Chinese School, 2011
The white ceiling lights hum as I slouch further into my plastic chair, waiting to turn in this week’s incomplete homework book. The teacher strides through the aisles, handing back last week’s assignment. I briefly flip through the pages, each one marked with unforgiving red pen meticulously crossing out every mistake and circling every section I left blank. At the top of the front page is a circled 62%. I laugh and nudge my friend Annie’s elbow with mine and turn the book to show her.
“Aye, not bad!”
“Right?”
I pretend I don’t notice her quickly close the cover of her own assignment book over her 90%. I think she tries to tiptoe around shame that I don’t have.
The two of us are discreetly cutting out the faces of the cartoon characters in my textbook with the yellow thumbtacks we found in the wall, and there’s still over an hour left of class. The teacher moved onto the next chapter, and I look down at my book where the kid and the bearded grandpa’s faces are swapped, and I laugh. But I straighten up when the teacher looks at me though, so she won’t send me to the principal’s office, where I’d sit staring at my dad which is awkward.
I’ve been scraping by pretty nicely with my terrible Chinese. When the teacher asks us to recite the chapter out loud, I pencil in small letters of pinyin over each character to phonetically fumble my way through reading. I don’t know how old I was when my parents decided to speak English with me at home.
Hefei, China 2012
I’m sitting in an airplane seat wedged between two people. The flight attendant rolls a cart down the aisle, sees my face, and starts to speak to me in quippy garbled Chinese. I look helplessly at my parents who instinctively rescue me and ask them to give me whichever dish is the noodle dish. I plug back in the plastic complimentary earbuds into the screen and wait for the stupid announcements (in English then Chinese) that keep interrupting He’s Just Not That into You.
The second I step out of the airport, I can feel my shirt stick to my skin, and everything smells slightly like old cigarettes. After lugging seven suitcases (for five people) into the trunks of an impatient cab, my older sister and I sit in the back silently, swaying left and right with the lurches of Chinese city driving, while our parents chat up the cab driver. My mind is pulled to my friend Lexi’s sleepover that’s probably currently happening and also is focused on fighting the jet lag and nausea filling my body.
We pull up to the side of the apartment, and my grandparents are standing outside waiting for us. My grandpa is wearing a maroon t-shirt my sister gifted him with big block letters “UChicago Grandparent” that he can’t read. We hug, smile, and nod ni hao ni hao! We walk into their small and tidy apartment that smells like fresh fruit and sewage. My grandma hurries into the kitchen to pull out fresh apples she bought from the market. She peels and slices them into a bowl for us before we fully set down our luggage. Pushing the bowl of apples toward me, she asks if I’m studying hard in school, and my mom responds.
I survive off the basics: ni hao, I love you, this tastes good.
I’m alone in my room, when my grandmother quietly knocks and enters with a fresh bowl of peeled and sliced apples. She sits next to me on the bed and places the bowl between us. Her skin seems so translucent, I can see the veins in her hands. I quickly put my phone away and feel a slow burning panic settle into the pit of my stomach. She asks me something, something about classes. I caught classes but nothing before or after, so I just stare at her and then at my hands. I eventually decide to smile and nod yes, thank you for the apples, this tastes good. I don’t think it’s a yes or no question because her face falters, and she pats my leg as she rises to leave. She says she’ll make sure grandpa picks up more apples for me when they go to the market the next day.
Hefei, China 2015
My dad and I can’t fight off the jet lag, so I throw on my tennis shoes and we head to the track of the local high school. The air is dewy and warm, and the sun has barely risen, but there’s a surprising number of people out exercising and stretching on the wet grass.
After running a few laps, I stop to catch my breath. I notice a middle-aged man in a ratty tank top nearby. He says something in my direction. I’m looking around me to see who he’s talking to, but he looks directly at me and repeats himself but louder. I squint to see where my dad is, but my rescuer is across the track, walking slowly at his own pace.
I nervously tell him in fumbled broken Chinese,
“I’m sorry, my Chinese is not that good. I’m born in the U.S.”
He stops exercising and his tone shifts. He talks louder and faster, and I can only pick out bits and pieces of “betraying your blood, family” and “absolutely crucial” and “go back and learn”. The flesh where my fingernail is digging into my palm is turning white, until my dad rounds the corner and I call out to him. The man starts calling out to my dad to tell him all the places he went wrong in his parenting, and how disappointed he should be in how he let me get this way. My dad aggressively nudges my arm for us to walk away. His face is visibly angry, so I laugh it off and say only lunatics show up to the park at 5am, us included. I look at his face again and can’t tell if his anger is because of the man’s verbal assault or because he thinks the man is right.
Beijing, China 2018
I tie my hair up into a braid after brushing my teeth and run downstairs for my daily 8am Chinese class. My friend Kevin sits in the lobby of the dorm holding a hot coffee for me in one hand, and his textbook in the other.
