your ocean tongue
You’re six when you fly for the first time. You tell the girl beside you in class that you’re moving away. You don’t know where. You’re not her friend. You say goodbye anyway. The next day, you cross an ocean ten thousand kilometres away to somewhere you’ve never seen.
School starts. You’re in Grade Two. Your hand is a desperate fist around your mother’s leg. It opens—a helpless snatch of air—when she leaves you at the classroom door. The teacher gives you a tissue to wipe your tears and a pencil to trace the alphabet. Maybe you did the alphabet wrong, because someone takes you out of class for ESL lessons. You’re good at spelling, even if you don’t know what the words mean. You laugh, even if you don’t know why the class laughs. You answer your family in English, even when they ask you in Cantonese.
Spelling only asks you to remember shapes. Your eyes slide over every arch and curve faster than your tongue can follow. Humiliation takes you by the hand when you stumble over paper words. Better to keep quiet, it tells you. During recess, everyone’s in pairs. You wait in the washroom. When will the bell ring? You wait and you wait, and in the meantime other children’s words pick at the absence of you like a scab. There’s a story about you, but you’re not in it. The bell rings. A rumour sits where you sit. It grows louder when you’re tucked away in your secret stall, and soon it is the loudest thing about you.
It figures, Humiliation murmurs. You never had a friend, so you don’t know how to keep one. Friendship is something to be measured in departures.
Summers and winters, summers and winters. It’s your first time seeing snow and it comes all the way up to your waist. A cousin back home dutifully sends a letter. Confusion and shame anchor themselves to the marrow when you realize you can’t read any of the characters. The letter is neatly folded and tucked away when your parents ask what your cousin’s written. Later, you smooth the creases out of the letter and carefully study each penstroke, the even margins, the colourful stationery. Your fingertips skim the indents before the letter is refolded along the same creases. It is never reopened.
You practice the sequence of strokes that make up your name—the one you were born with, not the one this world uses for you—because it is the last thing you have of yourself, and that’s being erased, too, one character at a time. It’s not enough. It’s too much. You try to hold all the words in your hands, but the walls on either side are tall, tall, tall—built from entire vocabularies you never learned. You can count by the thousands in two languages, but neither can encompass the whole of you, all the poetry in your head.
Over time, your syntax crumples. Strangers shape a narrative with the words you don’t know or the words you won’t say. You arrive half a sentence late to every conversation. You understand—intimately, without translation, in a way that transcends speech—the phatic language of assumptions being made about you, of your worth in a room. You no longer sound like yourself in any language. You don’t know if you have a sound at all.
At eleven, you’re granted citizenship because you followed every rule. But part of you is still held by the half that never landed. Not because you should, not because you want to, not because you should want to, but because other people’s mouths carry reminders the ocean followed you here. Your sea legs, your ocean tongue. Scraps that survived the crossing.
Three passports and you’re a person in a borrowed country.