The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life Read online

  Lately I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” or “fractured” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited-English speaker.

  I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and in restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.

  My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was a teenager, she used to have me call people on the phone and pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio, and it just so happened we were going to New York the next week, our first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.”

  My mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.”

  And then I said in perfect English on the phone, “Yes, I’m getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.”

  Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New York next week.” And sure enough, the following week, there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.

  We used a similar routine more recently, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment to find out about a CAT scan she had had a month earlier. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital staff did not apologize when they informed her they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since both her husband and her son had died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English—lo and behold—we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.

  I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person’s developing language skills are more influenced by peers than by family. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged poor, compared with math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.

  This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “Even though Tom was ______ Mary thought he was _____.” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations, for example, “Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming,” with the grammatical structure “even though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn’t get answers like “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.” Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that.

  The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words for which you were supposed to find some logical semantic relationship, for instance, “Sunset is to nightfall as _____ is to _____.” And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, sunset is to nightfall—and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words—red, bus, stoplight, boring—just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to see that saying “A sunset precedes nightfall” was as logical as saying “A chill precedes a fever.” The only way I would have gotten that answer right was to imagine an associative situation, such as my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turned into feverish pneumonia as punishment—which indeed did happen to me.

  I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian-Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian-Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys—in fact, just last week—that Asian-American students, as a whole, do significantly better on math achievement tests than on English tests. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as “broken” or “limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.

  Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my boss at the time that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.

  But it wasn’t until 1985 that I began to write fiction. At first I wrote what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.” A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.

  Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into here, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided on was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind—and in fact she d
id read my early drafts—I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

  Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.”

  • the language of discretion •

  Once, at a family dinner in San Francisco, my mother whispered to me: “Sau-sau [Brother’s Wife] pretends too hard to be polite! Why bother? In the end, she always takes everything.”

  My mother acted like a waixiao, an expatriate, temporarily away from China since 1949, no longer patient with ritual courtesies. As if to prove her point, she reached across the table to offer my elderly aunt from Beijing the last scallop from the Happy Family seafood dish.

  Sau-sau scowled. “B’yao, zhen b’yao!” she cried, patting her plump stomach. I don’t want it, really I don’t!

  “Take it! Take it!” my mother scolded in Chinese.

  “Full, I’m already full,” Sau-sau protested weakly, eyeing the beloved scallop.

  “Ai!” exclaimed my mother, exasperated. “Nobody else wants it. If you don’t take it, it will only rot!”

  Sau-sau sighed, acting as if she were doing my mother a big favor by taking the wretched scrap off her hands.

  My mother turned to her brother, a high-ranking Communist official who with Sau-sau was visiting her in California for the first time: “In America a Chinese person could starve to death. If you say you don’t want it, they won’t ask you again forever.”

  My uncle nodded and said he understood fully: Americans take things quickly because they have no time to be polite.

  I thought about this misunderstanding again—of social contexts failing in translation—when a friend sent me an article from The New York Times Magazine. The article, on changes in New York’s Chinatown, made passing reference to the inherent ambivalence of the Chinese language.

  Chinese people are so “discreet and modest,” the article stated, that there aren’t even words for “yes” and “no.”

  That’s not true, I thought, although I could see why an outsider might think that. I continued reading.

  If one is Chinese, the article went on, “one compromises, one doesn’t hazard a loss of face by an overemphatic response.”

  My throat seized. Why do people keep saying these things? As though we were like those little dolls sold in Chinatown tourist shops, heads bobbing up and down in complacent agreement to anything said!

  I worry about the effect of one-dimensional statements on the unwary and guileless. When they read about this so-called vocabulary deficit, do they also conclude that Chinese people evolved into a mild-mannered lot because their language allowed them only to hobble forth with minced words?

  Something enormous is always lost in translation. Something insidious seeps into the gaps, especially when amateur linguists continue to compare, one for one, language differences and then put forth notions wide open to misinterpretation: that Chinese people have no direct linguistic means to make decisions, assert or deny, affirm or negate, just say no to drug dealers, or behave properly on the witness stand when told, “Please answer yes or no.”

  Yet one can argue, with the help of renowned linguists, that the Chinese are indeed up a creek without “yes” and “no.” Take any number of variations on the old language-and-reality theory stated years ago by Edward Sapir: “Human beings . . . are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. . . . The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.”*

  This notion was further bolstered by the famous Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states roughly that one’s perception of the world and how one functions in it depends a great deal on the language used. As Sapir, Benjamin Whorf, and new carriers of the banner would have us believe, language shapes our thinking, channels us along certain patterns embedded in words, syntactic structures, and intonation patterns. Language has become the peg and the shelf that enable us to sort out and categorize the world. In English, we see “cats” and “dogs”; what if the language had also specified glatz, meaning “animals that leave fur on the sofa,” and glotz, meaning “animals that leave fur and drool on the sofa”? How would language, the enabler, have changed our perceptions with slight vocabulary variations?

