1.
My first language is Huangpihua, a twangy local inflection of the Wuhan dialect of southwestern Mandarin. Compared with the clipped tones and clean enunciation of standard Mandarin, Huangpihua is an earthy drawl that bespeaks the insular rural landscape into which I am born.
The light syllabic of my given name, mai, meaning “wheat,” becomes a primeval long vowel in Huangpihua, like the English words “mat” or “map” missing their final consonant. This name is what my grandparents call after me as I romp around the village, our village, where my family, our clan, has been rooted for many, many generations, at least a few hundred years or more. Maaaimaaai, they holler. Brother Maizi. Brother Wheat.
I am a rambunctious child, a tyrant among children. I frolic with the oxen, boss around my peers. My grandparents feed me all the rich foods and meat and sweets that they had lacked, that were lacking in my father’s childhood, when times were unimaginably harder. They are brusque people who till the earth, raise livestock, labor all their lives. They spoil me in Huangpihua, my undeniable origin.
2.
My father is a doctoral student at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, when I am born. My mother relocates when I’m two years old, leaving me in China with my grandparents. At age four, I make the long journey to Scandinavia myself, shepherded by an uncle. Are we there yet? I ask when we get on the plane in Beijing. My uncle chortles and tells me we haven’t even taken off. I promptly burst into tears.
When I arrive in Denmark, my parents are strangers to me. I push them away and glare at them. They are astonished by how much of a country bumpkin I am, fat cheeks and ruddy complexion, my demeanor uncouth. You were so spoiled, my mother tells me much later. Your grandparents really spoiled you.
In the late 1980s, long distance phone calls are still a luxury for our family. We record cassette tapes as mementos, our voices narrating and performing disparate lives on either side of the vast continental expanse. In the village, I once tottered and shrieked in the background while my grandparents relayed local gossip, spoke of how much I’d grown. Now I am on the opposite end of that unfathomable divide. My parents coach me on what to say. Make sure to eat plenty of meat for Chinese New Year, I recite to the tape recorder in Huangpihua. My mother laughs and teases me about my mangled pronunciation of “meat,” zou instead of rou.
My parents teach me to speak standard Mandarin so I sound more like a proper child. They are chagrined by the brassy, vulgar inflection that I’ve grown into, which betrays my peasant upbringing as much as the open-crotch pants I once wore. In an effort to refine my young sensibilities, they make me memorize Tang dynasty poetry. Bright moonlight before my bed / I thought it was frost on the ground! Soon I forget how to speak Huangpihua.
My father has only one more year left of his studies by the time I arrive. I never pick up any Danish except for one phrase: Hvad laver du?
What I remember of Denmark is this: playing naked in a sprinkler on the lawn of my preschool. My teacher buying me an ice cream bar shaped like a foot. The large tires of city buses and the smell of gasoline. Riding in the child seat of my mother’s bike when we fall sideways into the snow. Looking at a calculator in a bank.
Detached from my coarse, rural roots, I become a different boy altogether, shaped by a new way of speaking, surrounded by a language I don’t understand. No longer am I brash and carefree as I was in the village. I don’t know what to make of my new environment. My parents warn me that strangers might try to snatch me away. I keep a viselike grip on my mother’s hand at the grocery store. I am scared to be left alone.
My mother, meanwhile, is learning English at a local school. One day, she is scouring the house where we rent a room from an older Danish woman and her daughter Gita. It is raining outside. In a hurry, my mother grabs one of them and asks, “Are you umbrella?”
3.
At age five, I learn to speak English at a kindergarten in New Jersey. The first book I read is called No One Noticed Ralph. It is about an attention hungry parrot whose owners grow annoyed with him until he saves the day by alerting their neighbors to a house fire. English gradually overtakes my mouth and mind as I watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Rescue Rangers and buzz about the playground, adapting quickly and efficiently to a new country and language in the way that only a child can.
