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Mixed Blood Broken Tongue
First published in Ricepaper Magazine, 2014 Performed at UEA Live, 2016 Dàjiāhăo, I know I don't speak so well. You see I twice broke my tongue. After the first time they sewed it back tight but it wasn't guāiguai and careful like me, it went and broke again and forgot the rhythms of its shaping. These days it's just as tangled as my blood. The first time I broke my tongue I was still a child of Betel Nut Lane. That was the street at the end of the city behind the market where the old women sold chickens in wicker cages and the butcher spat red phlegm into the alley. The vegetable sellers waggled green onions under my mama's nose and threw in the basil for free. Nine-towers, we called it, best for frying with cockles. “Aiyo!” laughed the women as they squeezed my roly poly arms, “This little fishmonger will love such a fry-up, won't you big sister?” And they put everything in a white plastic bag so mama could put it in the front basket of our white scooter while I sat guāiguai behind her with my fists around her waist and my little brother was fastened to her front with a long cloth. “Hold tight, xīn’gān,” said mama. We coasted toward the fruit stalls at the end of the street. I closed my eyelids and the sun beat through them redly. It made the morning feel heavy and sweet, and I forgot we were in the shade of the mountain. From the fruit stalls I could see the far end of the market near the overpass, where we didn't go ― where the betel nut girls sat on their high stools and swung their big-heeled feet through the heat of the day and night. Dark hair and pink-strapped tops. They were always wrapping and wrapping, making perfect betel nut parcels. All day the market men chewed the parcels and spat out the juice and fibre and that's why the ground around the market was spattered with orange stains that mama turned her nose up at. Besides that, she thought the betel nut girls were silly. She would say, “You should look up to big sister Zhēn instead, ai.” But I thought the betel nut girls were the most beautiful big sisters in the world. Other things mama didn't like at the market were chickens' feet and pigs' blood paste, and how sometimes the women would sniff and turn away if she forgot to speak in Táiyŭ. Then she would oblige them but later she would say, “Guòfèn! How those market women make me suffer!” That would make her more upset than the misunderstandings, which happened when strangers saw us together and they would stop us and say, “Zěnmekěnéng, how can it be?” Then when they had stared for a moment they would register mama's dark skin and crow, “Ai, what a lucky amah to be charged with two such cute little Americans.” Mama would laugh and say, “Oh yes,” because it was an old joke to her. They smiled and said, “Can they speak Guóyŭ? And Táiyŭ, ne?” Mama said, “Not really,” and started moving away. I told them, “Of course I speak Guóyŭ, and she's my mama.” “Don't be silly little sister, there's no way she could have borne you in her womb.” And they laughed and laughed, “Wŏdemā’ya, upon my mother!” Ha ha ha. All the way home the betel nut trees made a little whisper with their branches. They said, “Aiyo, mixed-blood sister. Ai, look at you.” Mama warned us that when betel nuts hung the wrong way up on the tree it meant they were deadly poisonous. Even though mama's dark skin made strangers think she was an amah from Thailand or the Philippines, once she started speaking you would know her family were from the mainland. My great-grandparents came over on the boats where at first a hundred tongues milled together to create misunderstandings and panic. A woman who lost her shoe over the side of the ship screamed, “My little one, my little one!” and a dozen men dived in to save her baby. My great-grandmother, who saw dragons in the sky, put her palms together and was quiet. My great-grandparents settled in a dusty village in the south where my grandaunts grew up making paper flowers and working in the textile factory. My great-grandmother hung sausages to dry in the wind and learned to speak Guóyŭ in a tilting tongue. My mama was a toddler at her side and learned her first words in that singsong voice. And so it fell into me like a waterfall. Guóyŭ. The Language of the Republic. My first tongue. It drew me and shaped me. I was round and whole with it. I sat on the low wall in front of our house and poked snails' tentacles to watch them shrink inside their shells. I waggled my fingers at the touch-me-nots that burst through the bricks in the wall. Bamboo shadows swam over me like a blanket. People said to my baba, “You should speak to them in American.” But my baba told us, “Your first tongue is the rhythm of your heart.” He didn't know that rhythm is fluid like blood. The first time I broke my tongue I was laughing. I was running barefoot across the tatami mats in our living room. I was laughing at our turtle, that we stole from the creek bed. He was running so fast that I had to chase him to grab his tail. I pounced and tripped and in the midst of my laughter I bit down and my tongue broke like hot oil through my mouth. Red stains filled the tatami weave like an admonishment. Deep red, like the juice of a deadly betel nut. * The first time I broke my tongue the doctors sewed me whole again at the hospital. They wagged their fingers at me. “Have a careful heart now, little sister. It's the only tongue you have.” I was guāiguai and guarded my tongue behind my teeth, like a treasure of my heart. I counted my footsteps like dangerous syllables and looked up and down stairs and around corners. When mama said, “Hold tight,” I used all my might and concentration. The market women said, “Ai, what a precious băobèi. Still” ― and they swished away the flies with their colourful swatters ― “a cautious child is bound to be a fussy one. Isn't that so, mama?” And they pinched my arms and said, “Soon you'll grow up, big sister.” I went down to the creek bed and searched for our turtle, which had run right over my spilled mixed blood, through mama's hastening footsteps and out the green screen door. He had left mixed-blood footprints behind him, all the way across the tatami mat, through the kitchen, down the front steps and just about halfway across Betel Nut Lane. There the prints faded away, like a hasty goodbye. I peered under the little concrete footbridge, and beneath the big rocks and behind some ferns. I even wandered into the bamboo forest and called out to the spirit of the earth. There was no reply, just the gentle swishing of bamboo leaves in the dark. The turtle was nowhere to be found. The market women said, “Soon you'll grow up.” You'll grow into someone Way, way beyond the ocean Across the sky In the deep of another forest It happened as fast as you could say, yílùshùnfēng ― may a kind wind guide your journey. Of course, that's what everyone was wishing us. As if the wind was taking us away. As if the wind was blowing boxes into our little kitchen and saying, “Choose carefully, băobèi. There's only room for a few treasures.” As if the wind was the instrument of our departure. And it whistled a low tune all around us. But when I cried it was mama who said, “There's a better life waiting, xīn’gān, far away from this little island.” I chose my stuffed rabbit and my book of poems, and my wooden Laughing Buddha. I kept them with me, as we moved across the sea. The day changed. The sun broke across a foreign continent. Its glare was like golden ice. Grey mountains rose like a challenge above the sea. I held my Laughing Buddha close, as if his sweet wood scent would keep me close to home. But we stepped into a big grey car, that took us deep into the winter forest. The wind was a different wind, and it threw ice against the road. The walls of the mountains stretched over us in every direction. My baba's mother met us in a gravel driveway, in front of a dark wooden house. Inside, she sliced cheese with a silver wire. Over dinner she said, “What can we do about their Chinese ways?” Snow hung on the trees all around the house, silent as a secret. I lost the stuffed rabbit and the book of poems. Only my Laughing Buddha remained, grinning into the heart of a strange forest. And in that forest, I learned to carry the notes of a new language upon my broken tongue. Soon you'll grow up You'll grow into someone Way, way beyond the ocean Across the sky In the deep of another forest There you'll look up and know nothing except ― You are no longer a child of Betel Nut Lane. |
