The first time I was ever complimented for my spoken Chinese was about two months ago as I sat cross-legged on my maternal grandparents’ bamboo rug. I had been in bed most of the day trying to entertain myself with my new Taobao copy of Mario Kart and whatever morsels of YouTube my international plan could push through the Great Firewall. After a couple of hours of filling myself with various xiaochis and lounging around with my younger brother, there eventually came a knock at the door. Answering the door was really the only real responsibility I had that day.
Standing out in the apartment hallway was my grandmother, my paternal aunt, her husband and their youngest son. I greeted them with the usual smiles and loud celebrations. I didn’t have to pretend. My grandmother was walking with a limp and, in her signature stubbornness, attempted to refuse my help walking over to the couch, but she eventually caved to my insistent offering. There was an initial exchange of platitudes:
“中国什么样呢？饭好吃吗？”
“How are you enjoying China? Is the food good here?”
“饭很好吃啊！比美国吃的好多呢。“
“The food’s really great! It’s much better than in America.”
And that was when the compliment was delivered to me. I honestly didn’t know quite how to take it because in America, my Chinese was universally acknowledged to be awkward and off, but here, my aunt seemed to be genuinely impressed. Instead of noting my kindergarten-level vocabulary and inaccurate accents, she was just happy that I spoke fluently enough to have a conversation with her. I was glad.
My brother doesn’t speak much Chinese; rather, he doesn’t like speaking Chinese very much at all, so I served as his interim translator in the absence of our translation-major cousin. The room had split into two conversations: my maternal grandparents were getting to know my aunt, and my grandmother had taken my hand over to her side of the couch and asked me to sit below her. It was when my grandmother started rubbing the back of my hand on her cheek and quietly laughing to herself that I really started to feel my heart fall out of my chest.
It occurred to me then that I really had no idea what kind of a person my grandmother really was, and I had no good way of asking. What were this woman’s biggest ambitions? What was she proudest of? How did she love? The reality was that my grandma was getting old. Really old. She was gently chuckling while recounting the story of the stumble down her home steps that gave her the limp she came in with and kept leaning into me every time I spoke because she couldn’t hear or understand me the first time. I didn’t have much time to learn. I still don’t.
My brother snapped me out of my spiral by tapping me on the shoulder.
“Ask her about dad,” he urged me. “Ask when the last time dad came over was.”
There was a seriousness in his voice I didn’t quite expect, like he had been suddenly gripped by some mortal dread. Still kind of stunned, I tried my best to formulate his requested sentence with my broken Chinese.
“爸爸。。。最近的时候回来中国。。。是几年？”
“Dad’s… most recent time returning to China… was what year number?”
It took a couple tries of repeating myself, progressively getting louder each time, but eventually she leaned back and nodded her head in understanding. I didn’t think I was going to like her answer.
The last time my dad went back to China was to take care of his dad with terminal lung cancer from a lifetime of chain smoking. He took a week off work to visit China, but couldn’t even go all the way into Yunmeng, stopping short at Beijing to see his father in the hospital. His father died only three days after he flew back to America. According to her, my dad “哭鼻子” when he heard the news.
She chuckled for a couple seconds when she told me that. I thought for a second that I had gravely misunderstood her. I was, after all, dropping nearly 80% of the words that she said. Half of the discrepancy was her heavy rural 武汉话, and the other half was from my woefully lacking vocabulary. I subtly started recording on a voice memo on my phone so I could “reference” it in the future, but I was too late. My Chinese was enough to converse, but it wasn’t enough to truly listen and engage.
When I was at home in Houston, I spent a lot of time thinking about the things that we leave unsaid — the indescribable abstractions that seem to exist outside the limitations of human language. I wrote poems about it. I was pretentious about it. This was different, though. I was confronted with a whole world of heritage that I couldn’t know. These were stories that were just as much mine as they were my grandparents, but I felt like I couldn't access them at all.
I know the sound of my grandma’s laugh. I know the way that she holds her grandsons’ hands, but I can’t help but still feel like I don’t really know her. I don’t know what her job was. I don’t know what her childhood was like. Behind the wall of what is technically my first language lies a wall of wisdom and experience and story that I just can’t find any good way to access.
I am frustrated about this. I am deeply unsatisfied, but short of literally learning college-level native Chinese, there’s not much else to do. This is the same paradox that lies in all of our own minds: the closest things to us are the hardest to understand and communicate. We hold in ourselves the most deceptively tangible ghosts of our ancestors.
So that’s what I’m here to counter: I want to deconstruct and attempt to understand my thoughts about identity, language and humanity. I want to add matter to these ghosts and embrace them in my arms. Hopefully, you’ll join me on that journey.
Steve Wang is a freshman from Missouri City, Texas majoring in Biomedical Engineering. His column tries to put words to the things that exist just outside the language of our daily lives and make everybody feel a little less crazy.