One day my kindergarten teacher announces to the class my exciting news. I’ve just told her that I have a new name, which I claim directly from one of my favorite live action TV shows, Knight Rider. My name, she tells everyone, is Mike.
4.
At home we still speak Chinese, although English seeps in day by day, year by year, filling the house like a vapor. Every weekend during my childhood in American suburbia, I am forced to endure a dull couple of hours of Chinese language instruction. My interest in and desire to learn and speak the language declines steadily as I approach puberty.
The summer before fifth grade, I spend two months in Huangpi, my first trip back to China, with my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, shuttling between both sides of the family. It is brutally hot in the countryside, in the city. I am ravaged by mosquitoes. We eat watermelon every day. I am scared of the village children who are my age, scared of the adults, one of whom I see scold and beat a child in the road in front of my uncle’s house. I speak to them in Mandarin at first. But then, miraculously, my Huangpihua comes back. I grasp it again like picking up a discarded root vegetable, half buried beneath the soil.
From then on, I’ve been able to code switch when needed, although I am never as comfortable in dialect. I have never managed to properly mimic Wuhanhua, the terse city folk version of our twang.
By ninth grade, I stop attending Chinese school altogether. I don’t admit to speaking any language besides English. I’m embarrassed by the fact that I was born in another country. I deny eating rice at home every day. Sometimes we dine at Chinese restaurants and my parents make cheerful conversation with the manager upon arrival. I shrivel beneath the gaze of the white patrons, who cast aggrieved glances our way as they stab at their kung pao chicken.
5.
I begin taking French in middle school because everyone else is learning Spanish. I continue through all of high school, receiving excellent grades but learning nothing. Our teacher screens Ferris Bueller’s Day Off dubbed in French at least once a year. Occasionally we listen to some Coralie Clément. In my senior year I receive the honors distinction for French among my graduating class. But when I take a language placement exam in my freshman year of college, the results are decisive: I barely know any French. I have to start over from scratch.
6.
There is a moment in my undergrad years when I find myself in the library stacks for no particular reason, perusing a shelf of books translated from Chinese. I stumble upon a French-Chinese dictionary. Opening it, tracing my fingers over the brittle pages, I feel my mind grow hot as I witness the total elision of my operative language, diverted into two other realms I only half know.
I fulfill my language requirement in French, but I decide to press on. These are the years I watch Hiroshima, mon amour and Chungking Express for the first time. My heart lurches at something I’m not able to articulate. Red guards and rural goddesses, assassins and urban housewives commingling with young people shimmying to jukeboxes, delinquent teens, existential sorrow and romance. These languages and histories, of which I’d had only the vaguest of notions all this time, rise up before me in a sudden and implacable gust.
7.
I am twenty years old when I see Paris for the first time. That winter, far, far away from the sunny splendors of my life in Los Angeles, I burrow into used bookstores in the Latin Quarter, drink too much wine, huddle with friends against the winter chill and smoke hash under Pont Marie. I repeat the same phrases over and over again, listening to my own voice through headphones in my weekly phonetics course at the Sorbonne. Elle était soutenue par de grandes comédiennes. Elle était soutenue par de grandes comédiennes. Elle était soutenue par de grandes comédiennes. Elle était soutenue par de grande comédiennes.
I watch mostly foreign films, finding it easier to read French subtitles than to rely on my listening comprehension. These screenings are usually at tiny theaters run by one cranky proprietress who sells the tickets herself, then goes into the projection booth to wind the reel, smoking a cigarette all the while.
I become conscious of the being-looked-at-ness of a foreigner. This time I can’t hide behind the righteous indignation and bitterness I wielded in high school, when I wore black band shirts and spiky jewelry, dyed my hair atomic red or electric blue. I can’t seethe, how dare they, who are you to, I am as much. Los Angeles was about navigating queer identity, youthful indulgences, the delicate bloom of friendships. Now, in Paris, I am at a loss. I am alien. I am alone.
