Chapter 17: Speechless

Chapter 17: Speechless

Throughout childhood, language had always been an obstacle for me. Inside my head, behind a mouth that couldn’t figure out how to speak them, behind hands that stalled before they could write them, lay rivers of thoughts I didn’t know how to express. In either language, I didn’t know how to give shape or sound to the meanings I attached to things. When I tried to bring the words forth, something inside recoiled as it heard itself think. Afraid, it pushed the words further down, eating itself, digesting the core of my identity. It was easy enough to play the class clown, jabbering strings of jokes and obscenities. But my true self hesitated, choking before it could breathe. Maybe it was a fear of being punished. Maybe it was a fear of being.

This fear was ever present. Even as I worked on school essays that I never finished. English was a different beast than math, for my parents. Numbers were borderless, a language they could command, an old friend not tied to any one nation. But English was a faceless gatekeeper, denying them at every turn, warning of greater guards waiting behind the first door.

Milly’s mom, a school principal, introduced my dad to a Ms Jackson who was willing to tutor me privately. During those first weeks at her house one summer during middle school, Ms Jackson taught me to wield adjectives. “I want more”, she said. “Show me, tell me more, give me descriptions.” She told me she loved the pictures I painted for her. Clearly, my vocabulary wasn’t the problem.

“What was it, then?”, she asked. I told her I have too many thoughts. I told her my head felt messy and all the things I wanted to say scared me. She suggested I try writing an outline. I scoffed. I’d been shown outlines before. “If you have a 1, you must have a 2. If you have an A, you must have a B,” I repeated, quoting the cryptic instructions my sixth grade language arts teacher once gave me.

“You’re not filling out a worksheet, you’re just cleaning up your own ideas”, she said. “Talk to me”. She asked me to just speak freely about anything on my mind. As my mind wandered and I talked about how much I hated homework, hated the feeling that learning itself became simply busy-work and a deadline that loomed over my head while I struggled to find peace at home, Ms Jackson scribbled quickly on a sheet of paper. She handed it to me adding that despite my tendency to go off on tangents sometimes, I do have my own logic when I talk. I gasped as I began to see the structure of my own thoughts sitting on a kind of strange scaffolding. Over the next months, beyond adjectives and adverbs, Ms Jackson taught me to use structure. I loved writing short essays for her, some that made her laugh, some that made her sad. But I told superficial stories, writing about things I felt didn’t matter. My real thoughts, as always, I held closely.

It was 2004 when I started freshman year of high school. Ms Jackson challenged me to write a persuasive essay to the school to switch to the Honors English class. After weeks of coaching, multiple rounds of edits, and endless pep talks, I was called to the office. The administrative office in high school seemed very different from the small, three-roomed offices of middle school or elementary school. As I walked in, there seemed to be a sea of desks along walls and filing cabinets, in a long room wrapped in faux wood paneling. The air was punctuated with the constant ringing of phones. The office aides looked tired behind their desks, faded looking like the drab decorations they pinned along the makeshift partitions that resembled and also did not resemble cubicles. One secretary typed impossibly quickly with flattened fingers adorned with gaudy fake nails so long that they would’ve made the elderly Empress Dowager blush. I sat in cold sweat in a plastic chair with three pill shaped slits in the back until I was called into a counselor’s office. She made me wait, standing at the door, as she finished typing something on her computer. I could hear her heavy breathing as she looked almost dazed over her plastic framed glasses. She told me my request was approved. I had been transferred.

Honors English felt like a warm environment, far from the Algebra 1 transfer experience I had suffered the previous year. There were no cumulative exams. There was no catchup work. The teacher, Ms Perle, was a good natured woman in her sixties with a kind face who wore a very large pair of rounded square glasses. Her classroom even looked like a library, lined with shelves of books that she would lend out to students. Later that year, Ms Perle would schedule discussions with each of us one at a time to discuss whichever books we were reading, as she sat in a square armchair near her desk. On my first day, she gave me a copy of a book called “The Human Comedy”, and assured me that there was no need to make up work I had missed so far, only that I should catch up on the three chapters the class had read. The story was about World War II, a topic we would cover in other ways in the following months.

English was not the only class I switched during my first month of high school. Due to a clerical error, I had also been placed in the wrong science class.

