VOICES
an extended overreaction to a torn edge
M
y mother tells me fondly about her childhood in Guangzhou. As a girl, the bakery auntie handed her plastic bags with sweetheart cakes and egg tarts and told her to share them with her siblings, whom the auntie assigned nicknames: sing muk zai—smart kiddo, fei mui—chubby. On her meandering walks from Saikwan to Dungsaan district, storeowners ducked in and out of their caves, hawking their wares in aggressive, cheerful vernacular. The girls in the schoolyard fell into a rhythmic chant whenever she joined the bouts of competitive jumpsies. Life at home was interspersed with joyful folk songs. My mother and her mother took turns posing in their glittering rental 16 TUFTS OBSERVER OCTOBER 25, 2021
cheongsam. As a teenager, she listened to smuggled CDs from Hong Kong. Anita Mui and Danny Chan were her favorite singers. She watched Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) programs on the sputtering signal from her basement. Dim sum with friends on weekends were for gossiping about this or that leng zai, or that young bespectacled math teacher everyone pined over. Is it obvious I romanticize? Hearing the way my mother tells stories, it wasn’t hard for me to encase this Guangzhou in gold foil while growing up—the Guangzhou of the ‘80s that lived and breathed Cantonese, my mother tongue. I was born in Guangzhou, but before I could catch
By Juliette Wu
more than a glimpse of this elusive haven, we moved to neighboring Shenzhen. Shenzhen was a different story. If there was ever a sense of a self-determining Cantonese culture among the Punti and Tanka boat people, it was quickly unsettled by the top-down transformation of Shenzhen from fishing village to economic center. This led to the subsequent influx of migrant laborers and other newcomers for whom we decided Mandarin would be the lingua franca. It was a wonderful tale of success: the village that became a metropolis overnight. And this transformation would have been painless if we didn’t have to iron out the kinks here and there, the murmurs of a (now anti-modern, anti-urban)
