my mother’s mother’s mother tongue

by Qayla Yusri

content warning: descriptions of war & violence

婆婆，

pópó, grandmother

You have only ever told me one thing from the time of the war; that in the space beneath your bed, a hole was dug for your family to hide in when the bombs hit, or when the scary men came looking for gu niangs , young women , to be made into comfort women. Even if I wanted to learn more, which I do, it pained me to see how much you didn’t want to talk about it and yearned to forget the memories of your childhood.

When you were born, you had the inevitable identity of being a Chinese person in Malaya. Your parents were immigrants from China and your family was running away from one revolution only to run into another.

A month before your seventh birthday, the first bomb from Japan was dropped on the coast of Kota Bharu and Singapore.

—

A month after your seventh birthday, the British surrendered their forces to the Japanese.

婆婆, I have so many questions about your life. Was language a place of struggle for you?

Under the umbrella of Chinese, even you and I speak different dialects. Did you have to hide your identity from the oppressors? The colonisers? In your language that identified you as the oppressed, the marginalised, the target, were you afraid to speak? Behind everything that I have only seen from the words of others, is the way that your experience has been written for the world to see the same way that you see yourself?

Whose time were you able to heal on?

婆婆, when the British came and you learned English, did you feel liberation? As a cultural polyglot, was it freeing to be able to understand so many different words from different people? To have to know the languages of the gwailo , foreign devils, as you call them, and of the Malays, the superior oppressor of the country you grew up in? How do you learn to have such cognitive empathy to forgive and forget those who have oppressed you and your people? How far does your sympathy and capacity for such tenderness run?

Do you hold resentment towards me,

whose blood share traits of yours mixed with that of the Malay, for speaking more English, the language of the coloniser, and less Chinese dialects? Do you feel the same puddle in the bottom of your stomach when I can barely understand the words coming out of the way your lips move the most comfortably and your tongue dances as naturally your blood rushes? Because I do.

婆婆, I am ashamed that I am a speaker of many languages, and that my life has brought many exciting opportunities that has allowed me to learn a multitude of languages, and yet somehow I have struggled the most to grasp my mother tongue, my mother’s mother tongue, your tongue. I am guilty, wholeheartedly, that despite knowing the struggles and immense hoops that our people had to leap through to get to the place we are with the race we are, I am still too caught up in my ego, afraid that I am too rusty and incorrect to speak to you in the language that you are so proud of.

Please understand that my hesitancy to speak to you, specifically, comes from the fact that I feel I am perhaps not worthy enough to speak in your language, that I do not hold the space that allows me to share your suffering and your experiences. I am undecided on my place to inherit the trauma of my ancestors and the generations before me. Is my voice allowed to take up the space that echo the sentiments of historical oppression, pain, and silence?

Surely, I cannot experience the hardships that you, the generation that has come before mine, have had to build what and who I have become today but I am trying to grasp hints into the undertones of your actions. I hope that you can one day unconceal your trauma, for I am curious, always, to learn about what has happened that has led to the places I am today. I am continuing to assume what happened in the past to understand what is happening in the present.

How do I navigate my uncertainty that I am doing enough for the people of your generation, your blood, your community, your language when I ask my mother to teach me Cantonese and I am replied with, “you went to a Mandarin school, and that is enough.”?

I stand where I am today because I have been born privileged, in a world that tinges grey only after the black smoke that you survived in. I have been blessed with the luxury to go to an international school overseas, and to attend a university in the Western world that you have told me you approve of. I have learned English beyond colloquial jargon, acquired the words of other tongues as mandated from my schooling system but

I am still yet to feel like I have done enough to be allowed in the space to speak your language to you, to share every connotational moment of painful silences forced down by the colonizers that have led to your loud exclamations today.

Only a year ago did I formally ask permission to have our family name be included in my name. A question that may seem mundane to others but to me, was something that I had longed for ever since I realised that unlike my cousins, I did not carry the family last name, 吴, or the family generational character, 之.

I am trying my best to understand the weight behind the decisions and choices in my life that have resulted in where I am today, and I am trying my best to be better, to earn the right to greet you in a voice and language that you will be proud of listening to.

Would I be allowed into your space?

婆婆, I want to come home to you.