Je suis d’origine chinoise, mais…
But what, really? What can I say about being raised in America that will make them think any differently of me? Nothing, I know, can efface the Chineseness of how I look, no matter how good my French is, how differently I perceive or present myself compared with a recent transplant from the Far East. This much I learned growing up in Ohio. You are reduced to the sum of your physical features, a set of assumptions and ignorances, a blind and cold judgment on the basis of nothing. It matters not which concerts you go to or who your favorite authors are or whether you have a part-time job in the mall. It matters not if you speak with an indiscernible lilt or claim a Westernized pedigree by virtue of history and geography and dumb luck and good timing.
What am I doing in France? What were my parents doing, not that long before, in Denmark? Winter turns to spring as I shuttle across northern Europe, thinking and feeling and questioning in Amsterdam, in Brussels, in Paris. How can I return to complacency after this disruption of self?
Est-ce que vous êtes capable de lire ces caractères? an old man asks me at a Chinese art exhibition.
Non, parce que…
8.
In winter I find myself in Tokyo catching up with M., my classmate from the Sorbonne, a slender middle-aged woman, and Y., who had taken a pastry-making course in Paris and ended up renting a room in the same flat where I was housed, home to a silver-haired jazz-loving divorcée. We have yakitori for dinner, then a drink nearby, and end at a French café, fittingly enough, as light December rain falls over the streets of Ginza.
Japan turns out to be a lovely linguistic dysphoria, kanji peering at me from every street sign and restaurant menu. So strange to have some sense of things and also none at all. Luxury boutiques abound; trinkets and incense in front of Kaminarimon; crows flapping about Ueno Park as a busker plays “Ave Maria.” The melancholy feeling of glimpsing a world that was never yours, may never be yours.
It’s a relief to land in Shanghai. I’m grumpy, at first, waiting with my mom in a crowded railway station to catch a late train to Suzhou. But something in me softens. The enormity and brashness of China, after spending days stewing in the precise and delicate aesthetics of the Japanese, is welcome and familiar. I’ve been making this regular journey for some time now, ever since my parents repatriated without me while I was in high school. At first I resisted pretty hard. Shanghai, after all, was the last place I wanted to spend a summer when I was fifteen. I went grudgingly, with the requisite cynicism of that age. I was unimpressed by the rice paddies flying into Pudong Airport, the glittering skyscrapers of Lujiazui. My mind was always elsewhere. Amazingly enough, in retrospect, I longed to return to Ohio during those few weeks. But things change with time.
9.
I manage to recover over the years. I recover myself. It is a slow, arduous process, aided by the restorative cocoon I create in sunny southern California, where I learn love and find family again. China is never easy, and the journey to get there is so, so long. It is worlds apart from a life I am fluent in. My countrymen gawk at my clothes and hair. It takes time to defuse anger. I make overnight train rides into the heartland to visit my grandparents, who have relocated from their ancestral home to an apartment in the city. I feel more displaced than ever in Huangpihua, miserable for all the attention from random relatives and prying neighbors. Tentative steps. On the train, I mutter awkwardly to the magazine saleswoman who keeps barging into my bunk to switch out her wares. I shudder and squirm at squat toilets. I gape and bumble through the relentless crowds, the young mothers with their fat babies, skinny teens smoking cigarettes, businessmen baring blinged wrists, wizened women with canes, gruff ayis, peppy girls in miniskirts. Darkskinned laborers hoisting huge, inconceivably shaped sacks. This could have been you, I hear the voice of my parents echoing. This could have been you.
10.
New York feels natural. It is the city where I first landed as a five-year-old, whose streets I roamed with my mother on daytime excursions from Highland Park. An urban jungle we swept through during the summers of my childhood, when we visited family friends on Long Island. The metropole I heard calling during listless years in Cleveland. I’d been aiming to move for college. California is a contingency; I make my way back to Manhattan at age twenty-two.