“Science 3” seemed a vague, incredibly general name for a class and I felt bewildered as I saw it on my class schedule the first week of school. I had been expecting a biology class since I had passed, painfully, Algebra 1 the previous year. As I sat in Science 3 the first day, I accepted my fate that perhaps I didn’t fill the prerequisite after all, having gotten a C in the first semester of Algebra despite working myself to the bone to get a B by the time June had come in the second half of the year. Perhaps this was my lot in life, that none of my efforts would matter and struggle was necessary but meaningless, I thought to myself. It seemed having a C the previous January had marked me for failure, and all motions for the six months afterward were simply formality. I breathed a sigh with my head down as the teacher went over rules for the class, and looked around noticing that the other students were much older. They seemed a little dull.

My mom began to suspect something was wrong after asking me about my classes the first week, asking why I wasn’t out catching bugs with Milly. To my mom, Milly was the yardstick to the standard of a good student and any aberration from whatever Milly might also be doing was cause for worry and followed by hours of nagging, scolding, physical punishment, and in some cases, a combination of all three. As soon as she realized that Biology was the correct science class for any student who had passed Algebra the previous year, my mom marched me to the office one day after school, where she prodded me to ask, in English, why I wasn’t placed in Biology.

The secretary asked us to as she pulled up my records. She blinked twice, still chewing her gum, as she told me that Science 3 was the correct class for me, according to my grades from the previous year and I repeated in Chinese to my mom, who then stood up to asked me to insist firmly to the secretary that there must be an error on their part. Please wait, she said, as most of the counselors were out for the day. A younger, tired looking man, presumably the only school counselor still working at that hour, called us into his office and we sat there, cramped, as he pored over my records a second time. He chided me for having an attitude, telling me I was very rude to the secretary and that I should know better, looking coldly at my mom as he spoke to me. “There is a C here”, he said. “You needed a B.”

Much of Chinese is not spoken. We communicate through silence, through the words unsaid from the empty spaces in between. Yet every now and then all the repressed feelings boil to the surface through painful, often violent paroxysms of emotion.

My mom began to cry. Amidst the ringing phones, the dull humming of the fluorescent lights, the sounds of keyboards clacking and the uncomfortable stare from the counselor, I immediately became very aware of how "foreign" and ethnic the scene must have looked. It wasn’t just about the class.

This was an ancient grief. Generations of trauma pouring out all at once. As my mother cried, I saw tears for the great aunt who was dragged out of her home and beaten during the Cultural Revolution. I saw tears for the great grandmother who died during the Japanese invasion of Nanjing. I saw tears for the proud university professors forced to watch their children work menial jobs in a strange land. And I saw the tears for me, the son who had failed all of them because he simply couldn’t do a few math problems. And I cried with her.

“Oh, you got a B in the second semester. It was on the second page”, said the counselor. “They made a mistake. I’ll change your schedule.” The secretary handed me the new printout.

The first day of band camp, two weeks before the school year started, I saw a Chinese boy eating rice dumplings for lunch out of a glass tupperware container. He sat alone. I saw myself as a second grader, opening my lunchbox in front of the white kids, as I sat down next to him and asked what kind of zhongzi he was eating, adding that my mom often made them too during the Dragonboat Festival. He introduced himself as Hui Qin, but told me his English name was Byron since most people couldn’t pronounce his name. Eventually he had the nickname BB, because he was amused by the name “BB Q”. During band camp, we ate lunch together every day, sticking together during section meetings and rehearsals. Since we were both Chinese and wore glasses, older kids called us “butt buddies.” I assumed I’d found a best friend. In high school, proximity counted as friendship.

Yet there was a strangeness that permeated the friendship. After school started, BB only sometimes was willing to hang out with me during lunchtimes. During band class he often quietly told me funny jokes or made faces as I played, goading me to laugh so that our teacher needed to stop in the middle of the music to scold me. When we worked together to clean the bathrooms during the band competition our school hosted, he sprayed me in the face with Lysol as a joke, then retold the story for weeks, laughing to our math teacher that I’d overreacted, that I was looking for a fight. “Why can’t you just take a joke” he’d say whenever I tried to ask why he treated me this way. I stuttered, having no words to navigate this confusion. Friendship was not yet a language I understood well.

It seemed he wanted me near, but never beside him. To BB, friendship was paperwork without signature. I ran into him one day at 99 Ranch as my grandparents took me shopping. My grandparents had also planned on having dim sum in the restaurant next door. They invited him to eat with us, a common Chinese gesture of friendship and hospitality, half pushing him into a chair, loading his plate with pastries and steamed buns. BB made polite, awkward conversation with my grandma, then leaned close and whispered, teeth clenched, “Brian, don’t do this to me.” My grandparents never noticed. They kept filling his plate.

Eventually through high school, I had spent enough time with BB that my parents had gotten to know him as well. I had accepted a certain level of strangeness from BB; after all, having a friend at school was a small warmth worth keeping. But in the weeks before graduation, BB told me every day that an older bandmate, a senior who often punched and shoved me, hated me and wanted one last shot.

