In the Language of Tongues

Karen Au

My first is perhaps the most foreign, yet it is the one of home. Cantonese: she lights the path forward, a promise of return, the motherland beckoning us. She brings home wayward sailors paddling peeling kayaks packed with families, Canadian-born. Almost at the shore, upset, upstart, unsure, the smallest wave snatches me from my oar pulling me into the sea so I can ask my kindergarten teacher to go to the bathroom. Now at home I speak Chinglish, and it’s a rickety raft I can barely get to shore with. I’ll arrive wind whipped and soaked, adding salt to the sea, bleeding.

The second language to conquer my tongue laps at the shore of consciousness as I stumble through shifting sand. The maple leaf is branded on my chest, apparent under the dripping translucent shirt, buttoned to the top.

I might have been born here, but my way of speech is a barnacle, clinging to the bottom of a hull that has traversed many seas. My English is flavoured as if I had washed ashore with spice laced into my back, tea stitched into my fingernail beds. When I expel the water in my chest, my tongue gleams of the sky, limitless.

I’ve been told I speak with the cadence of monarchs and though Victoria ground opium laced teeth into her land, my grandmother does not speak the colonial language. Her tongue sings in the water-eroded cave of our ancestors. My mom might have been raised to place “u” in her words, but she lives in her mother’s warm mouth and dances in red silk with scalloped edges, golden with fireflies. She emerges when Jessica calls or when the mailman asks her to “sign here,” but the fabric still pools around her, and skeleton fireflies blink in her hair.

I can see, with each step towards the water, the strength she had to leave her home, lighting my own with her flickering tongue.