Two Tongues, One Painted World
I see what they tell you. I know, our “rich and multifaceted” culture has a way of weaving us together in stories that seem to invite pity– sob stories that tug at tender little heartstrings, wrapped in sugar-coated sympathy. It’s the soulless gaze in our eyes, our hyper-pigmented skin and our gangly, bony bodies that draw so much goddamn attention because of the trauma we’ve experienced. It implies the hardships we’ve struggled through, the weight of hate, the racism we’ve
so unfortunately had to deal with, and the constant battle of “adjusting to this new community where no one looks like us”. They hear the same, exhausted tale. The story that everyone expects from us, as if it’s the only one we know how to tell. So I stand and tamely perform my survival like a well-rehearsed play on your stage of compassion, wearing my resilience like a badge of honor. An adorable tale where every single one of us perseveres and rises above it all, mind you, unharmed, transformed, in a constant state of “personal growth”.
…
In another life, I’d be someone grounded–born and raised in one place. I’d know exactly where or what to call home, have my face be a shamelessly constructed result, a pure reflection, a beautiful product of people who have loved and shaped each other over time. I would know what to say to my friends, with pride, when they ask me about my culture.
I’ve only known myself to be a butterfly– shredding and reshaping my identity when forced to showcase it to the unrelenting world. Or as an acrobat, contorting and morphing my character to conform, just barely, to what my friends or family want from me. Or even as a magician, deceiving others into thinking everything is glorious and amusing, when in reality, it’s blatantly not.
It’s a quiet ache that I’m not brave enough to articulate–this feeling of not being “Chinese” enough to understand the words others toss around: certain terms from games I’ve never played, references that slip past me like shadows. It’s the way that, despite having spent my entire life calling Shanghai home, stepping into America feels like slipping into a vibrant, technicolor world. Not perfect, but something rich with possibility, filled with tangible love. Here, something in me mends, as if the layers of grey I’ve lived with are being slowly softened by the brightness around me.
Yet the shattering truth that this beautiful resurrection hadn’t come from home, but from a place I had no connection to, casts a quiet melancholy over my longing to feel like I belong.
The loneliness and guilt seep even deeper into me when I realize I’m adrift, not fully part of either world, instead hovering between fragments of one or the other. I had never lived in America before, so I can’t call myself American enough to slip so easily into those conversations. I speak English well enough to blend in, but somehow my voice doesn’t quite resonate. I am an imposter in a crowd of pure brilliance, left lingering in this awkward position where I don’t quite have a place anywhere. I cannot figure out where this misfit piece of a puzzle is supposed to fit.
一顿年夜饭，把我沉睡十三年的良知惊醒 (The Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner that awakened my conscience from its thirteen-year slumber)
Spit would fly everywhere when my grandparents spoke raucously and unabashedly. I’d observe, with disgust, as every morsel of half-chewed food–if you could call it that–catapulted out of their mouths while conversing rudely. It was straight up embarrassing seeing their crass manners and insensitivity. I knew I could never change anything; they were obviously accustomed to belching loudly and chewing with their mouths open until all the mashed up pieces of food, strung together by strands of saliva, started to collect at the corners of their mouths.
It was that unforgettable evening that made my mind churn as I laid in bed, eyes open and guilty as sin, recalling every little nuance of horror displayed at the dinner table. After arriving at my aunt and uncle’s house and settling in, I watched everyone bustle around. My grandmother, with those wilted hands and pale blue veins that snaked up her arm, was slicing open raw chicken that exuded an appalling shade of suffocating, mud-red blood. I could still see tiny clots of darker blood incorporated in the stiff meat.
A piece of
nian gao (rice cake) that had been marinating in a cesspool of a nebulous substance was being fished out by my uncle. It stank up the entire basement. It was the kind of smell that settled into your nose and back into your soul, making you want to hold your breath or even choke yourself. Anything just so you wouldn’t have to get a whiff of that gut-churning sourness.
My grandparents’ kitchen had the unappealing aesthetic of every typical Asian household: pungent sauces in random ramekins, containers, bowls, and Tupperware of unknown origin–and, if you’re lucky, even the carcass of some type of exotic dead fish drowning in its own blood in a sad plastic bag, seeping a foul, swampy smell into the kitchen. Who knows, maybe even the exact kind of “disease-carrying” wild animal that people would blame for COVID.
I wasn’t sure how I could feel so distant and aloof from the people I’m supposed to love and cherish. I don’t even know why I felt that way; my culture should be something I’d be proud to share with the whole world. It was as if I were quietly observing myself from a distance. Sitting in that tiny pale body was someone who was timid and uncomfortable in her own skin, overwhelmed by the pressure to fit in any one mold.
So that night, I let that little Mandarin-speaking girl go.
It felt easier and way less emotionally draining to relinquish that part of me that was so rich with culture. Even though my mother had explicitly told me that it would be incredibly disgraceful and a stab in the back to my family, that little girl and the fire she once had, whose voice was so naively steady and certain, was slowly extinguished by the merciless world she faced.
我的父母 (My parents)
I used to avoid my mother, not because she never loved me, but because she was never the nurturing figure I wanted her to be, and that hurt me. She never stopped loving me the same way; it’s just that my perspective has changed over the years regarding how she showed her love. The way she expressed it felt stifling. It wasn’t until later that I realized her love was buried beneath layers of expectations and a language of affection I could never understand.
I know that cliche: “Different people love in different ways.”
