it alone or with two others. Otherwise, you and the one other person would be forced apart. When I was younger I used to question the mechanism of this separation. What exactly would drive us away from one another? I imagined fate emerging from a street corner to snatch my mother away from me, or forming tendrils, entering through the ears to hypnotize and lead her away. On warm nights I’d crave one cool, crisp bite of pear, dreaming of the sweet juice that’d seep past its coarse skin. But 爸爸 was working the night shift, so one bite would turn into thirty until the juice pooled in my mouth so unbearably I’d vomit. Slicing the pear made it easier, but I was clumsy with a knife and the tough core of the pear often made for accidents. Eventually I’d learned to just not eat pear until both parents were home. 「 我要走了， 」my mom would often announce during her rough patch with 爸爸. 「 去哪里？ 」I’d always thought. It wasn’t
the leaving that scared me, it was that I’d never see her again. That some fateful bogey would take it upon themself to keep me away from her, or that she’d want it to. I’d at least prevent fate from stepping in, I resolved in third grade, handling the knife. I wasn’t patient enough to slice the pear into cubes, much less peel the skin, so I stuck with thick wedges that toothpicks could not hold. I ate the first slice in ritual. Holding a wedge speared on a fork, I ran to 妈妈, who begrudgingly took a bite after I reminded her of the superstition. But 爸爸 waved me off, saying he wasn’t in the mood for pear. I could tell I shouldn’t push it. Since then I’ve been waiting for fate to take action. 分梨，分离。I’m still waiting for a shadowy hand to pull us apart.
Backseat Blues
I miss my mother
Polyester seats in the car reek of frying oil and skin
Better than the plastic-y gusts that made me vomit
Safest spot in the car if it crashes
She doesn’t stop talking now
Some stories you don’t ever stop telling
I don’t want her to stop
Trees don’t hold their shape well at 55 mph
You don’t punch at someone who swings
奶奶 lashed out at her for buying a diabetic a Coke
Now I hate the sting of carbonation
She hasn’t stopped talking. “I miss you,” “Listen.”
I mean it, but I mean it less the twentieth time I can’t even listen now
Ambition makes me pander
When I’m in heels, hands so coarse no cream will save the aging, I will still pander
But now I stare at the stain and pick at the seatbelt
Toe the rusted penny tucked behind the driver’s seat
乱七八糟
WHEN I was in elementary school, the girls in my friend group gathered together, giggling in Korean, going through the motions of whispering but much too loudly. “뭐”, I’d picked up through a K-drama my mom and I watched on Friday nights.1 Tired of not understanding, I spoke up, feeling smug at the delighted and surprised squeals of my friends as they asked me to say it again. Whenever I felt too left out, I’d chime in with a “뭐”, and watch as my friends broke out in giggles. “在学校要说 English，” 妈妈 always told me, “You need to speak their language.” I was simultaneously jealous of the community mother tongues build and annoyed at what I saw as their attempt to be special. Perhaps my resentment stemmed from how much time I spent trying to shed my Chineseness. A study on Asian American accents was done in 2011 by Queens College professors Michael Newman and Angela Wu.2 The results of the study made calling the speech patterns an “accent” a stretch. Yet for a long time, and even now, I am con-
1 See Full House (2004).
2 Michael Newman and Angela Wu, “‘Do you sound Asian when you speak English?” Racial identification and voice in Chinese and Korean Americans’ English,” in American Speech (2011) vol. 86(2), 152-178.
vinced I can hear the “Asian” in my voice even when I’m speaking English. I don’t have an American accent in 中文, but I’m also convinced you can hear the American in my voice when I’m speaking Chinese. As a kid my mom would tell me the characters in my cartoons and audiobooks spoke pretty English. Now I know she meant white. Sometimes, I’d watch white girls on YouTube or look up videos of Disney Princesses and sit, mimicking words in front of the screen.3 I was convinced that if I could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious with the bounce of Julie Andrews, I’d be deemed American. I still count aloud in Chinese when I’m stressed on a math test. Even now, I’m discovering English idioms I had no idea existed. “Out of left field,” “on the ball”, “get your ducks in a row.” When I blanked on a word during my DC internship interview, I was reminded that English isn’t my first language.
