As a mixed-race young woman, I find myself at all times both within and without my culture. For a long time, my ancestral background seemed to color my skin but not my personal life. Likewise, the narrator in Katherine Charriott Hou’s short story “Learning Chinese” comments that she, “…was thirteen years old when she became half Chinese.” Throughout this softly funny and subtly tragic piece, the narrator learns the cost of forced American socialization when her mother suddenly cannot speak English anymore. Together the unnamed narrator and her father immerse themselves in learning Chinese culture and language to accommodate the mother.
Despite being published in 2000, “Learning Chinese” ’s themes surrounding assimilation into American culture are still hauntingly relevant to the cultural discourse in today’s world. Charriott Hou’s story begs the questions, “Why are only certain cultures considered American?” and “Why is acculturation often expected when someone moves to America?”. Masterful storytelling aside, the lack of narrative distance feels like another tragedy dusting the terrain.—
Learning Chinese
Katherine Charriott Hou
I was thirteen when I became half Chinese. It began on a Friday in March, the day I came home from school and found my mother on our loveseat instead of at work. It was raining that after noon, and the house was dark with the outside gloom. I remember: I ran in from the cold, switched on the lights in the kitchen, and then reached for the overhead in the family room. That was when I saw my mother. She sat in front of the television, holding the remote control, but watching nothing. She stared at the screen as if she were confused.
“Mom?” I said. “What are you doing home?”
When she didn’t answer, or even turn toward the sound of my voice, I went and stood in front of her; repeated myself. Eyebrows raised, I dripped our yellow-green shag carpet a darker green, and waited for her response.
“Hey,” I said at last. ”Are you okay?”
She watched me for a moment, turned her head to one side and then the other, and then she stood and walked away.
I followed her to the dining room, and the living room, and the kitchen. She ignored me, but I repeated her name, asked her questions the whole time, anyway. When she locked herself in the bathroom, though, I gave up, and went to my room.
I sat on my bed and emptied my backpack, but I couldn’t start my homework, because I was too worried about my mother. I thought about going back downstairs and trying to talk to her again, but decided to wait until my dad came home before I did anything else. By five-thirty, I had almost convinced myself that everything was fine. Still, when I heard my father’s car pull into the garage, I jumped out of bed.
My parents were in the kitchen when I got downstairs. Mom stood at the stove with her back turned to Dad; he was at the table, just a few feet behind her, talking about his day. I sat next to him and watched my mother. She took pots and pans from the stove, emptied them onto platters and into large bowls, which she placed, one by one, in front of my father.
“Look at all this food,” Dad said. ”And dumplings!”
Dumplings were his favorite, but a rare treat usually reserved for birthdays or New Years. My father surveyed the steaming pile of pork-filled dough and then smiled at my mother.
“What’s the occasion?” he said.
Mom didn’t answer, or smile back, or even sigh and tell us how long it had taken her to make them, but her lack of a response was lost on my father, as his hands fumbled around the table. He picked up a set of chopsticks.
“Where are the forks?”
”Yeah,” I said. “Where are they?”
The two of us turned expectant faces to my mother. She ate quietly, oblivious, it seemed; her eyes were focused on her plate.
“Oh well,” my father said.
Dad speared a dumpling with one chopstick, and I fought the impulse to laugh as he brought it to his mouth; swallowed it almost whole. He repeated this motion again and again (and each time it was a little less funny, and a little more pathetic), until the dumplings were gone. Then he lifted the bowl of pork and tofu and spooned a huge red mound onto his rice. That done, he poked around with his one chopstick for a while, but accomplished very little: the pieces were too small; there was too much sauce; there was nothing to spear. Dad looked a bit confused, but it only took him a second to brighten up.
“Chinese food,” he said. “What a great idea! Reminds me of when I was in Taiwan.” He nodded at the ma po do ju on his plate. “What’s this called again, Honey?” he said.
Mom was silent.
“Honey,” he said.
And still she was silent.
Dad turned to me at last. “Is something wrong?”
I looked at my mother, chewing delicate bites of pork, her chopsticks graceful in her hand, and I looked at my father, holding his one useless piece of wood, and then I looked down.
“I don’t think she’s talking to us.”
