Mother Tongue

This is a journalism article.

This is something I’ve dreamt of doing for years. It turns out, it could be both. Here is the lead: person left place. A person left a place. My grandma left China. Who, what, where, when, why. Jane Lin; escaped with her family; Taiwan; 1947; they knew the future had to lie somewhere else.

This was meant to be a journalism article, so I did all the journalism things. I did research, I found sources, I planned interviews. I became history, I became a helicopter, I became a granddaughter. I ended up with this crooked PDF.

Here’s what would have been in a 1,500 word article about it all (how funny, that I can say it in just a few sentences, because I could never say it all, even in a hundred).

In 1947, Yu Jan Fun Lin (known by her grandchildren as Jane Lin) fled China with her family. She grew up in Taiwan before eventually moving to the United States once she had children of her own.

Each step of this journey was an artifact in itself, but each was also happening in tandem with mass historical movements that shaped the lives of thousands of immigrants. Put simply, Jane escaped.

Then she escaped again, and again and again and again and she continues escaping, and every day, for Jane, is an escape. Every day her memories take one, then two, steps away.

But we were lucky. Jane wrote everything down. Twenty years ago, my grandmother realized her life was a story (she realized she had lived). She typed two words at a time, two languages in her mind — and she found her way back (she wrote her way forward) to her family, in the form of this PDF.

This is a journalism article. This is what we ended up with: my grandmother, her tongue, and me.

This was supposed to be easy for me to write. This was supposed to be my grandmother’s story. I was supposed to be the translator, daughter of the tongue, the one who heals us all. It became about me. It became about my journey, my questions, my process.

It became what we all are — bits and pieces, and that’s all it could ever be. Because we’re all bits and pieces of our mothers, and we’re all breaking into bits and pieces, and that is beautiful and bountiful and enough.

Grandma told me this story in a language she learned by doing. A language she learned over time. A language she learned with love.

A boat, a plane, a train, a car, and her.

Grandma rushes when she talks about the river. The river rushes by her; and in it, the shouts of school children learning, having fun, and I forgot that people in history went on field trips, and that there was play back then, it wasn’t just history, it was her present, and she stood by the river and thanked God the water didn’t take her with it. She stood by the river and dreamed of being at school.

I stare at her and remember I’m ungrateful; remember that I’m thankful.

My grandma had eight siblings.

There were brothers before her, but she was the eldest daughter and she tells me she didn’t have youth, she didn’t have childhood, she had housework.

She remembers that while her mom carried a baby in her stomach, my grandma carried her younger brother on her back.

She says that she was never asked, she just felt it was her duty. And it is, of course, no coincidence: that morning sickness sounds like mourning sickness. Because she remembers the things she missed, too. She remembers a single bedroom and a single pot.

. . .

Grandma rushes when she talks about the river.

I want to know where that river is. And what it looks like now. And if she would remember how to find it if we went back. And I wonder if it’s still there, the river that almost drowned her. I wonder: where do rivers go and how do they disappear? Is it something about erosion, sediment, trying to remember how to get home, sentiment. Or do they just flow until there’s no water left, and that’s how a river dies?

Grandma wonders what field trips are like. Grandma remembers Taiwan, 1947.

. . .

Grandma’s whole life went from two continents to two iPads.

One iPad is, if anything, obedient. Two is a balancing act between connected and addicted. Grandma doesn’t waste anything, though. Nothing gets thrown away at Jane’s house. Not a plastic bag from the grocery store, a second of time with her children (though maybe they don’t feel it), not a speck of food. Every grain of rice left on your plate is another day in purgatory.

An iPad is a time machine. It can bring three generations together in one. A screen can suck your entire life away.

What I’m trying to say is, in this constant tumble into old age that trudges on relentlessly at every moment such that if you’re not careful suddenly you’re 20 and you’re alone and all you’ve ever known is fear, or suddenly you’re 80 and all you’ve ever known is everything — in this constant kind of falling that we call life, maybe an iPad is an escape route. Then, my grandma has two, or my grandma has none.

. . .

Grandma rushes when she talks about the river; she speaks with slow precision when she talks about her mother.

Grandma worships a god she’s never met. I suppose we all do.

I’m too scared to ask grandma what God looks like to her; God looks like a stranger to me. Or, my god is my mother, but that’s not a healthy way to be in relationship with someone. For one to be god and the other to be daughter. I don’t worship anyone, or, I worship you but not myself.

Grandma prays on Zoom during remote service. She sits with her nose to the screen on the carpet floor, she moans amen because she finds pleasure or escape in a being who stole her homeland and gave her me instead.

She whispers — cries — "we thank you for our heart" but I don’t thank God, forgive me, I thank my mom and the skin that stretched to hold me in her stomach.

Grandma hums of grace and glory but there is no glory in our immigrant story there’s only her, me, and my mom who is scared of becoming her mom, but isn’t that what we all become unknowingly?

Like God, we make promises we can’t keep. Motherhood is a promise we can’t keep. Motherhood isn’t a promise. Motherhood is a compromise. What do I know about motherhood?

The church gives Grandma purpose, and maybe that’s what I am missing in life. Because the thing that is, for me, one slow death, for her, is one quick release. How painfully naive (of both of us) to see it this way.

My mom and her mom came to America for its unfulfilled promise of suburbia; they found a playground where mom was pushed off the swings because she was the only Chinese girl in the neighborhood and God forgot to tell the white kids anyone else was coming to play.

I came to America for nothing. No one asked if I wanted to be here, but at least God picked Chicago as my entry point so I can sound cool when people ask where I’m from, and Chicago is only a few letters off from China, so they’ll get half the answer they were looking for when "from" becomes a synonym for you don’t look like me.

God made grandma’s teeth fall out when she tripped in the grocery store parking lot. God let someone else find them, pick them up, and put them in an envelope that they left at the customer service desk of a supermarket in north Seattle. Grandma said thank you and amen. Grandma says we have good fortune.

Grandma wears a fake smile gifted by God now.

Grandma had her teeth stitched back into place at the will of her higher power and I know this feeling well because all of mine were pulled when I was young (except two) and then metal wires cranked together the gap between them so that at least when I smile through teeth polished by Crest 3D White Strips, I know God wanted me to have a mouth that would split open when it’s told.

Grandma tells me it takes her an hour to pray every day because she has so many children.

Grandma stands in the kitchen and whispers that she hates herself; Grandma thinks she’s useless.

Grandma knows something about life that I don’t — it starts with how to pack a suitcase for America, and it ends with how to say Amen to a god you don’t know.