Chapter 2 #2
I hadn’t heard from my parents since my first weekend in Taipei.
This was normal—they often went weeks without calling me—but I did worry whether everything was all right.
I tried calling once, but no one picked up.
I texted Flora to check that nothing was wrong, and she responded Drama as usual, followed by a shrug emoji.
I took this to mean that the forever war between Jasmine and my parents was currently in a hot cycle, as opposed to the more frequent but stable cold cycles, and that Flora had probably spent much of the last week in her room, headphones on to block out the noise.
And it was selfish of me, but I was glad to be so far away from it all.
Are you okay, I asked.
Yeah, fine, wrote Flora. A beat later, enjoy Taipei.
THE NEXT MONDAY, I DISCOVERED I HAD LOST ALL OF MY PROGRESS.
I felt sluggish and slow all morning. New vocabulary wasn’t sticking like it used to.
Throughout both my morning classes, I kept fighting the impulse to answer in English.
I wondered if I was sick, but I couldn’t pinpoint anything physically wrong with me.
I had felt fine that morning, and I didn’t have a headache now.
It was all cognitive. I thought language learning would be a smooth upward trajectory, so I was shocked to discover that I was now speaking like a five-year-old.
I winced at the sound of my own accent. Normally I had no trouble with tones, but today I was constantly fighting to get my tongue in order.
Tones! The one skill I thought I’d inherited!
My speech was afflicted with long, slow pauses while I reached for phrases that I had learned a long time ago, phrases that had suddenly and mysteriously vanished.
Teacher Cai asked me to use the term for “gross domestic product” in a sentence, and I couldn’t remember the word for “increase.”
By the time I got to my one-on-one class, I felt I had to apologize in advance. “I don’t know what’s going on with me today.” I tapped my temple several times to make my point. “My mind’s not working.”
“This is normal,” said Teacher Sun. “You feel like you’re making a lot of progress, and then suddenly one day everything gets harder. Your brain is making new connections, but that requires breaking all the old connections. You’re emptying out your house—clearing space for new furniture.”
“But I sound like an idiot,” I said.
“In fact,” said Teacher Sun, “you have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it.”
SO THE ASSIMILATION WOULD NOT BE AS QUICK AS I’D HOPED. I would have to redouble my efforts.
There was a gritty pleasure in this. I liked the verb phrase 求學, qiúxué, which meant to study or engage in research.
But the character 求 could also mean to seek, to search, to demand.
In period dramas, characters were always saying to each other, 我求你; I beg of you, please don’t kill my son, please don’t send me into exile.
The character 求 had a sense of urgency about it.
You might die if you didn’t get what you were 求-ing.
I liked the idea that knowledge was something you had to seek desperately, with flashlights and shovels, digging out little nuggets of gold.
Of course, the gold would not just fall into my palm.
I would have to dig harder: read more passages, create more flash cards, compose more sentences.
It could still happen. It was only a matter of time.
IN CONSIDERING THE NEWS, I ALWAYS GOT TRIPPED UP BY TRANSLITERATIONS.
Many proper nouns were translated not by meaning but with whatever characters offered the best homophonic fit.
So Manchester became 曼徹斯特 (mànchèsītè), Georgia became 喬治亞 (qiáozhìyà), and Morehouse became 莫爾豪斯 (mòěrháosī).
I could never pronounce these smoothly when we did cold readings.
I always had a mental back-and-forth over whether I should intonate the Chinese or just use the English pronunciation.
If the point of transliteration was to approximate the original sound, then it seemed I should just say “Manchester,” “Georgia,” and “Morehouse” instead of the belabored pinyin approximations, which always felt vaguely racist to utter out loud—like I was imitating someone with broken English.
But Teacher Shen made a face whenever I used the English pronunciations.
“Come on, Lily,” she said. “We’re supposed to be speaking Chinese. ”
I PREFERRED IT WHEN TRANSLITERATED LOANWORDS HAD MEANINGS of their own.
The loanword for Coca-Cola was 可口可樂, pronounced kékǒukělè, which meant “tasty and amusing.” The loanword for “myth” was 迷思, mísī, which meant “confusing thoughts,” or as I translated it, “thoughts that had traveled across a labyrinth.” The loanword for “proletariat” was 普羅, pǔluó—the word for “popular” next to the word for “gather.” And the loanword for “jazz”: 爵士, juéshì, which was also just the term for “gentleman”—and here I thought of Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, suited up and popping their collars.