My father did not press the situation. Instead, he got himself a fork; spent the rest of the meal praising my mother’s cooking; and, as if to prove that he meant what he said, ate more than I had ever seen him eat in one sitting. After my mother cleared the dishes, he stayed where he was and kept talking. Watching him, I couldn’t decide if he was talking to her or not. At any rate, he asked all the questions, and answered them too. When Mom dried the last dish and went upstairs, Dad finally got quiet. I tried to arrange my face into a worldly and sympathetic expression, thoughtfully smoothed the corduroy of my hip huggers, and waited for him to ask me what to do. But he didn’t; instead, I asked him.
“Do,” he said. ”About what?”
“Mom isn’t talking to us anymore.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “That isn’t true.”
”Yes it is,” I said. “She didn’t say anything at dinner. And she was here when I got home from school today, and she wasn’t talking then, either. Something’s wrong.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” I looked at my father accusingly, imagining an office romance, or a forgotten anniversary, some TV slight that would provoke this silent treatment. “It’s got to be something.”
“Look,” he said. “Maybe Mom just doesn’t feel like talking. I’m sure everything will be better by tomorrow.”
But the next day things were not better. I got out of bed at seven, even though it was a Saturday, to see how my mother was before she left for work. I waited outside the bathroom while she took a shower; then followed her to the kitchen and watched her make rice soup, scrambled eggs with soy sauce and green onions. She sat down to eat and I sat with her, hoping she would start a conversation, but she didn’t. We sat together in silence until nine o’clock; until nine-thirty; until ten. Finally, I spoke.
“Mom,” I said. “Do you know what time it is? You’re supposed to be at the store right now. Aren’t you going today?”
She didn’t answer me, just sat like she had been. That was when I went upstairs to confront my father. I found him in their room, sitting on the bed, and reading one of his stupid Westerns.
“Mom still isn’t better,” I said. ”And I don’t know what you think you’re doing up here reading Louis L’Amour when she’s downstairs and won’t talk.”
He closed his book.
“I’m not reading,” he said. “I’m thinking.”
“Thinking,” I said. “Thinking what?”
“Well, that maybe we should take your mother to the doctor. Maybe it isn’t that she doesn’t want to talk, maybe it’s that she can’t.”
“Of course she can talk,” I said. “If she couldn’t, then don’t you think she’d have found some way to let us know by now? Maybe instead of thinking about dragging her to the doctor like she’s sick, you should think about whatever it is that you did to make her not want to talk to us.”
“Me,” he said. “Me? How do you know it wasn’t you?”
”Yes you,” I said. “Because I already thought about it, and I know it wasn’t me.”
This conversation didn’t get us anywhere: not that morning, or that night, when we had it again, or the next night, when we had it for the last time. That Monday, I didn’t go to school, and my father didn’t go to work: we stayed home to watch my mother, and hope that she started talking to us again. But she didn’t, and she didn’t make any sign to acknowledge us when we were talking to her, either. What she did do was get dressed and get ready to go out. As she was drawing on her eyebrows, I went to my father. I spoke in a whisper, just in case, even though I myself was beginning to wonder if she really could hear or understand us.
“Come on,” I said. “Now’s our chance. She’s obviously going to work. We can follow her there and see if it’s just us she’s not talking to.”
My father and I got ready, and as soon as my mother’s car reached the end of our street, we got into my dad’s car and followed her. But Mom didn’t go to work. Instead, she drove, and we drove, all over town. After a while, it became clear that my mother was leading us in circles.
“Do you think she knows we’re following her and is trying to lose us?” I said.
“I don’t know,” my father said.
We continued to trail my mother in her loop around town; about five minutes later, she surprised us by pulling into the parking lot of the local high school. She stopped her car at the edge of the lot and just sat there. Me and Dad parked several cars away and waited with her.
“What do you think is going on?” I said.
”Actually,” my father said. “I think she’s lost.”
“Lost? But how can she be? We’ve lived here forever, and there are signs all over the place that lead to the mall, how could she not figure out how to get there?”
My father didn’t answer me: there wasn’t time. My mother had pulled out of the parking lot. She took us down the street and then u-turned and took us back in the direction we had just come from. Then turned us right and went that way for a while before making another u-turn.
“Oh my god, you’re right,” I said. “She is lost.”
”Yeah,” my dad said. “So I guess we are too.”
