Small Talk

Dearest Wah-Ming, dearest Marina,

I can tell that my terrible Mandarin is improving slightly on this trip to Taiwan, because when I wake up in the middle of the night, my mind is spinning with basic phrases. 研究 (yánjiū), “to research.” 一百零六 (ībǎilíngliù), “one hundred zero six.” (A couple of days ago, I told the cab driver to go to “one hundred six” without the “zero” in the middle. He assumed that I was talking about 1.6 hundreds, or 160. I ended up at the wrong address.) Both my parents grew up in Taiwan, but this is my very first trip here. I was born in Brazil, and growing up I first focused on speaking, reading, and writing Portuguese. When I moved to the US in fifth grade, I shifted my attention to learning English; that’s when I acquired three new Germanic letters of the alphabet, k, w, and y.

To inherent snippets of histories and language, to be supposedly of but never steeped in them— This is yet another of my liminal states, an embodiment of migration, an embrace without belonging.

So while I grew up with Mandarin, I’ve always approached it as a foreigner. My vocabulary is limited enough so that whenever I attempt to talk about anything that isn’t household-related (such as whether I’ve completed my homework or taken out the garbage), I speak in roundabout ways, with long-winded descriptions or similes. And when I hear a phrase, I often translate it slowly, literally, in my mind before recognizing its common/ instrumental meaning. To convey “be careful” in Mandarin, for instance, one says, 小心 (xiǎoxīn), “small heart.” Most of the time, when I hear someone yelling this phrase while walking down the street, I look both ways and watch my step. Sometimes, though, I think about what it would mean to shrink my heart as I do so.

I feel frustrated by my inability to fluently convey what I’m thinking, to understand news headlines. Even ordering meals in restaurants can be difficult, since so many dish names are figurative—like deviled eggs and hot dogs in American cuisine. But I also appreciate this odd, contradictory intimate distance from the language. It keeps me on my toes. To approach a language with this sort of diasporic ear, at once foreign and familiar, is to hear music in speech, poetry in prose. (At one point, in middle school, I felt something similar vis-à-vis everyday English. I wonder whether I would have become as avid a reader without profound adolescent loneliness, whether I would have become so invested in this language if I had been born an American.)

***

When you place 木 (mù), a tree or wood, next to 火 (huǒ), fire, you would think that you would have a forest fire. But instead, you get 秋 (qiū), autumn, a conflagration of color.

If you place a heart beneath autumn, you get 愁 (chóu), to worry. I’m guessing that this is not because a tree has been lit on fire atop a heart, but because of a sort of seasonal affective disorder. The anxiety it describes suddenly takes on a particular light, the sensation and shape of November.

Since Chinese is not a phonetic language, this mode of literal translation allows me to see motifs I do not hear, like “heart” as a radical, rather than a separate word, in 愁 (chóu), above, and 忘 (wàng), to forget. In forgetting, death pays a visit to the heart.

This way of taking apart and decoding each word resensitizes me to the particularities of a language, to etymologies and subtexts that I typically take for granted. (In English, I try to consistently use the word “hilarious” instead of “hysterical,” but I sometimes still find myself using the latter. I sometimes wonder whether, after a woman undergoes hysterectomy, she can still become hysterical. I do so only partly in jest.) It is an attention to the visual architectures of language, a hint of the many layers of history that usually remain submerged in everyday speech.

To lack fluency in one’s familial tongue is to live one’s life suspended in transit. Wah-Ming, Marina, your command of your respective second and third languages is vastly superior to mine. But I wonder whether this feeling of perpetual dislocation—this mode of literal translation, and the suspicion that one’s efforts to communicate are inevitably approximate, asymptotic, never reaching—is nevertheless a bit familiar to you as well. In Mandarin, I feel unmoored, I lack confidence and certitude. But I also take pleasure in intuiting underlying logics in twists of phrase, in suddenly sensing a shift in perspective as I do so, in glimpsing, for a moment, where the person I’m speaking to comes from.

***

I am constantly misunderstanding/ mishearing words in Mandarin. This is partly because words are monosyllabic, and there are so many homophones. I thought that the term 華僑 (huáqiáo), referring to the Chinese diaspora, to be 花橋 (huāqiáo), a flowery bridge. Instead, this huá is a signifier for China, and this qiáo simply means “overseas.” I assumed that the origins the term of endearment 寶貝 (bǎobèi), used like “baby” in English, referred to a bundle 包 (bāo) carried on a parent’s back 背 (bèi), a treasure so beloved that one holds onto it at all times. Like a bundle of joy. Instead, bǎo is a jewel, and bèi is a shell, an old form of currency. I knew my tones were slightly off, so I should have known that I misunderstood these terms. But I felt disappointed when I learned their true roots, as if imagined by nationalist bankers.

Even if my Mandarin skills aren’t strong, I appreciate the immense potential for deliberate misunderstandings and subversive wordplays in the language’s homophones. Like how protestors cheekily evaded censors in China by making a viral video about a “grass-mud horse”—in Chinese, 草泥馬 (cǎonímǎ), a homophone for, ahem, an obscenity regarding mothers. Or how Ai Weiwei hosts dinners serving river crabs, 河蟹 (héxiè), since héxiè sounds like 和諧 (héxié), “harmonious,” the Chinese government’s euphemistic buzzword for censorship and suppression policies. I especially like that the same sounds can hold a range of meanings, each refracted by context and speaker and listener.

I remind myself that visually, too, decoding each word is not always a reliable route to deciphering Chinese characters. A relatively small percentage of characters are actually pictographs. So many characters are phonetic complexes, combining the meaning of one existing word with the sound of another. A lot of the words are semantic-phonetic, so that 媽媽 (māmā) doesn’t imply that mothers are like female horses; rather, “mama” is a word associated with 女 (nǚ), female, that sounds a bit like 馬 (mǎ), horse. I tread carefully, to not fall prey to facile tropes. (A common joke seems to be that since one word for “peace” is 安 (ān), a woman under a roof, two women under a roof constitute the Chinese word for “trouble.” No such word exists. This joke often goes unchecked in popular culture, like on the NBC detective show Life. It feels as Orientalist as it does misogynistic.)

To translate literally is to intuit the text via the subtext. I am forced to pay attention to connotations and sensibilities, to emphasize the figurative alongside the instrumental. It is to constantly search for the apt metaphor or metonym, that which it is closest to, that which it is not.

***

In Mandarin, tales of fiction are 小說 (xiǎoshuō), “small speech/ talk.” Everything I manage to utter in Mandarin is small talk, is and is not fiction. My words are real and imagined, right and wrong, deeply embedded in diasporic space and time.

I remain self-conscious regarding my tendency to twist this language, to hear homophonic words and phrases. I am constantly (mis)reading between the lines. But perhaps this, too, can be a turn to poetry. I hope to retain some of the humility I feel whenever I read poetry, that I can’t be too presumptuous about my interpretations. I know that they are filtered through the lens of my experience, through my family’s particular history— Our flowery bridges were frequently christened with beijos, “kisses” in Portuguese. I wonder if this can serve as an entrée to a sort of immigrant poetics—the enactment of mongrel languages, of Chinportuglish, the constant shifting of perspectives, of embedded cultural referents.

In the past few days, whenever my partner Justin or I say “I,” our 18-month-old daughter Wen points to her eye and declares, in a soft, breathy voice, “Eye.” Or “I.” Or “愛” (ài), to love. Aye. 

 

Note: I was especially taken with visual motifs in Chinese characters after attending a class by Chia-Lun Chang on contemporary Taiwanese poetry.