In New York I find the landscape of sensation I’d long sought. I relearn. I reroot. I rediscover. Worlds within worlds. The contemporary and the surreal. The achingly human. The sumptuous cinema that is the city. I drink whiskey and host dinner. I stay up late agonizing over seminar papers on continental philosophers I can’t even begin to comprehend. The lunar calendar begins to mean something again. I buy talismans and banners from Chinatown. I read painstakingly. I write with poor penmanship. Each winter sends me into a glum hibernation. My heart is reborn in spring. I revel in endless summer nights. Years shed as quickly as autumn leaves. Thirty revolutions around the sun. I remember the child that I was, crude and unrepentant. Boisterous, in search of a good time. I am that child, have always been.
11.
My claim to Americanness is not mutually exclusive. Identities seem loose and fragmentary, be they national, sexual, social or cultural. My inflection in English is flat, tending toward Californian, I’ve been told, but I like to think of it as more neutral than that: without cadences that mark geography, standardized but not regionalized. Similarly, the Chinese that I speak is unplaceable and inoffensive, bearing no trace of my rural provenance, suggesting no more concrete an affiliation than that vague and multifarious diaspora to which I belong.
In time I learn to shrug it off when people in China wonder if I’m from Hong Kong or Taiwan. I pay no mind when the flight attendant narrows her eyes and asks, What nationality do you hold? I feel pleased when strangers approach me on the street or on subway platforms and ask for directions in Chinese. That freighted question Where are you from? does not faze me because I have been pondering this for years, for half my life, if not more.
These days the long slog across the Pacific is still uncomfortable, though nothing new. Shanghai is like an estranged family member in whom I find both resonance and disparity. But at least it is company that I can accept, even enjoy. At the same time, the compressed modernity of Chinese society has shifted certain odds in my favor. People no longer bat an eye at the way I look or speak. I never realized how liberating it can be to feel anonymous.
For now, my engagement with French has been whittled down to mostly email correspondence and occasional reading. Spells of travel can seduce but never satisfy a person. Left behind in abstraction, the language connotes, for me, a catalog of absurdities, the timeless cityscape of Paris, a dilettante life.
12.
I’m on a bullet train speeding through the smog-choked Chinese countryside. Every so often we pull into a stretch of urban density, replete with high-rises, neon signs, and teeming intersections. In between there are panoramas of farmland and ramshackle villages, rice paddies, distant mountains. A dull gray hangs over most of it. I’m listless in my seat, in spite of the leg room, the books I’ve brought to read, the work I intended to do. I can’t help but stare out the window at the scenery whizzing by.
Then suddenly we plunge into a tunnel. My ears pop. The quality of sound in the cabin changes. A few seconds later, we’re out the other side. More gray greenery, more somber landscapes. Then another tunnel. Then out. Then a tunnel. Then out. Over and over, the train shuddering each time.
Eventually we enter a tunnel that lasts for longer than a few seconds. I look out at the blackness, flat and unending. The longer it goes on, the more preposterous it seems. Everyone around me is reading or eating or watching shows on their tablets and laptops. No one notices this new realm that we’ve entered. Featureless and fearsome.
This train has torn through the fabric of space and time. We’re floating, if such a thing could be said, in an ether that is formless and placeless, that is neither here nor there, neither past nor present. My heart thuds. My palms sweat. How this mountain could be so long or so deep, I have no idea. All I know is that I want to get out of this darkness. I want to see my surroundings, take comfort in their existence.
I want to get out of this darkness.
13.
Oh friends, my friends, China is so far away.
Photo Cred:
unsplash-logoRobert V. Ruggiero
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 6.
View full issue & more.
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Mike Fu is a Brooklyn-based writer, translator, and editor. His writing has appeared in Slant’d, Banana, No Tokens, Perigee, and The Margins. He is the translator of Stories of the Sahara by the late Taiwanese writer Sanmao and a cofounder of the transnational journal The Shanghai Literary Review.
