Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  On my shelves, there is no debate which languages are dead, only agreement of departure: Etruscan is here, of course, as is Agta-Dicamay of the Philippines, Ahon of India, Arin of Siberia, Azari of the Iranian Plateau—so many, it is like counting stars. Some of their remains are thick tomes. Others are thin-spined monographs with typewritten titles. They tilt and jut up at different heights like tombstones settling in soft dirt. Sometimes I reflect that I will one day join the dead languages and their speakers, and no one will recall what I spoke. I will leave no mark in the record of humankind. Like most of these silent languages, I will not be missed and mourned. This is not a complaint, just a reminder to myself from time to time, to ask if there is anything else I should be doing. And then I continue.

  Here are three extinct languages, as close as sisters: Cappadocian, Cataonian, and Cilician. I have cataloged the places where they appear in Greek literature, always in passing, the lower status neighbors of the god-laden Greeks, to whom those sisters had come to borrow an amphora of wine and died shortly after because they forgot to specify in the dominant language, “Plain wine, that is, not poisoned.”

  I will mourn Washo and Quechan when the last of her native speakers are gone and those at their funerals speak only English. I have put those two languages with the endangered ones in my study. There are so many, crammed on bookshelves along all the walls with only the stanchions of doorways and small windows to interrupt the flow. I find it agonizing to decide which language should be placed on the shelf for imminent extinction—and of the hundred and twenty endangered languages in China, which are the twenty that are the most critical? The books and monographs on these dying languages are not always rigorously done. Many are neither informative nor interesting. For some, the remains of its lexicon resemble the lesson plan for kindergarten children, numbers one through ten, primary colors, and such. I cannot always determine whether the data is a bad transcription done by someone without an ear for phonemes.

  The death knell will soon be rung for many more, be it through the brutality of ethnic cleansing or the education of the masses. Han is the language of instruction in China; it is the language on the playground, the language of pop music and movies. We can’t deny the children of minority languages from attending school. We can’t deny them the pleasures of pop culture. We can’t prohibit them from gazing at the small screens of their cell phones while walking to school, while eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, while seated in the classroom or at the movie theater. In a just society, every child and adult has equal opportunity to devise a condensed form of their thoughts, devoid of complete sentences, but rich in dynamic spellings and acronyms as shorthand for emotions. They should all have the means to text a lover and document every second of their existence: just got home, just sat down, just saw your photo, just got under the covers, just got caught. Through text, they talk, and they are losing the idiosyncrasies of their voices, the regional nuances, the whiny tone of irritation, the wobbling one of shyness. They are merging with a more utilitarian grammar-lite language, in which datives and locatives are the here and now of when a message was sent and not when it was received. “Are you here?” “No, I’m not here.”

  I don’t condemn these changes. I mourn and move on. I observe and describe what is happening. So let us continue. Here is Yiddish, still spoken but ebbing into folktales, religious ceremonies, and jokes. I have banished the joke books.

  My love for languages began at home, listening to the linguistic hubbub of an extended family prone to disagreement—Mandarin, Shanghainese, English, both excellent and substandard versions of all of them. I mimicked my elders and peers, not just the words but also their mannerisms. To speak a language fluently, you must be persuasive in that language and not just argumentative. To know a language well, you must understand intent before words.

  At seventeen, I took my love of languages to the university and studied linguistics to obtain an undergraduate degree, then a master’s, and a Ph.D. I was young and needed to make a mark of some kind, and my love for language soon gave way to intellectual enthusiasm. I fell into the sinkholes of theories—Chomsky’s view of innate language structures as ready-made scaffolding in the brain, followed by waves of other theorists who banged their heads on a closed system and eventually built their own theoretical camps. I did so as well; my position as an assistant professor at the university depended on it. New approaches to the puzzle of language origins, acquisition, change, and decay. New questions on how change occurs.

