The types of Chinese you meet on vacation
BY CLAIRE GUO
- great-aunt
The first type of Chinese you meet on vacation is ignorant, the size of a watermelon seed rooted between your canines, a landing path for your tongue when it falters and forgets. A homecoming, pulsating gently in the space where you once read ancient assassins would store poisonous pills to escape interrogation – in the shoebox of your grandmother’s apartment, so small you can count the number of lights throwing arms across the plastered walls, you bite down, digging the seed further into tender gums, hoping for release. A woman sits across from you, her face a full-moon of kindness, her eyes two crescents of confusion. You, a high-tide, wavering on the edge of understanding – between us, on the bed and the three lights illuminating half of your face, two worlds gravitating towards collision.
You are not bad at Chinese – you scored a 5 on the AP exam; you can still impress your mother’s American friends with your grasp of culture, this Chinese that sounds more like a party trick than a vessel for communication, showmanship decorating every vowel. The woman presses a plastic container of waxberries into your hands – she heard from your mother that you loved them – but you don’t know how to thank her; you don’t even know her name. For the first time, your Chinese is not Chinese, not a crutch you can smile and wave away by saying i haven’t spoken in a long time, hoping they’ll forgive your foreign accent or the wariness of your consonants – rather, it is worth nothing at all. Smaller than a seed; an ache you prod gently with your tongue. You’ve forgotten that the Chinese you learned – despite being the Chinese of Chinese After School, with Chinese teachers and Chinese food – is not the Chinese of your ancestry, the Chinese of the soil where your mother grew up; roughened by weather, a peach pit of tilting speech. Yours is glossy modern Mandarin, textbook-lacquered; hers is furred through with rural dialect, handed-down through generations, well-worn.
Thank you, you try anyways, a handshake across this endless distance of comprehension, wondering how different gratitude could sound between provinces. Through the oily glaze of the ceiling light, she seems to understand. In her reply, the only thing you catch is you’re welcome, and something that sounds like ai (love), although you can’t be sure, because nothing sounds the way it’s supposed to. You tongue the seed of Chinese lodged between your teeth and smile back, hoping it’s enough to permeate the empty spaces: the topography of her tired fingers, the silence rattling with things unsaid.
- Uncle
The second type of Chinese you meet on vacation is rowdy, boisterous, self-assured – the sound of sizzling pork on a crackling grill, waxberries dimpled on a bed of ice. Blood-red, thistles staining your teeth as you bite down. Your uncle invites you to fancy dinners on the highest floor of a shanghai tower, to private rooms the size of a swimming pool, the city sprawling beneath your window like an open palm; beneath you, the shoreline is dotted with toy boats and pinprick-people. He plates foie gras and peking duck on your tongue, encouraging you to eat more, eat more! In the rustling veranda of one of the oldest houses on a historical street, he orders a mai tai for you, the type with alcohol, and because it’s vacation, your parents let you have a sip. When the drink comes, a glittering purple-red, you relish the unfamiliar burn, how it reaches down your throat and scrapes your larynx, just like the Chinese you learn from him – unapologetic.
Once, your uncle brings you and Ma with him to a business dinner. The round table reminds you of the legend of Arthur, the Knights of Camelot, the men in suits staring imposingly across the massive, automatic lazy susan. Here, the Chinese is guttural, loud, sifted through layers of cigarette smoke and steam, Shanghainese glancing off their mouths like the glint of a sword. It is a parlay of wit in a contest where you don’t know the rules, an uproar of laughter pinned to the tail-end of jokes you never heard, and your Chinese is the smallest dagger amongst the fray of prettier, stronger weapons. Do you know what kāu means? One of the men asks you in traditional Mandarin, the oldest and scariest one, and you shake your head for no. He chuckles, it means tall! You watch as the table erupts in renewed laughter, even the cadence of humor threading to a beat you can’t name.
Afterwards, your uncle pats you on the back good-naturedly, leaning down to say it’s a compliment, but you stare down at your shoes – American Converse – and your clothes – American Brandy Melville – and you know that what they’re laughing at isn’t your height, but your American-ness, your lack of knowledge, how you can’t decipher a compliment from a comment. For now, for just a moment, you’re not a knight but a jester, something funny to be laughed at, a marvel of migration, sampled from the distance across oceans – look, isn’t it incredible? A Chinese girl who doesn’t know Chinese!
- stranger
The third and final type of Chinese you meet on vacation is accidental, and the girl who introduces you – a bank teller – is unaware. She smiles at you from across the counter, a perfect illustration of customer service – blood-red lipstick, her smile curling at the corners like pinwheels, an endless cycle of artificial joy. When you ask her for help in your American-born Chinese Chinese, she sits her head in her palm and examines you like an exhibit at the zoo, eyes roaming over your flushed skin, the redness of humidity peppered across your cheeks like chilli flakes. Wow, she says. Your Chinese is great. Are you Korean?
No, you tell her. American, and she nods like that makes even more sense. In that moment, you are painfully aware of the limitations of your Chinese, how its brokenness cannot even claim ownership to the unpronounceable vowels of your last name – Guo. How a language becomes a synonym for displacement over time, shedding the value it once held like a depreciating currency. Every time you visit, your Chinese is worth less, and now you are holding pennies between your fingers like sand, watching the final coins drain away.
Once, in grade school, you told your teacher that you were Korean as a joke, knowing your last name on her attendance clipboard was distinctly Chinese, but she said nothing. She never found out.
Once, you pretended you were nothing at all, slipping to the back of the classroom and matriculating into absence.
Once upon a time, your parents came to America but left their mother tongue in China, and you grew up with a different mother, swapping cradles and blankets and the color of the toy blocks you used to learn your ABCs. And after growing up, on vacation, you meet three new types of Chinese, each encounter another reminder of how little you know about your mother’s mother tongue.
But also, in a small room without moonlight, there’s this: you holding your great aunt’s hand, somehow aware without words that she took the 6 a.m. train to see you, and for now, this is the only language that matters. It’s funny, you think, despite all your studies, how you’ve returned to the most primitive form of communication, how it stifles the distance between oceans, the thousands of kilometers covered by jet fuel and poor sleep, the universal gesture for love that you fold between your intertwined hands – a heart.