After another half-dozen false starts and u-turns, forwards and backwards that didn’t lead anywhere, my mother pulled her car to the side of the road and stopped again. Dad and I pulled up right behind her: at that point we didn’t care if she knew we were following or not. I could see into her car, and her head was shaking a little, as if she were listening to music, or telling herself no. But then the shaking stopped, and she started the car again.
“I guess she remembers the way now,” my father said.
”Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
My mother drove with more purpose, without the u-turns, and not a single more stop, but she didn’t go to the department store where she had worked for seven years. She drove to the Chinese grocery that was five minutes past it, parked her car, and went inside.
My father and I sat outside Maxim’s Oriental Grocery, glad to have come to our destination at last, and we waited for my mother.
“Well,” he said. “I guess she’s doing some shopping.”
“I guess so,” I said.
But an hour passed, and then two, and still she didn’t come out.
“One of us has to go in there,” I said.
”And one of us should wait out here in case she leaves before the other one finds her.”
My father looked at me and I got out of the car. I was prepared to search the aisles of Maxim’s forever, if need be. As I walked to the store, I imagined myself peeking out from behind tanks of sluggish lobsters; crouching by the long low refrigerators that held bloody innards in open bins; playing some sort of elaborate hide and seek with my mother. I saw myself stepping fearlessly into the tiny jewelry store in back, where they sold light green jade and shiny yellow 24K gold, and asking in my broken Chinese if anyone had seen a quiet (well, for now at least, very quiet), pretty, middle-aged lady. But I didn’t have to do any of this. I saw my mother as soon as I walked into the store, and she wasn’t shopping. She was standing behind the counter; ringing up customers. And she was talking to them: in Chinese.
I ran outside to tell my father what was going on in the store, and he got out of the car and followed me back in to see for himself.
“She can talk!” he said. ”You were right, she just doesn’t want to talk to us.”
But that was when I realized that maybe in a really weird way I had been wrong all along, and it was my father who had been right.
“Let me try something,” I said.
I picked up a few groceries: a jar of preserved mustard, a box of rice candies, a stiff dried fish, and I went to my mother’s register.
“Hello,” I said. “Hey, Mom, it’s me.”
She stared at me blankly and I took a deep breath.
“Ma, do you know me?” I said, in my slow sad version of Chinese.
Her face became normal again, like I remembered it had been back when she talked to us.
“Of course I know you,” my mother said in Chinese. ”Why wouldn’t I know you? My own daughter.” She paused, thinking. “It’s the first day of the week, isn’t it? Why aren’t you at school?”
“There isn’t school today,” I said.
“Really,” she said, eyeing me the way she always did when we both knew I was lying.
“Really,” I said. “Is this your job now?”
”Yes.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s good.”
She handed me my groceries, and I started to leave, but she stopped me.
“Daughter,” she said. “The way you speak, really, so strange, I can barely understand you.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I went back to my father and started to tell him what had happened with my mother, but he shook his head.
“She doesn’t speak English anymore. What am I going to do? I can’t speak Chinese!”
We went home and I tried to comfort him.
“Maybe she just doesn’t feel like speaking English now,” I said. “But she must remember how. She’s been speaking it a long time, and you can’t just forget, you know.”
“Maybe you can,” he said. “Maybe it’s some special kind of amnesia.”
“Don’t think that,” I said. “We’re going to be okay.”
I put my hand on his arm, but he shook it off.
“Don’t try to make me feel better,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like. At least you can speak Chinese. At least you can talk to her.”
“No I can’t,” I said. “My Chinese is terrible, she told me so today.”
”Well, she can’t even tell me that,” he said. “If she did, I wouldn’t understand her.”
He turned away and I moved so he’d have to look at my face.
“Come on, Dad,” I said.
“No.”
I sighed. “Well, isn’t this really your own fault?”
“What? My own fault?”
My father’s eyes opened wide; and he looked like he had been shocked out of his self-pity, almost into anger.
”Well,” I went on carefully. “You have been married for sixteen years. And she is from Taiwan. Why didn’t you learn to speak Chinese before this?”
“I tried,” he said, deflated and moping again. “When I met your mom, I actually spoke more Chinese than she spoke English. But somehow I stopped learning Chinese, and before we knew it, Mom could speak like an American. And now I can’t even remember the little I did learn.”