  And if this were the case—if language were the master of destined thought—think of the opportunities lost from failure to evolve two little words, “yes” and “no,” the simplest of opposites! Genghis Khan could have been sent back to Mongolia. Opium wars might have been averted. The Cultural Revolution could have been sidestepped.

  There are still many, from serious linguists to pop psychology cultists, who view language and reality as inextricably tied, one being the consequence of the other. We have traversed the range from Sapir–Whorf to est to neurolinguistic programming, which tell us that “you are what you say.”

  I too have been intrigued by the theories. I can summarize, albeit badly, ages-old empirical evidence: of Eskimos and their infinite ways to say “snow,” their ability to see differences in snowflake configurations, thanks to the richness of their vocabulary, while non-Eskimos like me founder in “snow,” “more snow,” and “lots more where that came from.”

  I too have experienced dramatic cognitive awakenings via the word. Once I added “mauve” to my vocabulary, I began to see it everywhere. When I learned how to pronounce “prix fixe,” I ate French food at prices better than the easier-to-say “à la carte” choices.

  But just how seriously are we supposed to take this?

  Sapir said something else about language and reality. It is the part that often gets left behind in the dot-dot-dots of quotations: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

  When I first read this, I thought, Here at last is validity for the dilemmas I felt growing up in a bicultural, bilingual family! As any child of immigrant parents knows, there’s a special kind of double bind attached to knowing two languages. My parents, for example, spoke to me in both Chinese and English; I spoke back to them in English.

  “Amy-ah!” they’d call to me.

  “What?” I’d mumble back.

  “Do not question us when we call,” they’d scold in Chinese. “It is not respectful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ai! Didn’t we just tell you not to question?”

  To this day, I wonder which parts of my behavior were shaped by Chinese, which by English. I am tempted to think that if I am of two minds on some matter, it is due to the richness of my linguistic experiences, not to any personal tendencies toward wishy-washiness. But which mind says what?

  Was it perhaps patience—developed through years of deciphering my mother’s fractured English—that had me listening politely while a woman announced over the phone that I had won one of five valuable prizes? Was it respect—pounded in by the Chinese imperative to accept convoluted explanations—that had me agreeing that I might find it worthwhile to drive seventy-five miles to view a time-share resort? Could I have been at a loss for words when asked, “Wouldn’t you like to win a Hawaiian cruise or perhaps a fabulous Star of India des
igned exclusively by Carter and Van Arpels?”

  And when this same woman called back a week later, this time complaining that I had missed my appointment, obviously it was my type A language that kicked into gear and interrupted her. Certainly, my blunt denial—“Frankly I’m not interested”—was as American as apple pie. And when she said, “But it’s in Morgan Hill,” and I shouted back, “Read my lips. I don’t care if it’s Timbuktu,” you can be sure I said it with the precise intonation expressing both cynicism and disgust.

  It’s dangerous business, this sorting out of language and behavior. Which one is English? Which is Chinese? The categories manifest themselves: passive or aggressive, tentative or assertive, indirect or direct. And I realize they are just variations of the same theme: that Chinese people are discreet and modest.

  Reject them all!

  If my reaction seems overly strident, it is because I cannot come across as too emphatic. I grew up listening to the same lines over and over, like so many rote expressions repeated in an English phrasebook. And I too almost came to believe them.

  Yet if I consider my upbringing more carefully, I find there was nothing discreet about the Chinese language I grew up with. My parents made everything abundantly clear. Nothing wishy-washy in their demands, no compromises accepted: “Of course you will become a famous neurosurgeon,” they told me. “And yes, a concert pianist on the side.”

  In fact, now that I remember, it seems that the more emphatic outbursts always spilled over into Chinese: “Not that way! You must wash rice so not a single grain is lost.”

  I do not believe that my parents—both immigrants from mainland China—are the sole exceptions to the discreet-and-modest rule. I have only to look at the number of Chinese engineering students skewing minority ratios at Berkeley, MIT, and Yale. Certainly they were not raised by passive mothers and fathers who said, “It’s up to you, my daughter. Writer, welfare recipient, masseuse, or molecular engineer—you decide.”