the bridge

thoughts on language, translation, betrayal

I am back in my Ye-Ye’s apartment in Hangzhou, in eastern China. It is a beautiful city that rests around half a lake. The other half is ringed by mountains. It is very bitterly cold in this apartment, colder than New York, and the heating only works in one room at a time, and the stove has long gone out, but being here feels good and ancestral in a way. He’s had this place for the past fifty years. I actually wrote my debut novel in here, or part of it. I remember being here last time in the summer, filling a research book with color-coded sticky notes. I like being tied to something, to some personal history. There is a very old willow chair here that I jumped on so much my foot went clean through. I borrowed that detail to put into Ruby Lost and Found, the book I published this year, the book in which I finally could express the complicated magnitude of care, love, guilt, and gratitude that I feel for my grandparents.

I always wonder how that book came about. I didn’t even come up with the idea until I was under pressure, on deadline for a second book I’d committed to. And now I can’t fathom not having thought of it all this time. Maybe it has been living inside of me and all this time I have been subconsciously learning, growing into the person that could find those words. I could not have written this book at 16; that is for sure. I have grown leaps and bounds, since 16, since 18, when I wrote Clues. My books are infinitely better today than they used to be. They are about things that are important to me and that I have only learned about in the last few years.

I am also acutely aware that my Mandarin has gotten worse since childhood. I spent my first year in this country and yet now I misread words all the time. I forget idioms. The Mandarin translation of Clues to the Universe came out and is being taught in fifth grade curriculums in mainland China (!!!); if I am being entirely frank, I actually don’t know if I could fully read through the entire book fluently. These are my words. I thought of them while on a family trip to Hangzhou, in this apartment I had intermittently spent my childhood in, in this place I am so immediately connected to. I look at the beautiful copy of Clues I was so incredibly lucky to get (my first translation! In a language my loved ones can understand!) and I’m elated beyond words. There is also a small part of me that feels like I have let someone down.

What have I been doing all this time? Sure, I speak it with my parents, and when I go into Chinatowns. But all this time, in the past years specifically, I have not been using it regularly. Instead I have been reading books in English, expanding my vocabulary, refining my command of the language so that I can continue to write books about my experience in the diaspora.

Of course this experience is all my own. This is a shortcoming on my part. There are a thousand ways I could have mitigated this: I could have watched shows, practiced, read, self-studied. Things must be preserved intentionally and taken care of. This all I can start. Of course I’m complicit in the erosion of my first language and that will be apparent in any future potential generations. There is a moment in Ruby that I always loved, and that is when she describes the passage of Mandarin in her family as a sixty year game of telephone. In spite of her love for her grandparents and her devotion to her community, her Mandarin is imperfect. It is one of the most honest things I have written.

I think what I am trying to say is: sometimes, my articulation, my increasing command over the English language, feels like an act of betrayal. The worse I get at Mandarin, the better I get at describing the loss in translation between my two languages and the past and present; the grief and love; the complication that seeds in the in-between. The better I get at describing history, of certain phrases and words, and ideas, the more distance I get from my origin. I have built the bridge and now I watch it fracture behind me.