Chapter 5 #3
Everything. Everything was a shameful blank to me.
I wanted to know about Popo’s childhood, her family, what kind of background she had come from.
What the war—the wars—had been like for her.
How she and Gonggong had met, and what it was like building a family during the upheavals of Communist rule—the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao.
But I couldn’t tell how much Popo could handle.
So I just asked, “How did you meet Gonggong?”
That same cycle again: A Zhu shouting my words back, then my mother, and then finally a glimmer of life from Popo.
She didn’t give her answer all at once. Popo seemed to have lost the ability to speak in full sentences. Instead she uttered phrases, sometimes linked together, sometimes disjointed thoughts. After several painstaking minutes, what I made out was this:
“He was older, and I was younger.
“At first, all he did was watch. Me.
“He was watching me.
“Taking care of me.
“He always took care of me.”
“I see,” said my mother.
A Zhu said something to my mother, who said to me, “Lily, I think Popo needs to rest now.”
I pretended not to be relieved. “Okay.”
“Say goodbye.” A Zhu lifted Popo’s hand and made it wave. “Goodbye, Li-Li! We’ll talk again soon!”
“Popo, 我想你,” I said. Literally, I’m thinking of you, “I” + “think” + “you”, but in Chinese it meant more. 想 had so many glosses. I miss you, I want you, I desire you, I wish you were here. “Popo, I miss you very much.”
She continued staring off into space as if she hadn’t heard.
A Zhu handed the phone to my mother. My mother turned the camera onto her own face as she walked into another room.
There were shadows under her eyes. The gray around her temples seemed more pronounced than before.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “Popo knows who you are, she’s just very confused these days. ”
“That’s okay,” I said. “How is she doing?”
“She keeps asking where he is.”
“Did you tell her he passed away?”
“Yes. Many times.”
“Do you think it’s going to register at some point?”
“I don’t know.” My mother shook her head. “Honestly, I think we should stop reminding her. I’m scared she’ll decide not to wake up.”
ON MONDAY, I HAD A MELTDOWN IN THOUGHT AND SOCIETY.
The material that day was not so difficult.
Our reading was about whether Taiwanese voters should have the right to recall corrupt officials through a special process.
I had studied the vocabulary list the night before and felt fine about it: political party, vote, right, authority.
All easy, recognizable characters. But that was just the problem.
They were easy characters because they were abstract and had a million different uses, and this made it hard for me to speak in the particular about them.
I was meant to come up with a sentence about the obligations of elected officials to their constituents.
I knew the relevant words, but I didn’t know how to slot them into a sentence.
I threw all the constructions I knew around it until it came out convoluted and stupid, a winding clause that I didn’t know how to close.
“So the citizens, because they want to have the ability to interrogate the officials, they are inclined to . . .” I halted. My mind was totally blank—I knew neither what I wanted to say nor how to say it. “They . . .”
Teacher Cai watched me, waiting. I wished she would move on, but that wasn’t how she ran the class.
She always let a silence stretch. It wasn’t cruel.
It was good pedagogy, part of the program’s philosophical approach.
Many heritage speakers arrested their language ability at a novice level because they skirted away from difficult constructions in everyday conversation.
We didn’t like awkward pauses, we didn’t like to struggle with our speech, and so we remained in the safe, easy territory of the subject-verb-object.
I eat an apple. I do homework. But to push ourselves to speak in more complex clauses, we had to muck around with the long, frustrating silences.
So no one else in the class found it strange, or even uncomfortable, that I couldn’t get the sentence out. This happened all the time.
Teacher Cai prodded. “The citizens are inclined to what?”
I had never felt this blankness before. I was used to being so quick.
I always knew the answer. Meaning was supposed to flow easily for me because I was such a good student.
But the words would not come. It was not like my second week of class, when I had halted often because my brain was forming new connections and erasing bad habits.
A wall was thrown up in my mind. I was totally outside language, beyond communication.
