tongue ‘n cheek
By Jaiden Li (@jaiden.li)
In Persian, “I miss you” is said jaat khaaliyeh — “your place is empty.” Your place isn’t empty from my life; I talk about books with other people, celebrate my accomplishments with other friends, do all the other things in my life like I’ve always done — alone. Your place isn’t empty, but I miss you. I feel bad for the people who want to say “I miss you” but can only say “your place is empty,” the people forced to be poets who don’t want to be. Whenever we examine the beauty of other languages, we don’t stop to think how much pressure it must be, to be beautiful all the time. To only have beautiful words at your disposal when all you want is to rip the bandaid off, to hurt, to heal. To cough up flowers instead of blood.
I’m lucky that I speak the language of the blunt, the uncivilized, the hurt. I speak beautiful languages too — I speak Chinese and French and Japanese — but I speak them brokenly, even my mother tongue, the words don’t roll off right. Once, I used to be ashamed of how I eject clashing consonants out of my mouth: gracelessly, carelessly. I tried to make my words curl, make them nicer, prettier, but that didn’t please you, didn’t please Madame, anybody. Now I feel the friction between tongue and teeth — a surere sign that a wrong word is about to come out — and I think of the hurt of always, always swallowing my words around you, and simply let the plosives pop out. I feel schooled around you, by you, like I’m six again and in grammar school learning English and I’m getting a slap on the wrist because I can’t separate my vowels from consonants. I can’t speak my colorful vowels around you anymore, especially not the Mandarin “儿” (ɚ), an R-colored vowel. To speak Chinese with you is to hand you a piece of my soul, and I can’t do that, not after you turned my own vowels against me. My phonological inventory is empty around you: it seems the only sounds I can make around you are labiodentals (“mmm”) and quadrilaterals (“uhh”).
And of course, of course I’m mad that you present me with such an impossible dilemma: to be poetic, to be blunt, or to be silent? But then I remember to be grateful. Someone had to teach me that my words are of no consequence to someone who won’t listen; someone had to break in my vowels to make them smooth and graceful the way one breaks in a child gazelle who leaps from vowel to vowel with no restraint. I’m grateful to you for teaching me the language of friendship, but I’m afraid I’m no longer fluent, and you keep the dictionary under lock and key in your heart. So in my final act of gratitude, let us find people who speak our language, so we will not have to spend our entire lives translating our souls.
Jaiden Li (李梦安) is a high school senior based in the greater Boston area. Born in China and raised in Singapore, she has developed a debilitating love of world languages and hopes to devote her life to language as a linguist, writer, and programmer. You can learn more about her at dreamingalias.com.