“快一点儿！我们快迟到了“
”我来了我来了！抱歉“
He hands me my coffee as we leave, and I tear off pieces of my baozi for him while we quiz each other on new vocab words on the walk to class.
A few months ago, the teachers handed me a bright orange piece of construction paper with a black inked contract printed on it: I pledge to only speak Mandarin for the next 12 weeks. I heard that sometimes they’ll even walk through the dorms to eavesdrop on students to see if they’re speaking English. I don’t know if that’s true. They must have better things to do with their time. But we stick to the contract just in case.
Kevin begins to practice his response to the oral exam prompt on the history of bribery and corruption in the Chinese government. I sip my coffee, feeling the humidity of the air press my hair into the back of my neck. He turns to me and says, okay your turn.
Hefei, China 2018
My grandma leans heavily into age, and she’s propped up in her bed at the senior home. I hold her hand. Her hand feels papery against my skin. Her eyes are closed most of my visit. When we eat, I revert back to the basics: nihao, I love you. My grandfather points at me and loudly asks her if she recognizes me, which is a bit cruel to the both of us.
I eat steamed egg soup quietly, listening to the murmurs of the other residents and their caretakers and the clattering of the plastic bowls. After we stack our trays and clean up our table, my aunt and I take turns wheeling my grandma around a small circle in the parking lot for some fresh air. We walk in circles, while we shield our eyes from the sun. For the first time, I can ask my aunt about her work in Chinese.
“我的学生好热闹啊“
She tells me about her students, who are rowdy and tiring, and how they remind her of herself when she grew up. She then tells me about how she was a star student until she was forced to drop out of middle school and not allowed to join Mao ze Dong’s red guard. I look in the cracks of the cement and nod as we walk. I didn’t realize she was a teacher.
My grandfather reads a newspaper in the corner of the room, and my grandma is back in her bed, eyes closed. I softly tell her I love her before I leave.
Franklin, MI 2019
I’ve been home for about three months. I’m comforted by the bowls of white rice we eat at dinner, but the smells of the Chinese food don’t have the same kick of spice that I’ve gotten used to over the past three months. I’m back sitting at my unspoken assigned seat at the dinner table across from my mom.
“哇，今天做的菜挺好吃的“, I say pointing to the cabbage on the table.
“Oh wow! I forgot you have fancy new Chinese skills now.” My dad laughs, “We can speak Chinese at home now!” He and my mom laugh.
I smile and scoop steamed cabbage into my bowl and nod, suddenly put on the spot.
“明天我有一个面试”
“嗯嗯那就好”
I speak slowly, delicately trying out new phrases I used to speak with confidence. My face feels hotter, and the words wedge together in my mouth.
After dinner, my brother and I carry empty plates over to the sink. My dad leans to place plates into the dishwasher and turns to me.
“Oh, did you hear back about your application?”
And with that, we go back to speaking English, nothing happened. We try a couple more times to switch back to Chinese through the year, but a few minutes pass, and we’re back to English. We never talk about it, and after a few years, the language slips away from me again.
Franklin, MI 2021
My first funeral is one in my home. I never thought about how quick the turnover rate is for a funeral to be put together until I’m the one in charge of finding silky black tablecloths, black picture frames, and fresh flowers in two days. My dad and I find out that Costco prints glossy portraits within 24 hours if we go to pick them up. With candles burning a little too close to flower petals, hand painted crooked Chinese letters on a white paper banner, the final touch of our in-home funeral is a laptop propped up on textbooks next to the freshly printed portrait of my grandma. After picking up a black dress shirt for my brother from Meijer, I put on my own black dress pants, and we all gather in the dining room.
While I cook dinner for before the funeral, my mom calls me over to talk to her.
“We’re going to have the three of you speak before me and your dad, so we’ll be the ones the funeral ends with, okay?”
My mind starts racing, not realizing we were going to be asked to speak, then realizing the limited and faded memories I have of my grandma, of me running into my room to avoid disappointing her. My face flushes.
“Just speak from your heart, talk as if you’re talking to grandma directly”
I put down my chopsticks to type something small on the note’s app on my phone. I think of the stories my mom told me when we laid together crying in her bed about my grandma being relentlessly kind and strong through the obliteration of her family during the communist revolution, how my grandma consistently took care of her family and put others first, and how she never went to school but commanded respect. I write a small ode to how I want to be kind and strong like her.
When it comes to my turn, I kneel in front of the laptop screen on the black couch pillow we placed in front of the table. I can’t see my phone screen anymore. I tell her how sorry I am, for not being able to know her, for not knowing the language that would allow me to know her, for not learning soon enough.
I stand back up and clutch my mom’s hand while my brother kneels next, wondering even if my grandma could hear me, if she’d understand the English words I’d just spoken.