My father looked so sad, hunched over at our kitchen table, and I really did want to help him, but I didn’t know what to do. I stopped trying to comfort him because it just seemed to make things worse, and left him alone to feel bad. But when my mother got home from Maxim’s, I was waiting for her in the garage.
“Ma,” I said.
“Hnnnh.”
“Ma, why won’t you speak English anymore? You know Dad is really sad about this.”
“English,” she said. “I don’t speak English.”
”Yes, you do,” I said. ”You’ve spoken English all my life.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve never spoken English.”
“Yes, you have. How do you think you talked to me? And Dad?”
“In Chinese, of course.”
“Chinese, I don’t speak Chinese. And neither does Dad.”
“Of course you speak Chinese,” she said. ”You’re speaking it now. And Father does too, how else would I have married him?”
“Dad’s American,” I said. “He speaks English.”
“I know that,” she said. “I’m not stupid, but he speaks Chinese too.”
“No he doesn’t.”
”Aiyah,” she said, and she went into the house.
“Old man,” she called. “My old man.”
“Dad,” I said. “That’s you.”
“Oh,” my father said excitedly. “Hello, Honey.”
“Chinese,” I said. “She only speaks Chinese.”
“He—llo Ho—ney,” my father repeated, slowing down the syllables, as if that would translate them.
My mother stared at my father in confusion, and then she turned to me.
“What has happened to you two?” she said. “First you. Your Chinese is so bad, really, I’m ashamed for other people to hear it. Auntie Lin at the next register asked me after you left today, ‘Didn’t you teach her anything?’ And now your father. That wasn’t Chinese. I don’t know what that was. Is he joking?”
“No,” I said. “I told you, he can’t speak your language.”
My mother looked scared, and then started talking really fast, to my father, to me, but neither one of us could understand her. She went on and on, pausing sometimes, asking questions that would remain forever unanswered, and then she stopped.
Slowly, carefully, she said to me:
“The two of you really can’t understand me, can you?”
“No,” I said. “Even when you speak slow like now, it’s hard.”
My mother’s face crumbled even more than it already had, and she ran upstairs. Dad and I heard her on the phone for hours, ranting on in Chinese, and crying a lot, but we didn’t know what she was saying, and couldn’t even imagine who she was saying it to.
The next morning, Mom’s eyes were red and puffy. I asked her how she was; how she had slept, but she would not answer.
“The bus will be here soon,” she told me quietly, handing me a brown paper bag.
I thought about her swollen eyes and soft voice all day, but especially during lunch, when I took out that paper bag and found (to my embarrassment) rice balls, and a small container of sickly sweet asparagus juice.
“What’s that?” my classmates said, and they laughed at me as I ate.
But, even then, humiliated before the eighth grade second lunch shift, the only person I could feel sorry for was my mother. After all, wasn’t she the one they were really laughing at: she had packed the lunch, not me.
When my mother came home from work that night, I was expecting more red eyes, perhaps even actual tears, but she surprised me. She strode beaming into the house, calling out my Chinese name.
“Spring Scenery,” she said. “Spring Scenery! Come here.”
She unpacked her groceries, so many—she must have been getting some discount at Maxim’s—and talked to me excitedly. She didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying, or that I questioned her constantly about the food she was putting in our refrigerator. She made animal noises and point ed at her own body parts to make herself clear. There were chicken feet and pork intestines and salt fat back; a whole range of foods I had never eaten before, though I had naively believed the Beef and Broccoli and Sweet and Sour Pork we ate in my house was authentic Chinese food, because my mother was an authentic Chinese.
“Such strange things,” I said. “What are we having for dinner?”
She said something about chicken, but what part of the chicken it was, I couldn’t figure out.
“Show me on you,” I said.
“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have any of these.”
I flapped my arms like wings and she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I don’t have any because I’m a woman, not because I’m a person. It’s something that men have.”
She opened a red cellophane bag: inside were dozens of slippery, tan globes. Horrified, I understood.
“Rooster testicles?” I said in English.
“You know I don’t understand you.”
I crowed like a rooster and then took two tangerines and put them between my legs.
She laughed and nodded. Then she looked at me seriously.
“We have a problem in this house,” she said slowly.
“Yes,” I said.
“But I talked to Auntie Lin at the store and she said she knows a school for you and Father to go to until you remember Chinese again.”