Chinese. Mandarin. Chinese refers to a variety of dialects, but when I say “Chinese”, people assume I mean Mandarin. 普通话。Common speech. Regular dialect. Ongoing discourse continues to argue Chinese vs. Mandarin. The geopolitics imply that Chinese is a propagandist word, meant to conflate all the nuances between cultures with that of the mainland. “You wouldn’t ask if someone spoke
3 See Alisha Marie’s Youtube Channel and Alice in Wonderland (1951). I never said my references were consistent.
American, right?” But I don’t want my words to be policed, and to be frank I don’t care enough to demand the distinction. Still, I wonder if I ought to use “Mandarin”, at least in my writing.
I am what most people would think of when they think of the word “Asian”. East Asian, full-Chinese, US-born, Beijing-raised, my features don’t leave much to be questioned. I play violin, go to Phillips Exeter Academy, study hard, captain the debate team and am co-editor-in-chief of four publications. I could go explain the nuances of these aspects of myself in order to explain away the “Asian-ness” of what I do—I play violin in the jazz band instead of orchestra, I got a D+ (albeit my first grade anywhere close) in calculus last term, I’ve been out of the competitive debate circuit for years and I lead these publications because I actually want to become a full-time writer. But part of me questions both the desire to subvert my Asianness and the presumption that these traits are not Asian. What does it mean to be Asian American?
She’s convinced the English she speaks is ugly /i/ and /I/, V’s morph into W’s
Her R’s aren’t quite hard enough
She dreams in English now, but her English And the dreams feel ugly In nightmares, she sounds like Hop Sing Acts like him, too
She’s scared she’ll become a caricature
She contorts her mouth, enunciating so hard she may cough up phlegm
She feels that makes her uglier
“Tell them English is your first language,” 妈 妈 always says. Technically my first word was “Volvo”. I used to be proud of the quirk, now I just think it’s silly. Claiming Americanness on a technicality. My first language is 中文. I am still American. But I check English as my first language on every form and application.
My greatest shame is that I feel ashamed by my mother’s accent. I think the way she speaks is beautiful—earnest and round, each word afforded genuine effort. But when she stutters, searching for a word she doesn’t find, or repeats, trying over and over to pronounce correctly, I rush to step in. To help, I say, but also to hide. This is what she meant to say. This is what she would say if she were American. What makes someone American? Is it their citizenship? Their culture? Under the current administration, their race? I’ve always thought it was the language. When I was younger, my mom would complain to me on the ride to church, judging the other parents for not learning how to speak English properly after being here for years. But now, over a decade in the States, and my mom can’t pronounce “corn”. Sometimes that earlier judgment bleeds in
through the ears. In the worst of my teenage years I’d snap at her, correcting her pronunciation publicly and rolling my eyes. I don’t do that anymore, but I wonder if she reads the urge to in my voice, if when she looks up at my face she can see through my feigned patience. I think about the ways I censor her in my writing. I rarely write my mother’s dialogue in broken English, as it actually would be when spoken. This. This is what she meant to say. In my writing, I feel I can give her the words, let her speak as eloquently as she thinks. Because she feels like an entirely different person in Chinese. Because I think I do her justice through translation. Because I cannot see broken English as fluent. Because I cannot hear past the accent.
Amy Tan wrote in “Mother Tongue” that “to preserve the essence [of her mother’s words]” she, too, writes in a “‘watered down’” manner—“what [she imagines] to be her [mother’s] translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English.” By then, the language is “neither an English nor a Chinese structure.” 4 Is that a beautiful hybrid or an effort stuck halfway?
