Me, Her, Us by Yen-Rong Wong

Author:Yen-Rong Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2023-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

When I was around six or seven, Mum taught me Mandarin at home for a couple of years. I’d been going to the church’s Chinese school, but she was concerned that I’d get picked on in class because everyone else there was at least a few years older than me. She was a hard taskmaster. I had to write essays every week, on grid paper she made herself in a Microsoft Word document on our old PC that still ran Windows 98. It was a poor imitation of the exercise books I used at Chinese school, which were used from right to left, top to bottom, with squares that didn’t make me squish my characters so they would fit, and rectangles beside them for 注音 if I needed it.

I hated having Mum as my Mandarin teacher. I didn’t really see the point in it. I understood why it was important, but I disliked how hard it was and how much easier I found English and when was I ever going to use Mandarin outside of home and church, anyway? But Mum was insistent. As a child, she won awards for her writing in both Chinese and English, excelling in the writing of essays and fiction, and she never tired of telling us that the money she won from those essay competitions paid for her schoolbooks and stationery, as well as the Enid Blyton paperbacks we read obsessively as children. She saw potential in me, but she didn’t tell me this out loud. She just said, ‘很重要,’ firmly, and calmly, and I was crushed by the weight of generations of inbuilt filial piety.

I don’t know where those essays are now – there must be enough to make a book, at least – my juvenalia, Chinese style. I’d like to think they were thrown away, that all the characters I spent so long crafting and trapping in those little squares were, perhaps like Mum’s flashcards in that ice-cream box, set free. But knowing my parents – knowing my father – they’re probably safely stored somewhere in the depths of their bookshelves, a relic of their elder daughter’s childhood and conscientiousness. Maybe they’ll pull them out when I’m struggling to teach my own children Mandarin, proof that I was once good at it, but not so much anymore.

Mum still corrects me when she gets the chance. I don’t think she can help herself. For example, when I let her know about the status of some pain I’d been having in my chest, I texted, 我今天去了醫生, 這個星期去做 X-ray. She replied: 是照 X-ray, 不是做 X-ray. Part of me was grateful because I knew she was right, but another part of me was annoyed. She was the one who nagged me into going to see the doctor in the first place, but then picked on my phrasing even though she obviously knew what I meant. I knew she was just trying to be helpful, but I still felt a pang of guilt, for a second. Maybe it’s because I felt like I had let her down – I couldn’t even get the verb for an X-ray right.

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