I did not argue with her. I did not tell her that there was no Chinese to remember; that when I talked to her now I was using every little bit I had ever learned; or that, surely, she must know that my father had never really spoken Chinese, either. I just nodded.
“I talked to the teacher already,” she said. ”Actually, he’s Auntie Lin’s husband. He’s very smart. Went to a lot of school.”
My mother nodded happily and set to cleaning the rooster testicles. She turned to my father, who sat watching us, and waiting to use the three phrases of Chinese I had taught him while Mom was at work. She smiled at him and then turned back to me.
“Tell Father.”
I told him, and he nodded. Then he said, so slowly and badly that it was painful to hear:
“Hello, my old lady. How was work? I missed you.”
“Hello, my old man,” my mother said. ”Work was good. I missed you too.”
Then she looked at me again. “Father will have to study very hard.”
That Sunday, after three hours of Gene Autry (there was a singing cowboy special on the Western movie block me and Dad watched every weekend), my father and I went to the local high school for our first day of Chinese school. Mr. Lin, or Teacher Lin, as we were to call him, met us a few minutes before class began.
“I have heard of your emergency,” Teacher Lin said in slow, heavily accented English. “The school is in the mid-session, but we have decided to take you in a very special case. I teach beginner’s class, and you two will go there today so we can test your level.”
Teacher Lin shook my father’s hand in a stiff, dignified manner, and looked a little confused when Dad tried to bow to him. Then he turned to me; stared for what seemed like forever.
“Spring Scenery,” he said. ”Your skin is very white, and your hair is brown.”
“I know,” I said, but he had already looked away.
The beginner’s class, as it turned out, was made up of a dozen Taiwanese-American children, ages eight to eleven; my dad, and me. If it wasn’t for my dad being so old and so, well, white, I might have died from embarrassment that day. As it was, though, even thirteen and mixed race, nobody bothered to look at me with Dad there. The fourteen of us, headed by Teacher Lin, spent two hours practicing the Mandarin phonetic alphabet, which I thankfully already knew, and going over basic conversational skills and vocabulary. We spent the last half-hour practicing a handful of characters. In the beginning, I would glance at my father every few minutes to see how he was doing, but, really, it was awful to watch him stumbling along, so I stopped.
When class was over, Teacher Lin met with me and my father again.
”You,” he said to me. “Will be in intermediate class. Your accent is very bad, and you do not know characters, but you will be able to catch up if you work hard.”
Then he turned to Dad. “But you must stay in beginner’s.”
My father’s face fell, the thought of being alone with all those children, stuck with a Chinese name—Li Cha—which he couldn’t really pronounce, must have been terrible to him, but he did not try to argue with Teacher Lin, just shook his hand once more; this time, without bowing.
The next week my father and I returned to the high school, and the week after, and the week after that, until it seemed like we had been going to Chinese Sunday school all our lives. At least it seemed like that to me, but in a good way. Actually, I liked Chinese school. The intermediate class wasn’t bad at all, just a room full of teenagers like me who were struggling with their parents’ language. But my father had a much tougher time across the hall in beginner’s. Apparently, my dad, forty-one and balding, was the slowest student of them all and, respect for elders notwithstanding, his classmates had no problems pointing this out to him, and calling him, when Teacher Lin went to the bathroom or wrote on the blackboard, a “Stupid Egg” in Mandarin.
Those Sundays were probably the most humiliating days of my father’s life. He feared them all week long, and every night I would help him practice his Chinese. The two of us struggled over the four tones more than anything else.
“Ba, ba, ba, ba,” I would say, pronouncing each syllable with a different tone: first a high even one, then a rising one, then a low one, and, finally, a falling tone.
“Ba, ba, ba, ba,” my father would say, but not the way he was supposed to.
“No,” I would tell him, and we would begin again. We did this every night, over and over, until my father, by some lucky stroke, managed to get all four tones right in a row, or until he exploded. Many times, he accused “you guys”—who you guys were, I still do not know—of “making them up.”
“Four tones, right!” he would say. “They all sound the same to me!”
But then he would calm down and we’d move on to something else.
My mother watched our nightly sessions with curiosity. Every now and then she would help us with the pronunciation of a particularly difficult word, but, otherwise, we were on our own. After wards, she would draw me aside; talk about our progress.