But sometimes the characters had nothing to do with the meaning.
For instance, 粉絲, fěnsī, was the loanword for “fans,” because the characters sounded close enough.
But 粉絲 also meant “noodles,” and when we spoke of a pop star’s fěnsī, I always thought of a bucket of cold rice noodles, wriggling in adoring delight.
WE WERE MAKING VERY LITTLE PROGRESS IN MY ONE-ON-ONE class.
We never got all the way through our daily vocabulary list because I had too many questions about each term.
I had to understand its precise connotations, and all the situations in which I could use it.
For instance: 分瓜, to split a melon, to allocate, to split into pieces.
You could split the melon of an estate, and all the heirs would fight over the scraps.
But did splitting the melon have to be a bad thing?
What about infinite resources? Could you split the melon of your parents’ love?
“It feels like you are deliberately looking for the least plausible uses of each term,” said Teacher Sun.
I tried to explain to her that it was the implausible test cases that would help me understand the boundaries of phrases. How could I engage in wordplay otherwise? Was not the difference between literacy and literariness the ability to make puns?
Teacher Sun suggested I focus less on puns and more on using words in the correct context.
“The problem with linguistic play is that you’re only allowed to do it when you already know all the rules,” she said.
“If you are fluent and you break a language, then everyone thinks you’re very clever.
So poets can do whatever they want. But if you aren’t fluent and you break the language, then everyone just thinks you don’t know how to speak. ”
BUT THE TAIWANESE PLAYED WITH ENGLISH ALL THE TIME, AND often not very well.
Nonsense English was everywhere in this city.
In a single afternoon I saw T-shirts reading “Live FreE or Butterfly,” “I like eat cows and you,” and “Pussy cat pet pussy.” Once I saw a prim middle-aged woman proudly wearing a velvet cardigan with repeating block letters that read, “GO FUCK.” These seemed like more than a case of a bad translation.
I couldn’t imagine what the source text would have been.
Someone had to be messing around. Someone was misusing a language just because it was funny: because they just liked the look of a letter or the position of a comma.
In the cluster of lunch spots north of campus, there was a pizza and pasta restaurant called I’m Pasta with a sign in English that read: “Once, I hate pasta. Now, it’s my life.”
“DOES CHINESE HAVE A V SOUND?” ANNA ASKED LATE ONE NIGHT, long after I thought she’d gone to sleep.
I was still awake, so I pondered the matter. This was tough. It was hard to know for sure until I had reviewed every conversation I’d had earlier in the day, every term I’d gone through in my glossary, to confirm the absence of the sound. “Wow. I don’t think so.”
“So we haven’t made the V sound since we got here.”
“I guess not?”
“Vuh,” she said.
“V-v-v-v-v-v,” I said, like an engine.
“Veeeeeeee,” she said, like the Henry Higgins alphabet machine.
TEACHER CAI TOLD US THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING CALLED AN “ABC accent,” which was the accent some “American-born Chinese” acquired when they were too lazy to distinguish between different consonant formations.
She insisted that only boys used this accent, but it wasn’t clear to us why.
In Teacher Cai’s opinion, girls were simply more diligent in every regard.
None of us had the ABC accent, thank God.
She couldn’t bear to listen to that garbage all day.
Some boys who grew up in the United States—California, she specified, without further explanation—thought they didn’t have to work hard at their Chinese pronunciation because they had it in their blood.
So their tongues stayed flat, and they never learned to distinguish their zh from their zs, or their ch from the c’s.
They didn’t even know they were doing this, because they couldn’t hear the difference.
They were incurable. But the twist was that Taiwanese boys too had started adopting this accent when trying to pick up girls, because this made them sound more like American boys, who were generally understood to have more money and provided a pathway to a green card.
“Does it work?” Shanhong asked.
Teacher Cai looked aggrieved. “Still today, many people want to go to the US.”
“HEY, BY THE WAY.” ANNA LOOKED UP FROM HER TEXTBOOK. WE were studying together at Youmoutoohana. “Could you please stop leaving little black specks all over the bathroom floor?”