  In time, I forgot about the persuasive nature of language, the intent before words. I wrote papers like, “Gain and Loss Innovation in the Genealogical Classification of Mongolian and Manchu-Tungusic Languages.” My papers were read by the twenty-six linguists who claimed this same diachronous territory, from Manchuria to the Altai mountains, between Genghis and glasnost. That was how I nearly killed my love for language. I buried it under academic discourse with my contentious colleagues, who sought the smallest differences to undo me. Did you link Kalmuk with Oirat, Dagur with Buriat? Do you agree with the theories of those Soviet scholars—that languages go their separate ways according to those that are vowel harmonizing and those that are not? Did you consider those languages that are syllabic in phonological structure and not simply those that are purely vocalic?

  Through scholarship, I saw language as territory and a reason for combat. I saw only in between, and not within. I looked for evidence in homonyms, counterevidence in rhymes. The goal was to find proof, better and more proof, impenetrable and inviolable by opposing views. Without proof, you have nothing more to say. I sat in judgment with my colleagues over what should be included in the realm of consideration.

  Twenty years ago, my opinions about proof changed. I was driving home from a meeting, going up the familiar eucalyptus-lined road in the Oakland hills, when a fox suddenly appeared. A driver coming downhill in the opposite direction saw the same. She was a lover of felines, she later explained, which was what she mistook the vulpine to be. Out of such love, she turned her wheel sharply to avoid hitting the catlike fox and in so doing, hit my car instead, sending my car and me tumbling over the embankment. I was not thrown from the car, but the bony case that holds my brain banged against the side window each time the car rolled over—three times. I was lucky I had not fractured my skull, the doctor later told me. I had suffered only a bad concussion, a bruise on my temporal lobe. But the next day, there was evidence of a subdural hematoma—a slight one, just a bit of a blood leak under the skull but not in the brain, and that resolved quickly on its own, no surgery required, so again I was lucky. Luck ebbed when I found that a bit of a hematoma and bruise on the brain do not heal like a scratch and bump on the knee. I had difficulties keeping my thoughts organized as words. When asked to describe what I saw on the road just before the accident, I could see the road, the fox, the other car, and the woman’s eyes staring into mine before the sound of crushed metal. But I could not describe this. I could not say where one was in relation to the other, spatially or temporally. When I could speak again, I felt as if my thoughts were being diverted to a holding place, where some were released more quickly than others. I knew my intellect had suffered greatly when I could no longer understand the arguments waged against my most recent work published in Lingua. Instead of resigning, however, I asked for a leave of absence, believing that I might fully recover. I said I might ease back in later by teaching only one class. The department head made vague assurances that my position would still be there when I was ready—they would try their very best to make that possible. His tone of voice was too consoling and full of the kind of excessive warmth expressed to people who are dying and leaving behind a fortune. As damaged as my brain was, I detected that. He was glad to be rid of me. In the next beat, I shouted: “How stupid do you think I’ve become to believe that?” It was the most comprehensible thing I had said since the accident.

  The insurance settlement was large, commensurate with the amount of damage done to m
e, as enumerated and exaggerated by my lawyers. After six months, I understood that the vast sum was not excessive, given that no amount could compensate me for what I had lost. I was forced to consider how much of my existence had been my intellect. And then I sank into grief for my former wholly cerebral self.

  My mind had become a Scrabble board of unrelated words. I had to consciously put them together to form a sentence. My thoughts were similarly disconnected, and I had to search for contiguous thoughts I could stitch together in logical order. I could not recognize satire or irony or humor more subtle than slapstick. I became terrified that I might have lost more than I could fathom.