”You speak much better now,” she said. “It isn’t so hard to understand you. But why can’t Father speak Chinese anymore? Why does he have to practice every day and still can’t say things the way you’re supposed to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
And I kept practicing with my father. In addition to Sunday school and our study sessions, he bought books (Teach Yourself Mandarin; Speak Chinese Today!) and audiocassettes (“… three native speakers teach you the Beijing dialect in the comfort of your own home… “). Inevitably, but slowly, his Chinese improved. By the beginning of the summer session of Chinese school, he could say very basic things to my mother. Anything beyond basic, though, I had to translate for him. This obviously limited their conversations.
“Why do you learn so fast?” he asked me. “Why do I learn so slow?”
”You’re doing good too,” I said. ”You are.”
But he would watch me talk to my mother with such an eager expression, a hungry look that told me he was searching out the few words he did know, and then turn away with a disappointment so strong that I didn’t just see it on his face, I felt it inside myself.
“I can’t understand you two when you talk,” he said. “You talk too fast. What do you say to each other? How is your mother? Is she the same as she was before? Is she all right? Does she miss me?”
I didn’t know how to tell him that Mom seemed happier now than she had back when she spoke English. Or that she had told me so many things about her childhood; about our family in Taiwan; about her life before she married him, that I had never known before. I did not know how to tell him that she had friends now, other Taiwanese ladies from Maxim’s, and that every day she came home from work with stories so funny, they made me laugh and laugh. And so I was silent.
I must have been silent a long time, because as I sat looking at my father, and wondering what to say, I saw his face change from expectancy to confusion to fear.
”You too?” he said. “Can you not understand me?”
And then he asked me in Chinese, “Do you understand English?”
“I understand,” I said in Chinese.
Then, “I understand,” I said in English.
But it was too late: he had already walked away.
For the rest of that week, Dad skipped our Chinese lessons. And then, on Sunday, he skipped Chinese school. Every day after dinner he would go to his study and close himself in until it was time for bed. My mother said to let him be, that he would come to us when he wanted to talk, but I couldn’t wait. On Monday night, I went to his study to find out what was going on.
I knocked on the door and when my father didn’t answer I just opened it and went in. He had moved a TV and VCR into the room, and he sat at his desk watching a black and white Western. His bookshelves were empty, and the floor and the desk were scattered with books about the Old West, and the Wild West, about gunslingers, and sheriffs. On the wall next to the poster of High Noon that had always been there were two new posters: both of John Wayne.
The condition of the room; the sight of my father still engrossed in his movie, confused me. I had imagined him sitting in his study with the lights out, depressed and lonely; it had never occurred to me that he had been in there having a good time.
“Dad,” I said at last. “Why haven’t you been studying Chinese anymore?”
“I’ve been busy,” he said.
“But you’ll fall behind in class. Teacher Lin asked about you.”
“Don’t worry about Chinese school.”
My father stopped the video so the TV was locked in the still image of a lone lawman, stepping out into a dangerously quiet and empty street. He stood up.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. I need you to do me a favor. I need you to tell your mother something.”
My father smiled.
”What is it?” I said.
“Well,” he said. “I put in for a transfer at work, and I got it. So we’re moving.”
“Moving,” I said. “But where?”
“Texas!”
“Texas?”
I closed my eyes on my father’s grinning face and saw frame after frame of the movies we two had watched together. Those long dusty roads that went on forever; cowboys, and ranches, and saloons. Nowhere in all of this could I see me, or my mother.
“But I don’t want to move,” I said at last. ”And I bet Mom doesn’t either.”
“Of course you want to move,” my father said. ”And so does your mother. Texas is great! We’ve always wanted to move out there.”
My father reached out to pat my arm, but I pushed him away. The wideness of his smile, the tone of his voice, the brightness of them both—at the time, I could not know they were false—were too much for me to bear.
“Maybe you have,” I said. “But we haven’t!”
My father sighed, and, thankfully, stopped smiling.
“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset,” he said gently. ”We’ll buy a big new house, and Mom won’t have to work. Maybe once we’re out there, she can start learning English again.”