It honestly offered no comfort–it seemed repulsively overused. I can picture my mother having this astonished look plastered on her face as she admired
me. “Wow, Lindsey, you’re such a grown up! It took me my entire life to learn this.” It’s strange, sometimes, almost patronizing, to think about the idea she has of me in her mind–how small she must have thought me to be, especially if this suggested I had grown up in her eyes.
I’ve cried too many times to count. Like the time I was six, sitting at the piano, my bony little fingers trembling as I reached for the keys, my mother’s red-hot stare scorching my back. The music wasn’t coming out the way she wanted, drowning me in frustration. Sometimes she could forget that I’m just a little kid.
My eyes began to water, and suddenly, all I heard was this sharp, shrill sound–and through my blurry, wet vision, a hand extended out of nowhere, snatching my hands and folding them into place with such force that it felt like I was clay being twisted, molded, and manipulated into something that was never quite right. I ran to the bathroom, locking myself away from the world, holding myself in a ball and experiencing one panic attack after another. The echo of her voice lingered, the muffled sounds of a piano screeching, making its way into the sanctuary of my bathroom. It wasn’t until at least half an hour later that she came to check on me. My broken, curled-up body was never the same.
And in all the years since, through all these scarring arguments and silences, I’ve carried the burden of saying, “I’m sorry, mom.” It was the duplicity of her character that got to me: one moment she would be at an all-time high, chanting how ‘proud’ of me she was, but never forgetting to tarnish my joy with snarky comments. “You can’t just let yourself go like that.” I’ve grown up knowing exactly what her footsteps sounded like as they quickened on the stairs, how the hard soles of her shoes struck against our wooden floorboards. On weekends, I’d jump out of bed at 7:46 in the morning when she came to check on me for the second time, after already slamming me with words that barely concealed her disappointment–words that, in their coldness, were enough to jolt me awake.
It was love, but a love that was so empty, so distant. It wasn’t about being there, it was about doing–the actions, the expectations. This ‘showing love’ without ever saying it, without ever asking if we were okay, never having conversations that were just simple and casual, conversations that didn’t carry the weight of “So, how are you going to finish Precalc by your Sophomore year?”
And to think that people always sympathize with Asian parents like it’s some kind of admirable devotion, when in reality, it’s the most toxic thing ever.
命运是个有趣的东西 (Fate is an interesting thing)
I am a victim of conformity.
I don’t want people to know that I grew up in China. I don’t want them to know that I can speak two languages. I’ve always preferred to emphasize either my English or my Mandarin, but never both. Explaining how I grew up feels like such a burden–being raised in a country, attending an International school, but ending up speaking English better than my supposed ‘mother tongue’. It always confused them, and it singled me out, because I don’t really know where to call home.
It’s always
the same comments: “Wow, your English is really good!” or “You don’t seem to have an accent, even though you grew up in China!” People perceive this as an achievement. “Isn’t it cool that you’re fluent in
two languages?” But it makes me feel trapped, forever forced to fit in one neat box and to appear unassuming and modest while still retaining some sense of peculiarity.
I feel like I’m grieving everyday–the death of my fleeting, sad childhood and the premature responsibility that robbed it away from me. The years I spent learning everything through pain, feeling like I could never confide in anyone. The countless nights I’ve felt tears crawl into my ears while laying on my bed. Those brief moments of intense jealousy, a bitter, gut-wrenching taste that lingers in your mouth like a bad nightmare.
I once wrote a superficial little essay in fifth grade for a writing assessment in Mandarin class. It was about my mother's constant nagging and how overwhelmed that made me feel. I remember comparing her voice to “a mosquito, constantly buzzing in my ear, telling me what I should be doing.” I ended the essay on a cheery note, something like, “I know it can seem incessant and discouraging, but I know she does it all for my good because she wants me to flourish.” My teacher took several points off for being disrespectful to this “great and glorious figure” who had sacrificed everything for me, or so I was told. They wanted me to shut the hell up, tuck everything neatly under a curtain, and put up a happy facade because I obviously wasn’t meant to question or criticize the people who had built my life “piece by piece”.
So do you want me to worship them?
Like my fifth grade essay, I feel compelled to end this memoir on a positive note because, despite everything, I still love that piece of my culture that’s embedded in who I am. It’s ironic, because I don’t have to be so fragile with this anymore. But I certainly deserve to express the complexity of my feelings– the ambivalence of growing up under my family’s love. I can’t just paint things black and white. I’ve felt the unconditional roar of motherhood, that fierce love that engulfs every harm coming my way, and I’ve felt the uncontainable pride in my culture, wanting to scream and shower its beauty to the world. But I’ve also felt desperately alone and lost. I’ve felt everything in reach crumble and wandered around to see where I fit. It’s about the shades between these extremes–the moments when love feels complicated, when it hurts, when it’s not perfect, but it’s still real.
Sometimes I feel cursed; sometimes blessed. The startling juxtaposition that I’m able to perceive because of the exposure to both of these cultures that meld together and form me is such a gift. I recognize the ways of how unspoken love trickles through my family that may seem apathetic at first glance; the way my grandparents, despite their age, will make sure they concoct my favorite rice cakes every time I visit them. And yes, maybe they smell bad, but I don’t think I would’ve made it this far without the late-night bowls of sweet fermented rice soup they’ve delivered to my room. The freedom of expression and the brilliant culture of confirming your love in the form of sweet affirmations and direct gestures that I am so lucky to be able to experience in my school community here in America also is intertwined within who I am.
So who am I?
Maybe the question is enough.
