A C H A P E L TA L K
Yiyang “Echo” Zhuge ’16 February 23, 2016
Eye Spy I
’ve been spying on my own dreams for some years now. Do you ever do that? Because your brain takes so much control of you during the day: it monitors every thought, filters everything your gut has to say, and forces you to swallow down the honest opinion about the ugly shirt your roommate decided to wear to Chapel this morning. It’s a complete tyranny. Only in my dreams am I able to reclaim part of myself that is not my brain, and there I observe, I listen, I try to understand what it has to say. “What language do you speak when you’re thinking to yourself?” In real life, that’s the kind of question that people always ask when you’re not born speaking English. And I make up an answer every time depending on how fast I want to finish eating my lunch. But in my sleep there is no one asking. Dreams are thought to be such a safe haven that nobody questions them. As a result of my espionage, I’ve come to notice that I don’t speak Chinese in my sleep, nor do I speak English. It’s a language I never learned, with syllables I do not know how to pronounce, grammar I fail to grasp, word combinations that do not make logical sense, yet I understand the language perfectly well. In these dreams, I am a complete foreigner, lurking somewhere, peeking at my own movements. Curiously, it brings a familiar feeling I thought I’d lost many years ago. In the first ten years of my life, I lived right off the coast of the East China Sea. My grandfather—my mother’s father—had a middleage revelation and quit his job as an aerospace engineer. He settled his family in Hangzhou, where my mother and I were born, and opened a seafood factory. After he passed away, my mother sold the factory but kept one part, a sea cucumber farm. If you haven’t had the luck in your life to know what a
sea cucumber is (which probably means that you need to reevaluate your life priorities), it’s an animal that looks like a soft, brown spiky cucumber. It’s edible, has the taste of rubber—that is, when it’s undercooked. If cooked well, sea cucumber can have a delicious taste of a leather shoe sole. I have spent a considerate amount of my childhood vacations on a fishing boat with my parents, floating on the sea area outside our sea cucumber farm. The ocean there was not friendly. There was no balmy water, gentle waves, or glimmering goldcolored beaches. It’s always cloudy, shrouding the distant coast with a layer of ominous fog. The fog thickened as I grew older, as the pollution encroached on coastal cities. To a kid, this was what represented the ultimate world of the unknown. I was terrified of the ocean and somehow at the time addicted to the same terror. I liked to stand on the bow and look down into the black water, as big, glassy waves broke in toward one direction and rocked against our boat. In that saltwater there is seaweed, giant kelp, electric eels, slime from fish skin, and a myriad of other creeping sea creatures. There is warm and cold earth, golden sea rocks touched by a light breeze, unlit underwater plains, quietly decomposing debris, and nurturing sea cucumbers. There are dead and undead lives coexisting in the same, enormous substance. The enormity of the ocean mutes, fragments, and enfolds all emotions. In that seawater, I was nameless and I did not matter. I was a stranger. My body would become so insignificantly small that I did not exist. I looked down into the deep, black water and I felt fear. As a tenyearold, it was a profound feeling, not the kind of fear that made you scream and cry and get under a blanket into mommy’s arms, but a quiet thrill, a
www.groton.org
37