And that was when I understood what all of this was about, or at least I thought I did. It was more than just going west because Dad wanted to live out the movies: he was trying to take me and Mom out there so we would become more American again. Unfortunately for my father, though, that was the last thing I wanted just then. As miserable as Dad must have been those last few months, I had been happy. I liked this new path my life had taken; as far as I could see, things were just fine, for everyone. At that moment, I couldn’t have cared less if my mother never spoke English again. And that’s the only way I can explain it now: how I faced my father that night, how I listened to the quiet hope in his voice; watched him stare at the boring green carpet after he finished speaking, and, still, I had no pity for him.
“I’m not going,” I said.
My father sighed, and he slouched a bit, the way he always did when he was defeated, and I thought that I had won. I saw the future, and it wasn’t in Texas, it was right where we were: that night, we would study Chinese again, and, on Sunday, we would go to Chinese school.
But then Dad pulled himself back up.
”We’re going to Texas.”
I stared at my father in disbelief. The man I had grown up with—the one who caved at a word, a smile, from me or my mother—was gone. In his place, standing tall next to posters of High Noon and the Duke, I saw a man who was willing to ride roughshod over anything and anyone in his way. I turned to the TY, still caught in that silent moment before the shootout, and the man on the screen was my father, just waiting for someone to step out and fire. I was ready to fight; I wanted to fight, but even I understood it: I didn’t have a gun. If there was going to be a battle, it wouldn’t be between the two of us: everything was up to my mother. And if everything was up to her, like it or not, she’d have to speak the language my father understood.
“We’ll see about Texas,” I said, and I ran out of the room.
I found my mother upstairs folding laundry, laying it in huge soft piles on her bed. The stereo was blasting Chinese music, a tape of songs that had been popular when she was a teenager, and she sang along happily. I turned the music down, and she stopped folding to look up at me.
I rushed to her side.
“Ma,” I said. ”You have to speak English again!”
“English?” she said. ”What are you talking about? You know I can’t speak English.”
”Yes, you can,” I said. “Listen to me: Dad’s moving us to Texas! Don’t you want to stop him?”
“Texas?” she said. ”We’re not moving to Texas.”
”Yes, we are. Dad just told me. He’s going to sell the house and make us move there!”
“Sell my house?”
My mother sighed, and took my hand.
“Don’t worry about this,” she said. “There must be some mis take. I’ll go downstairs and talk to Father right now.”
She turned to leave the room, but I stopped her.
“In English, right? You’re going to talk to him in English, aren’t you?”
“Daughter,” she said. “I can’t.”
”What do you mean, you can’t? It won’t work if you speak Chinese!”
My mother was silent, and suddenly I felt desperate. I wanted to shake her; to shake back the English I knew she used to speak; or I wanted to throw myself flat on her bed, destroy her neat piles of laundry; burst into tears; kick and scream and cry until every thing was okay again. But of course I did none of those things.
“Couldn’t you just try?”
My mother looked at me then as if she felt sorry for me. She looked at me as if she couldn’t understand me; as if she were understanding for the first time that I couldn’t understand her.
“I can’t,” she said at last. “Don’t you think I wish I could? Do you think I like living in this country all these years and not knowing the language? I can’t speak it. I just can’t.”
We stood there for a long time, and my mother seemed little, and sad. And that was when I really knew it: she would never speak English again, and what that meant, not just for me, but for her, and for my father.
Mom shook her head and walked out of the room. I followed her into the hall, to the edge of the top step, afraid of the fight that would start when she got downstairs. I stayed on that top step for a long time, and for a long time everything was quiet. Finally, I got tired of waiting, and I went to see what was going on with my parents.
Mom and Dad were at the kitchen table; there was no show down. I crept to the end of the hall, and stood off to the side a little, watching them. They sat next to each other without speaking, but I knew from my father’s face that, somehow, it had already been decided, and we weren’t moving to Texas. I felt sorry for him, then.
I was about to go back upstairs, to leave them to each other, when my father started talking. He went on for a while, making mis takes, and stumbling along as usual, but speaking more Chinese than I had ever heard him speak before. He went on for a while, trying desperately to find the words to tell my mother something—I’ll never know what—and then, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped. He just stopped.
After a few minutes, my father sighed and pushed his chair away from the table. He went to stand at the window; look out at the dark. My mother let him go. And the two of them were silent for such a very long time, I wondered how they could ever speak again.
Then my mother stood and went to his side, reached out to him.
They stared wordless into the black, and she took his hand, held it so gently, as if there were some part of her that could remember: how it felt, all those years, when she lived in a language that did not live in her.
