Victoria Chang

In our house, loud language was everywhere—bundles of Mandarin from Mother’s mouth, Father’s nearly perfect English but Taiwanese-accented Mandarin. Then our Chinglish. But in our house, silence arranged itself like furniture. I was always bumping into it. When unrelated aunties and uncles came over for dinner parties, I envied the laughing as they drank Riunite wine, ate steaming fish and tofu. When they left, they took all the words. What was left after their laughter was always my grief.

I’m reminded of what Donald Barthelme said: The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.iii

Recently, during a reading, the poet Valzhyna Mort said, Lacking language is the beginning of a poem to me. This is what writing feels like to me too. In some ways we are coming out of silence to make a new language. This making comes out of a deep desire to understand something that is invisible and voiceless.

Do you know that Jeanette Winterson cast this generative uncertainty of creative practice in terms of time in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery:

Writing feels like being within you, silence, and then emerging, bronzed. Somehow, writing feels more related to beginnings than endings. Writing feels outside of time. In a windowless room. Not in a room at all. In a state of being half-awake and half-possessed. In an endless snowstorm, ploughed under. Alone. As I reach for memory that has become extinct.

Sometimes I wonder if you chased me one time or many times. I wonder how memory can become larger and larger. Does it matter whether you were wearing shorts or not? Whether the shorts had a stripe down each side? I imagine you had tube socks on. I imagine they had blue stripes. Sometimes I think of H, who once threw an icy snowball at my face. Did he do that once or every winter? And M, whenever we were alone, telling me to go back to China.

mostly white town in her book, All You Will Ever Know, Cathy Park Hong’s experiences being mocked on a school bus in Minor Feelings, Sejal Shah’s experiences in This Is One Way to Dance, and Jaswinder Bolina’s memories in Of Color, and my memories returned again, like Bishop’s moose, high as a church / homely as a house. While reading, I suddenly felt less ashamed, less alone, and less silent.

Maybe memories

Resolve isn’t inactive, though. Resolve is a live animal. We perpetuate the narrative that is given to us in order to survive. I didn’t even know until recently that we opened restaurants because of labor restrictions placed on Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century

The papers all yellowed like memory.

You loved to read books.

I don’t know how much of Dickinson or Shakespeare or Keats stuck in my teenage mind, but to learn from you that writing was a possibility, not as a career, but simply as a way to move into and out of pain, was the real gift.

The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including more deeply into myself.

I don’t remember what I told you when you called me up to the front of the classroom and whispered in my ear.

remember nodding as if I was fine. I was fine. I had language. And it would be the one thing that would keep returning, like light. Language felt like wanting to drown but being able to experience drowning by standing on a pier