I don’t know, I tried to say. But I opened my mouth and found that I didn’t have the words for that either.
The silence stretched. Teacher Cai cocked her head. I felt no malice from her. This wasn’t punitive. She was deciding how much more I could take. But finally she must have seen there was no hope here, because she turned to Shanhong, and didn’t call on me again for the rest of class.
The Singaporeans kept their eyes fixed down at their notebooks. Shanhong tossed me a sympathetic smile.
When class was over, I went up to Teacher Cai’s desk. I had to apologize for this rupture. I wanted her to know I still liked her, that I was trying hard—that I was the good immigrant daughter she expected me to be.
But how could I explain this choking feeling?
It was all just so beside the point. I could not speak Chinese and it was clear by now I was never going to learn.
I would always be straining for words, yanking my tongue back from incorrect tones, and it didn’t matter anyway because my Chinese was not good for anything, I did not live here and I would never live here, and I didn’t have family here, and it didn’t matter whether I could converse fluently about mayoral politics in Taipei because I couldn’t vote here, and Taipei had nothing to do with me, so who were we fooling? What was this all for?
What I said was “I’m very sorry, teacher. It won’t happen again.”
Teacher Cai gave me a wary glance. She still thought this was a problem of attendance—that I was a slutty delinquent. “Just review your vocabulary list next time,” she said. “It’s not good to miss so much class, okay?”
STOICISM, I REMINDED MYSELF. STOICISM.
My gonggong was gone and I hated Taipei and I did not have any friends but none of this had to bother me because I wasn’t here to feel happy, I was here to get an education, my university had paid for me to be here, and this was what I would focus on for the next few weeks: keeping my head down and doing my homework.
Take refuge in the back roads of the self, said Marcus Aurelius.
Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed.
Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.
It didn’t work.
I wasn’t resilient enough. It didn’t matter that nothing had functionally changed about my days.
It still felt like the bottom had dropped out from my world, and I couldn’t get the taste of ash out of my mouth, and when I looked at my textbooks I felt no interest in applying myself to their contents, because I couldn’t see the point of doing anything at all.
All I could think about was that my gonggong wasn’t alive anymore, and I didn’t even have memories to treasure, and that was entirely my fault.
WHEN I GOT HOME FROM THE DEPARTMENT, MY KNEES BUCKLED, and I was crying before I hit the floor.
I simply could not stop crying these days.
I cried every evening before bed. I cried at random intervals during the day.
I cried a bit in the mornings before I left for the department.
It was not the frequency that surprised me but the sudden onslaught of these crying fits.
There was no warning; a sniffle would escalate to full-blown sobs in a matter of seconds.
It didn’t matter what I’d been doing or what I’d been thinking about.
I had no choice in the matter. I could just be working on my homework or walking home from the bus stop, and then I would remember that Gonggong was dead, and my thoughts would follow the same stupid patterns.
No, he was not dead. How could he be dead?
But he was indeed dead, and this was irreversible.
I would never see him again, and nothing I did could change this.
I would reflect on these basic facts, and then tears would start pooling in my eyes.
I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
If anything, I’d gained an appreciation for the inevitability of the process.
I was familiar now with all the stages: The beginning, when my eyes got very hot and raw under my skin and it felt like a tap had been turned on behind my nose.
The buildup, the hiccups and the short, desperate breaths.
The peak, the painful part, when my sobbing approached a seizure and I couldn’t breathe and my ribs really hurt.
I always ended up on the floor because it strained my core to sit up.
I could not remember crying this hard in my life.
I had never felt all this pressure inside me with nowhere to go.
At this point the crying became independent of anything I was thinking or feeling, and my mind drifted aloof while my body went through round after round of involuntary spasms. I was fascinated by the phonemes of my cries—the way my sobs nearly formed intelligible syllables but fell just short.
What was the linguistic function of my crying? If babies cried to get attention, then why did adults cry when they were alone? What was I trying to communicate, and to whom?