Sara Ahmed talks about bodies at a table, how nonwhite bodies struggle to fit into chairs that
4 Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue,” in The Three Penny Review (1990), 315-320.
were never made for them.5 Around the Harkness table, I find myself physically shifting in my seat often. One leg up, both curled against the edge of the desk, crossed, opened. Back straight, slouched, nothing ever feels right. When we’re asked to write on the chalkboard, the chalk squeaks and snaps in my hand, and if it’s a whiteboard instead, the dry erase markers are streaky and stiff. “As long as I get an A in this class, as far as I’m concerned I hate white people,” a white student snickered during small group discussion. They said it within earshot of me. I could feel their gazes against my hair, and a rage built within me. Why would they sign up for a class on leftist movement building if their minds were so clearly closed-off to the idea? Their performative contributions to Harkness made mine performative too. I knew I wasn’t getting through to them, and now everything I said, I said to the teacher, whom I knew agreed. Worse than open skepticism or hatred, these students let their smugness simmer, steaming me alive. Disingenuously ingratiating the authors or noncommittally voicing snide skepticism through “confusion”, they parade through the course without ever meaningfully engaging with the materials or themselves. In such a space, my advocacy is reduced to puppetry. I find myself averting their conde-
5 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” in Feminist Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 2007) vol. 8(2), 149-168.
scending gazes in Harkness, feeling shame I think I ought not to feel. In these moments, I almost feel the “American” accent I’ve cultivated revert. I struggle with pronunciation, my words are less sure and I stumble. Whiteness makes me feel less American. This past summer, I got my nails done in New York. It was decided on a whim, I had chosen a random spa in Flushing on Google Maps and picked out a particularly elaborate design that I’d never dream of requesting in a Portsmouth salon. It took me half an hour just to find the shop once I had made it to the street, calling the salon over and over as the clerk tried to explain which turn to take. I had wondered if switching to Chinese would be faster, but I couldn’t be sure off more than MG Eyelashes and Spa being next to a Gong Cha. When I got there, I greeted the receptionist in English, asking for the price, the amount of time, for GelX instead of acrylic. My nail tech was perfectly polite, if not rather curt and a bit annoyed at how thick and hard to remove the acrylic already on my nails was. “The acrylic removal costs extra,” she said. I sat, shifting my weight left to right until my nail tech started speaking to her coworker in Chinese about the blind date she has lined up after work. I waited a few minutes, then started, “姐姐，” She paused, maybe evaluating the fact that I had understood her entire conversation. And then, speaking to me in a tone so soft I almost melted, she asked which color I thought better
matched my reference photo. Giving me a cushion to rest my hand on while my set dried, asking if she was filing my nails too hard, she transformed. People say Chinese sounds aggressive when spoken because it’s a tonal language. But in these moments I cannot imagine words more gentle. I, too, spoke softly to her, thanking her, complimenting the design, asking about her day. And I walked out with a discount.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
FIRST, to Mr. Perdomo, without whose guidance and support this book would not have happened. Thank you for your love of teaching, your steadfast mentorship, and your ability to reinvigorate my passion for writing in a single conversation. Thank you for guiding me towards the kind of writer I want to be. As you’ve mentioned in our talks, years later I might look back on this writing and cringe, but I will never look back on this process of writing with anything less than the deepest tenderness. I hope to outgrow this writing, but I won’t outgrow this moment.
Second, thank you to the Phillips Exeter English Department and Senior Project Committee for giving me the platform to publish my first anthology. A special thank you here to my advisor, Doc Seals, for really selling the elevator pitch, and Ms. Desmond, for answering many a late-night email to make sure the book gets printed. This has changed the trajectory of my life and cemented in me the will to keep writing. I’ll stick to platitudes here and say that I cannot express my gratitude in words. It’s true. Third, it doesn’t feel right to write a book and not mention you. Even though it’s for the most part
not about you and may be as far from you as I’m capable of writing. I think about you a lot. I hope you’ll do more than ivory tower talk. I hope you feel more than sympathy. Bless you. I love you. I’m not afraid of that anymore.
And of course, thank you to my parents. For your endless love and painstaking care that I didn’t always see. Thank you for giving me something to always write about. Thank you for being family I’d choose, given the chance. You are the two most important people in my life. I love you as much as my heart can bear and then some. 你们是我这辈子最大 的福气。