  To rehabilitate my brain, I underwent speech therapy, but I was impatient with my slow progress. At night, I read simple texts, children’s nursery rhymes and fairy tales, first in English, and then in other languages. In those early days, I counted my victories in small parcels—when I could recall the gist of the story a day later, or remember the particular abilities of various gnomes, fairies, genies, and witches. I read a hundred fairy tales. I reread them, again and again, until they no longer felt new. I recovered basic analytic skills by seeking patterns in those fairy tales: there was often a desire, an obstacle, a trial requiring feats of ingenuity. I recorded my discoveries on scratch pads, which served as interim memory. I noted that victory required both the violent destruction of enemies and the reward of castle, kingdom, and love. I also discovered that many of the stories had a common refrain, which often appeared in the middle of the tale, at that intersection where bad decisions quickly become fatal ones: When leaving a place, don’t look back. If you do, you are back to where you started. I took it to be a warning about my own life—that if I looked back, all progress I had made would vanish. I was like a character from a fairy tale, banished from the kingdom until I could find enough clues to solve the puzzle. I had to walk blindfolded into a forest of talking trees. I had to find the salivating sea with its tongue-lapping waves. I had to bail water with a leaky bucket until the sea waves turned into sand dunes. Damn the castle and its puzzles.

  One evening, I opened drawers in search of a scratch pad and came across the draft of a monograph I had written before the accident. Here in my hands were the vestiges of who I was five years ago, just hours before I tumbled into a ravine. I knew I should not read those pages. But a small hope that my brain had improved became a great torment in my need to know. I read the title, and then, cautiously, the short descriptive paragraph, and I shouted with jubilation. I understood it, or, rather the intent of it—the morphological evidence that Xibe was likely a dialect of Manchu and not its evolutionary heir apparent. I continued reading and remembered why I had chosen to write the monograph. New pockets of native Manchu speakers had been found in isolated villages in northeast China. I possessed new data, new proof. But the speakers were elderly and their progeny spoke only Chinese, which put Manchu in the bell lap of a race it could not finish. The monograph was timely. I was elated that I could follow bits and pieces of the premise, the data, the hypothesis, the competing theories, and the body of evidence that was still needed. I understood only the gist of those pieces, but they were enough clues to the puzzle, each an oasis, linked to another, creating a path out of the dry dunes of my memory.

  As a linguist, I knew better than most that one does not inherit a predisposition toward a particular language. Yet, when I first studied Manchu, I had the odd sense that I was becoming reacquainted with a language I had once used. The textures of reduplicative syllables in my mouth felt familiar. The meanings of the words came with vivid images, what seemed like recollections. That night, now fifteen years ago, I recalled one—not the word, but the image that it stood for—an ancient desiccated tree that had lost its bark. In my mind, I could still picture that bare tree. And when I did, a shape ran out from behind that tree and floated before my eyes like a hologram. I went to touch it and it immediately disappeared. A stroke, I thought, a leak in my brain. There goes the rest of me. I closed my eyes to await the change. After a minute, I opened them and saw the shape was there again. It was a word. Kirsa, I read aloud. Immediately the word pulsated and dashed across my field of vision. A detached retina. My doctor had cautioned that this might occur months or even years after the accident. The word returned, solid and still. What was the meaning of this hallucination? Was I psychotic? I wanted proof that I was not insane. I wanted kirsa to mingle with memory and return as a word I once knew. I uttered those two syllables, velar and sibilant, still unclaimed by its meaning. Kirsa, kirsa, kirsa, I said. Just as I gave up, I saw it: kirsa, the fox, and not the one on the road that blighted my brain, but the fox of the steppes, the one you can never find when you seek it. I knew what the fox knew: to see the illusion, you must become the illusion. In the next instant, I was running on the Mongolian steppes, dry sand beating against my white belly.

  From that day forward, I roamed freely among the words of dead languages. I spoke them, I wondered over them, I cherished them, and they came to me alive for a moment, as briefly and as bright as the spark of phosphorus before there is flame.

