AN EXTENDED OVERREACTION TO A TORN EDGE

VOICES an extended overreaction to a torn edge

By Juliette Wu

My 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 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 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)

language deemed substandard and dialectal. A regretful thing, but surely it was for the common good. If a child spoke Cantonese in class, the teacher would snap at them to speak correctly. To use Cantonese out of class was to regress into everything that was previously rural or ugly about this now resplendent, progressive place, this special economic zone. Parents gave up speaking the language with their children. There were no longer any games in Cantonese. There were no candies or stinky tofu sold near tennis courts in Cantonese. There were no schoolyard taunts in Cantonese. As children grew up and no longer spoke the language, they did not transmit it to their own children. Life carries on in Shenzhen, but no longer in Cantonese.

I was excited to return to Guangzhou last summer. The phrases that I learned from my mother and tucked under my tongue—those practiced pitches and greetings, the bakery orders and muttered mgoi je je’s as I’d squeeze through crowds—would finally find their willing ear. A language calls its speech community home, and a speech community calls its language home, so I looked forward to my homecoming.

However, when I stepped off the train and found myself in my mother’s and my birth city, it quickly seemed that few people spoke my mother tongue. If I initiated inquiries in Cantonese, many people stared blankly back. The public announcements sounded in the automated voice of a Standard Chinese speaker. I am not a nativist or xenophobe; I do not think that migrant laborers should assimilate and be consigned to a non-existence by the snobbish exclusion of regional language speakers, but what I saw was that migrants and locals alike defaulted to Mandarin, that city officials scrubbed the streets clean of vernacular. My mother’s wistful stories fell away to reveal that Guangzhou had not been the bastion of what she calls Guangzhou-hua—Canton City-speak.

Please understand the pain of language loss. Individual language loss is something I’ve experienced (the way English cannibalizes Cantonese and Mandarin in my head), but it doesn’t compare to collective language loss. It’s something invisible and unnoticed; it’s when members of your own speech community say that language shifts are “organic’’ and that speaking perfect, non-accented Mandarin without fangyan weighing it down is a marker of achievement. It’s the myth of subtractive bilingualism. It’s when they think that to cast off the dredges of a heritage language is to become urban, to climb a social ladder, to fill the mold of a respectable, globalized citizen. It’s when other Chinese people say I’m overreacting, that I’m making a problem out of nothing, that Cantonese is alive and well—just look at Hong Kong—and the dwindling numbers of speakers in the Mainland is just an unfortunate sacrifice in the re-making of Modern China. It’s when you walk around Guangzhou and nothing sounds familiar. It’s when everything hip or cool (read: mass-mediated) in a language community becomes everything non-local and non-Cantonese. It’s when a mother tongue becomes simply just a mother tongue; something you speak exclusively with your mother, until she greys and grows weaker and her language, too, gives away to hereditary dementia. It’s a taxi drive from Saikwan to Dungsaan (now: Xiguan and Dongshan) when the driver mutters, “Oh, my children don’t speak Cantonese, what was the point of teaching them anyway? What resources are there with which to learn? The wife is busy slaving away at her factory job, and the grandparents are too tired and old to bother. The schools want everyone to speak correctly. To be a citizen of China, you must speak Mandarin.” It’s the words in the language you learned from a stubbornly Cantonese mother—the words you’d practice when you anticipated that “homecoming”—staying tucked away and unused. In just a few decades, “dialect” will become a token of a China that once

was, a rusted artifact on some antiquarian collector’s shelf. No one denies that Mandarin was necessary as the uniting language. Mandarin was central to this nation-building project. It was the medium of modernization, the major instrument of some of the country’s most impressive achievements. Because of this newly enshrined national language, we saw an unprecedented reduction in illiteracy; we saw its use in diplomacy and in the forging of global interconnectedness. But the point is not about Mandarin’s greatness or achievements or even usefulness. In extolling the virtues of Mandarin-asmodernization, we became nonchalant about the demise of those provincial soundscapes and the collective memory they carried. In the middle of my second year, I was fortunate enough to join an art exhibition hosted by Tisch College. My piece, entitled Mandarin Only, is an illustration of a high school classroom setting with an official slogan in red characters superimposed, roughly translated as “Please speak only Mandarin; please write in only Standard Chinese.” My artist statement introduces the topic of language assimilation policy in education, in which public schools serve as a pragmatic site for the prevailing language ideology that favors a singular national language, Mandarin, over all other spoken varieties of Chinese.

Last month, I walked by the wall inside Barnum Hall on which my artwork was exhibited and discovered that someone tore up my artist statement and smeared the margins in red. I’m no longer angry. I’m confused, maybe—confused about how an art piece celebrating language diversity bothered them so much, confused that they decided to breach the sanctified (mythologized, sure) realm of artistic freedom, confused about how students of color in America would rather pit ourselves against each other or engage in auto-exclusion than—god, imagine—engaging in community-making and explorations in solidarity. But I’m not angry anymore. I think I get it.

Maybe some think being a patriot means aligning oneself with the myth of a monocultural, monolingual China. Recalling the image of the beloved motherland, they see something that has triumphed against the ravages of colonialism, regime change, and CIA intervention. They don’t

agree that modern nation-states are flimsy constructions. Or maybe it hasn’t occurred to them that “Chineseness” looks different for everyone who identifies as Chinese. Maybe they think identity is taxonomical, a cage, measured by authoritative standards, rather than what it could be—an empathetic network of meaning between those navigating markers of sameness and difference. They think identity is a fixed matter of “being,” rather than a pragmatic, subjective process of “becoming.”

It took me a month to process things, but I finally wrote something stronglyworded in retaliation, printed 50 copies, and placed them around the most visible parts of campus. Today it’s my mother that’s the one telling me I shouldn’t have posted those flyers. That I made a drastically wrong move and that she isn’t angry, as long as I learn from this mistake. She says: why won’t you keep your head down, I told you not to make noise, even for what you believe in. She says: your job is to reach as many people as possible; your every act and spoken word should service the image we uphold of “the Chinese.” In a time fraught with sinophobic fear-mongering, with geopolitical tensions, with anti-Asian sentiment, isn’t your obligation to your people? Isn’t it your duty to represent your entire community, when the fact is that someone’s negative opinion of China is so easily extrapolated from the disobedient individual?

Some of my classmates at Tufts have said the same thing. My duty was to be a representative first. I failed to represent the Chinese community at Tufts to be singularly excellent, a model community, and not a brainwashed and propagandized crowd. If I had a personal opinion, I should’ve kept silent rather than throwing the rest of us under the bus. I should’ve used softer language, or else “they” will think “we” are combative and

radical. Someone in particular said that I was defaming China, that I was exaggerating the extent to which public schools “shame and punish” their students for speaking non-Mandarin fangyan. (There is no exaggeration. If they only talked to anyone outside of those that have successfully self-assimilated, those that “made it” with their perfect monolingualism, they would know that it isn’t an exaggeration.)

I’m not one for cliches. But in any case, diversity is the answer. Language diversity, obviously. Diversity of political opinion in any imaginary community (à la Benedict Anderson) we call “Chinese” or “China.” Heteroglossia. Not just a tolerance for, but also a celebration of everything non-standard. In short: let people be.

IT’S WHEN A MOTHER TONGUE BECOMES SIMPLY JUST A MOTHER TONGUE: SOMETHING YOU SPEAK EXCLUSIVELY WITH YOUR MOTHER, UNTIL SHE GREYS AND GROWS WEAKER AND HER LANGUAGE, TOO, GIVES WAY TO HEREDITARY DEMENTIA.