“He’s going to kill you, you know. You should lay low,” he said.

“It’s probably nothing,” I answered.

Each day, the details multiplied. Baseball bats in a trunk. A plan to catch me after my last class. I asked my parents to pick me up early on graduation day. That night, at the ceremony for a family friend, my mom ran into BB.

“Brian isn’t here because he’s hiding from a bully,” he told her. “My friend is a real coward.”

Back home, my mom shook her head. “Do you know how badly this reflects on your family,” she said, “to hear from not just teachers, but even your friends that you’re a good-for-nothing?”

I spent the winter break of freshman year in Nanjing, where the air was gray and cold enough to sting. Ms Perle had assigned us a project to complete over the break, each student choosing a topic of World War II to research and compile into a creative writing piece. She encouraged me to explore what the war was like in China. My dad took me to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. It was a cold, gray day in Nanjing, much like most winter days. There was no ice, only a rain cold enough to soak through skin and bone. It was a day that I learned as a Southern Californian, what it meant to truly feel cold. In more ways than one.

The memorial hall was a gray building, geometric, brutalist in design with sharp angles that are uncomfortable to look at. Under the gray sky it lay like a broken piece of slate, discarded behind a thin pool of water lined with sculptures; bent bodies, faces frozen in silent screams. We trudged up a small staircase next to a giant 300,000 painted in black. When I was younger, my grandfather told me stories of the Japanese invasion. But he was never specific. Bad things happened, he said. Terrible things. Times were rough. But we were lucky. That was all he told me. I remember years before, after my dad took me on a trip to Hawaii, I brought home souvenirs and brochures from Pearl Harbor. My grandfather’s eyes lingered a long time over a picture of Japanese surrender. He didn’t say anything.

Grandpa did not come to Nanjing with me. I had almost forgotten my dad as I walked through the halls, feeling very alone. They were also gray, and empty of people that day. I saw pictures of corpses. Behind them stood smiling soldiers in uniforms. I saw photos of heads impaled on bayonets. Behind glass were piles of skulls. The shiny tiles reflected the cold lights on the ceiling. The hall was silent, except for the echoes of our feet. There were more bones in a large pit in the center of the hall. The pit was rectangular, behind a glass. There were no words on the labels next to the half excavated corpses. Only numbers. I wanted to look away. I couldn’t look away.

I looked through the glass for a long time. I saw my dad’s reflection as he walked up behind me. I turned away and walked toward the exit. There was another visitor there, a local. He coughed twice, paused, and spat on the shiny floor. I looked at him. He looked at me, then walked away. My dad and I walked without speaking, until we were outside. Our shoes still squeaked on the wet tiles.

He asked if I had enough information for my assignment. I wanted to say something. “Show me, tell me more”,echoed Ms. Jackson in my head. Every word that came to mind felt childish.

Even saying “that’s terrible” felt like another glob of spit on stone. I tried to imagine what one of the victims would say, but in that place even the dead seemed quiet.

I never wrote about the Nanjing Massacre for Ms Perle’s assignment. I made a fake diary about bombings that happened over two weeks, added facts and figures. At thirteen years old there was no language for me to use. No words big enough to trade for a school grade.

That year, like the previous years before, Milly came to my house after school to take Chinese lessons from my mom. Unlike the previous years, freshman year the two of us decided that we were friends. There was no spoken agreement, no initiation. There were no words. It just happened one day Milly had asked for an old clothes hanger to catch bugs for Biology class. I don’t want to bum stuff off of you, just give me whichever one is broken, she said. I stretched and broke the one in my hand and handed it to her. She looked at me, surprised, but smiled. I laughed nervously, looking away and pretended to be busy with something else. All it took was laughter.

Soon after, instead of studying downstairs, Milly began to hang out in my room after school. We would talk as we worked, often about nothing at all. Some afternoons the late sun came through the blinds, throwing little slats on the floor as we played whichever CDs I had lying about. Other days Milly would sit in silence, pencil scribbling until she would turn around and show me one of many incredibly vulgar sketches she would make. That year I had the best grades I would see until college, rarely missing assignments. Somehow, homework sessions became a fun event in itself. The afternoons felt long as time seemed to stretch out, until we heard her little brother’s voice from downstairs calling “Milly, mom’s here”.

Suddenly, the home was not a workplace or a daycare or a zoo. Home was two friends doing homework. I do not remember the conversations or even the games. But I remember learning that maybe goodness lived only in the pauses; the spaces in between for laughter to fill.