  I now know why the Mongol dynasty retreated from China in the thirteenth century. Listen to the open vowels, the rapid lateral flaps. They were hungry to hunt again and gallop bolt upright in their stirrups over the Hump and across the Prickly Grass. I know why the Manchu soldiers were just as eager to leave those plains three hundred years later when the Qing languished and the sands were no longer theirs to protect. They wanted to return to Manchuria, their ancestral farmland, where their families had been waiting for centuries. As they moved across the steppes alongside the Altai mountains, the sounds of Manchu began to migrate. Palatalized affricates fell forward into sibilants and the Tungus tongues slushed with happiness. Each night, they sat under a full bowl of stars, imbibing fermented mare’s milk, muttering that tomorrow would be yet another day wending through Endless Grass. But two years in, they sank to their knees and cried in surprise—Adada ebebe! Adada ebebe! How could this be? Nothing rose above the tall grass to mark the path. Hostile tribes had knocked down the ancestral rock piles—thirty-seven generations of guidance now scattered. Soon the illusions greeted them. Deer looked like rocks and rocks became rabbits.

  From then on, the only precious words they spoke were rumors of water. Water flowing underground from a hidden river. Sweet water in an oasis poured from pitchers by seven lovely sisters. A muddy pool fouled by the breath of camels. The dental nasal n lurched back to the liquid lateral l. The water seekers scratched in the sand: “In retrospect, there is no water half a day’s journey east of this spot. In retrospect, this was the wrong way to go.” And then their cries weakened to olhokon, olhokon—“we are all dried up”—and their desiccated voices were sucked forward into the wind hiss. The last sound they heard was a hundred thousand crickets shrieking sar-sar as they leaped into the air and onto the Manchus to devour them while they were still fresh.

  Fifteen years ago, I read these words: When leaving a place, don’t look back. If you do, you are back to where you started. I took it as warning. But when the fox appeared, it became a choice, and since then, I have looked back every night.

  Tonight I go to a spot in my mind where the foot of the mountain and a river connect, senggin, a meeting place. I wait until I feel the sound pulsing in my veins. And it comes—Pes-pas! Pes-pas!—the sound of horses galloping softly over grass. The second vowel tightens. Pes-pis! Pes-pis! The hooves are hitting the hard-baked earth of the steppes. Soon we will arrive at that place where the past begins.

  [ QUIRK ]

  Intestinal Fortitude

  [From the journal]

  I misread “intentions” as “intestines” and now think the image is an apt one. Your intentions come in part from what was fed to you so long ago you’ve forgotten what it was, let alone whether it was good for you or if it simply staved off hunger, whether it was delicious or a kind of poison, an addicting taste.

  Books are no longer being bought. People a
re scrimping on their minds. They are starving.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTICS

  LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

  My mother spoke Shanghainese, Mandarin, and English, but in any of those languages, people often misunderstood what she meant.

  Shanghainese was the first language she acquired, the language she heard her parents speak, and she spoke that the best. She picked up Mandarin as a child in school, where it was the language of instruction. That was also the common language she and my father used between them when they argued and, I assume, when they made love. She took English classes as a schoolgirl and of the languages she spoke, English was by far the worst, which was why I was shocked when I came across the facsimile of a college diploma twelve years after her death that showed she had received a bachelor of arts degree from an English-speaking University. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the name of the recipient, Tu Chuan, was only similar to the one on her student visa: Tu Chan. She had used the diploma of someone who had actually earned the degree. The fact that her English had always been rife with mistakes was evidence that this hypothesis was likely true. If she had truly majored in English, I would have seen her reading English novels, but not once did I see her read even one. The only novels we owned were ones packaged under the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series. They were donated to us, but she never read them; I did. Carson McCullers’s A Member of the Wedding—that was one. She never acknowledged she had read any of the novels I was reading in high school. Oh, The Scarlet Letter. I love that novel. The minister and the lady. She the punished one, not the man. So sad. She and my father were the minister and the lady, and she was punished. But she never said that.

  In 1949, when she was accepted to Lincoln University in San Francisco to obtain a master’s degree in American literature, she confessed by letter to the college registrar that her English had become a little “rusty.” The registrar wrote back: “Yours is a common difficulty with Chinese students who have had their studies interrupted.” Presumably, the registrar was referring to World War II, which began in China in 1937, when my mother was twenty-one. Or maybe she meant the more recent civil war, which ran from 1945 to 1949, a period of personal turmoil for my mother, when she fell in love with my father, left her husband, and was jailed for infidelity.