At nine, māmā wound a leash around my tongue and tugged the meat loose until I spat out syllables, how a spooked dog would let go of its marred bone. I ironed out my words, slept with a mantle on my tongue, and beat my mouth into submission. Inflections don’t exist in English, a single word has a single meaning, māmā said, so untrain your lips. In Chinese, love is “ai” and “ai” is a mutable thing, a sigh, a tumor, an herb, “ai” is what you tell someone when you’re sorry for their loss, but you are actually tired of their sadness and just want to go home. In English, love has no sibling, no sister you could mistake her for, the weight of her body plump and familiar in your mouth. To teach myself I read the newspaper daily, double homicide in Buffalo, this city is an animal. Shifting scales, wires running through tendons, cables moonlighting as arteries. I felt its pulse crawling in the pipes every night I slept, ozone puffs sizzling down my gaping wounds. Bàbà gave me a name just so he could tame me, so he had a curse to hold onto, a tether for his wife who told me he loves you, you know, a soured treat, a brown, moldy bone. At nineteen, I met a boy who asked where I come from, And I told him: an animal. He asked me to teach him Chinese, But I couldn’t pull the wilted muscle out from my clamped teeth. The boy asked if I loved him, but I didn’t know what he meant. I said his name but it came out a lot like an apology, like I’m sorry, I have to go home, except I couldn’t remember what that meant, either.
Elaine Liu is a third-year undergraduate studying neuroscience and English at Colby College. She is a poet and a storyteller who draws inspiration from her experiences living on both sides of the Pacific. She especially loves writing about defamiliarized images that challenge and stretch the material of language. You can reach her at @itselaineliu on instagram.
