Burnt Tongue

I was six years old when I learned my Grandmother didn’t speak English–only Cantonese. To me, she sang with a wave of hands and a dance of chopsticks. Her fingers whispered, “Try this, it will warm your belly.” at me and the Siu Mai. Her long blinks and soft cheek creases cheered me on. My Mum, she also spoke this rapid-gesture-dialect, and English, and a broken Cantonese. When I asked Mum how to say “Do you like my drawing?”, she didn’t know how. She ran her pointed finger across the page and said rabbit twice in Cantonese, looking back at Grandma each time. But Grandma already knew. She smiled, and her stretched hands above and behind her head made floppy ears; her hands unfolded with play. I giggled and did the same. It felt warm to be understood. My art spoke for me. But when my legs grew taller, my heart cooled down: it was so frigid, and our relationship froze. I didn’t know the words–a sore throat, choking on cold. Before this ice age, before English, before I was born, she toiled away on a farm in rural China while the Communist Party of China stole all the art and all the artists and all the Cantonese words she knew, not to a museum, or a treasury. Instead, behind the bitter, enslaving bars of a cell. She rode across the ocean, followed Grandpa to an unfamiliar world: one with words she couldn’t understand. She never learnt English. Yet Cantonese was already a headstone, here in Canada–Grandpa too. He became a photo, in an altar, in her empty apartment. 

I snuck by that third-floor street-facing window a thousand times. Mum and Jack and I, we were only four blocks west, but conversations with Grandma were strained shouts over a chilly ravine, echoes, hidden in snow. So instead, I’d wake up a surgeon, or maybe a butcher, just a slice and a chop every morning walk; maybe another juicy cut of Guangzhou. An acid, a guilt, and an ache spilled out of those wounds. Each cleave closer to the marrow. Drips of my Cantonese blood smelt like rubbing alcohol. 

When Toronto was sweating, every late July through August, Mum would drive us to Grandma’s condo to swim in the indoor pool downstairs. I wore a sloppy smile and hid behind Mum’s legs, arms crossed close to cover up the scabs and the sickness that poured out. Somehow, she’d catch my averted eyes and look me down. She was crying, without tears or wails or anything else. Irises dotted with sympathy. She knew. But I didn’t know if it was for herself, that she knew I ran past her building so she wouldn’t see me. It’d be worse if she knew my Chinese half spawned a dirty cavity. I felt sick. 

I vomited when I moved my first boxes into her place, in my first year of university. Grandma died a year earlier. I cried icicles six feet out the sliding doors of North York General that night, such a bitter cold–the irony of living in her home, only a decade later, it stung. And yet, the corners of each room were corners of a quilted family tapestry, and each stitch reminded me of her. In the 1970’s-never-renovated kitchen: a gold and red and tasseled Chinese calendar, three years out of date. In the bedroom-turned-sunroom: leftover cookie tins filled with pins and needles and thread I later borrowed. And on the wall of the living room: a very Chinese painting of a bird that was blue and green and gold but not a peacock. Before each morning class I’d slam my alarm, crawl out her pull-out couch, the one I left as a bed–the one with her five different blankets, and I’d see the painting. I know she woke up to it too. Every sunrise felt a little warmer. When I dipped my first brush in oil paint, Mother’s Day was soon, so I painted Grandma from a photo, in an altar, in her welcoming apartment. It’s how I remember every line on her face. My painting reminds me where I’m from. 

Last year, after half a decade, I moved again, and I thought I had left most of her belongings behind. This year, I stumbled into nine of her missing cassette tapes. I got curious, I wanted to hear her voice, so I rushed to find my Walkman–but the Walkman needed to be repaired again–so instead I shuffled through them. Between the dust and the cases, there was a wrinkled paper note, decorated with Chinese. I asked a friend from Hong Kong to translate. I hoped to read her voice, so maybe we could talk again. Maybe for the first time. He replied, after the empty roar of a tremendous pause: it was a list of songs and actors. He said the tape itself must be a Chinese Opera and then sent me the link to watch it. 

I laughed. It was just like her. Grandma ran kitschy B-Rated Chinese movies even on her kitchen TV, every channel in every room was Chinese, and I’d sit with her because my aunts and my uncles and my cousins were too loud, I’d sit there on her lap with her left hand in mine as her right rustled through my hair, I’d sit there and know how warm it all felt to watch movies with her. The familiar, smiling heat of art and Cantonese. The melting of hands on a bowl of juk. Of a burnt tongue, the reminder of how great it tasted, even hours after. When I say Poh Poh, the only Chinese I ever knew, it’s the same feeling. My tongue went numb with the tape resting in my hands. I missed Poh Poh. I could understand her, through all the frostbite, because the ash of my wounds still smoldered, if only flickers. I was cauterizing.  

It’s funny how Chinese Opera was the thread after all these years. In 1959, the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was published for the Beijing Opera, a political work now burned into history. Mao Zedong initially praised the play. Six years later, his party used it as gunpowder to fire the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing–ironically once an actor, Mao’s later wife and major CPC figure, began to limit and censor future opera. They eradicated their enemies: academics, artists, and innocents. Traditional culture, language, and art in China was stamped out. The Cultural Revolution was genocide. The history of the People’s Republic of China was its shame, in the shadows of war and defeat. I wonder if the Red Guard, the youth Mao weaponized against that past, felt like me. I hated my paintings growing up, imperfect strokes made me ashamed of who I was. Where I came from. I hated my culture growing up; I was ashamed of my Chinese side. Only now, by how small and lost that part of me seems. What an icy feeling. The CPC’s solution: self-immolation. Restart. I see that forest fire, hungry, only never to be full. Others felt the same. Many years following the Cultural Revolution, Cantonese and later, Mandarin, have become two of the most spoken languages in Canada. There was boat after ship after boat out of Hong Kong; I am one result. Current CPC leader, Xi Jinping, another: he was thirteen when Mao’s tragedy started. I know what follows all too well; this killing, last breaths with frostbite and bone-chilling, the only way to kill a culture–kill a language, has left me to claw at embers adrift in the winds of mid-eastern Canada. I watched the Chinese Opera secured in the tape, a low-resolution cam-rip in the depths of YouTube. It was a broadcast back from Poh Poh’s lap. This hearth that made half of me: the black-red yellow-white charcoals of Chinese Opera, Poh Poh’s Cantonese, and art. To snuff out this flame, this bright-burning culture, is an heirloom pain; to stoke it, a healing to wounds along my mother tongue.