Alien
I heard a while ago that people who are bilingual can develop two personalities. Our perception of the world is primarily captured by language. In Russian, there are multiple words for differing shades of blue, and the Pirahã people of the Amazonas do not keep track of exact quantities in their language.
The English language has the feature for situating actions in time: ‘I was sailing to Bermuda, and I saw Jacob’ is different from ‘I sailed to Bermuda, and I saw Jacob.’ Chinese is an uninflected language and conveys meaning through word order, adverbials or shared understanding of the context. The concept of time in Chinese is not handled through the use of different tenses and verb forms.
So sentences would sound like this —
“I sail to Bermuda and see Jacob yesterday.”
“I sail to Bermuda and see Jacob next year.”
The action remains intact, the time is merely a modifier.
At my family dinner last night, a relative that I haven’t seen for decade asked me to share with the table what I’ve learned in 2018. I journal a lot, so this wasn’t supposed to be a hard question. Yet I found it almost impossible to get words out of my mouth in a way that sounded Chinese; I couldn’t map all the actions to the time modifier of another language. For a moment, it felt as if all the growth, journey, and epiphany got lost somewhere in time.
My writings in Chinese have always been about capturing feelings, observations, without making conclusions or judgment. It was to “make someone feel a certain way,” leaving behind irresponsibly but intentionally lots of ambiguity and uncertainty. I didn’t care to sound clear, or useful, or concise; if there has to be an objective for which I wrote, it was to make someone feel a bit less lonely.
I was once proud of my words, and people seemed to like it too. I wrote about dreams of sailing to a lighthouse, nights of riding in the dark and rushing into the future, stories we tell each other to fulfill our own prophesies. I was determined to leave, to build something new, to disrupt, to reconstruct. It was the language of passion, madness, and lots of determination that has become contagious to even my future self.
Then very abruptly, I stopped writing in Chinese about three years ago. because I became afraid, afraid of showing vulnerabilities, fearful of being honest, and showing who I am; for a moment I thought I should give up writing entirely for a new life I got to build in America, where I thought I could start from scratch and become who I truly want to be.
I might’ve been able to escape from the language temporarily, but this humongous castle of imagination built by words stood still, and maybe someone still resides there. When I decide to go in and talk to her, I imagine her gently telling me: “You’ve never gone that far from where you came from.”
So, when they asked “what I’ve learned in 2018”, I ended up telling them in Chinese:
“I learned that you need to be yourselves.”
The phrase “becoming yourself” (自己）in Chinese assumes singularity; yourself is only one you. The “selves,” safely packaged in the English language, was shoved under the table in my head. My teenage cousins burst out laughing at this cliché; they were on their phones watching pop stars dancing on Tik Tok.
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