Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  My mother also used the Mandarin expression wo da si ni (Woh DAH-suh-nee), which was another way to express how angry she was. In this case, the expression means, literally, “I’ll beat you to death.” In English, you might say something similar, for example: I’ll kill you if you eat any of those chocolates. That suggests you are serious about how much you love chocolate, and you’re being direct in telling someone they can’t have any, but there is no real threat that you’re going to do anything that would lead to life in prison. The Chinese meaning of the phrase, wo da si ni, carries about the same weight, but it sounds so much worse. It’s a syllable longer in scariness and suggests that a true beating might follow. I saw this literal meaning amply illustrated when, in an effort to improve my Mandarin, I watched about thirty episodes of a period drama soap opera in Chinese about three generations of a family whose wealth waxed and waned over seventy years. There were no subtitles. Had I not known even the basic rudiments of Mandarin, wo da si ni would have been the first expression I would have learned through frequency of usage in many kinds of situations—from insults to disobedience to betrayal. Fathers threatened to beat to death sons who failed an examination, and they came close to killing one who gambled away a lot of the family fortune. In that soap opera, brothers threatened brothers, cousins threatened cousins, in-laws threatened in-laws, masters threatened servants, concubines threatened maids, and the maids were nearly beaten to death before they killed themselves. Everyone in this period drama had bad tempers. In our family, qì le “I’m mad to death” was an emotional preamble to da si ni “I’ll beat you to death.” I hasten to add that this was not particular to Chinese culture. I grew up in an era when many American parents abided by the dictum “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” and even teachers paddled students at the front of the classroom. In comparison to other parents, mine did not punish us that often or as severely. Some of the kids I grew up with were slapped as soon as they made a sullen face. I still remember the shrieks and wails of a four-year-old girl with blond curls who was beaten daily in the bathroom of the house next door. That girl developed her own violent streak. She pushed us down and slammed the door on our fingers whenever she could. There were certainly times in our family when the hairbrush came out and my father followed my mother’s orders to use it. On a few occasions, my mother slapped me, but by age twelve, I was taller than she was and she had to resort to beating her fists on my back. I remember another occasion when my mother carried through with a neighbor’s demand that she punish us. My brother, cousins, and I had picked wild blackberries in our backyard and had thrown them over the fence. We looked through the knothole and rejoiced when we saw that our fusillade had hit its target: the sunbaked white sheets hanging on a clothesline. My mother disliked this Caucasian neighbor, but she could not let us get away with what we had done. So, with the neighbor listening on the other side of the fence, she said to us in Chinese, “When I clap my hands, scream loud.” Then she shouted in English, “You do this bad thing? Eh? Give me your hand.” And then she clapped her hands together, and we took turns screaming as loud as we could.

  The other Chinese expressions my mother often used with me and my brothers were the threads that kept our life together as a family:

  Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Turn off the light. Go to sleep.

  Dinner’s ready. Don’t wait for me. Hurry eat before it’s cold. Eat more. How does it taste? Too salty? No taste? Spicy enough? How many dumplings can you eat?

  Listen to me. Don’t cause trouble. Be careful. Watch out. You scared me to death.

  What a bunch of lies. Stupid beyond belief. You’re so bad. Such a temper. Why are you giving me an ugly face? If I died would you be happy?

  I’m exhausted. My legs feel sour. What bitterness I have to swallow. Do you believe me or her?

  Are you sick? You’re burning up. Do you hurt? Your stomach isn’t feeling well? Eat more rice porridge. Don’t cry. Lie down. Wait for me. Don’t be scared. I’ll be back soon. Do you believe me?

  STANDARD ENGLISH

  Most of my non-Chinese friends had a hard time making out what my mother was saying. Sometimes they would understand half, sometimes, nothing at all. During her fifty years of living in the United States her grammar became more idiosyncratic and her pronunciation worsened after she retired as an allergy technician and she no longer had to make an effort for patients to understand her. But she had no problems speaking voluble amounts of her form of English. “Lots lots lots lots I have to tell you,” she’d say to me before settling into a two-hour conversation. She was not aware how off the mark her articulation was, as I discovered one day when I caught her trying to teach her daughter, my half sister Lijun, how to pronounce words incorrectly.

  I understood her version of English as a pidgin I had grown up with, an assimilation of Shanghainese, Mandarin, and English into unique pronunciations and surprisingly useful blended idioms, e.g. “you unwind my mind,” meaning, “you twist my words to confuse me.” Her sentence structures were English words overlaid on a free-style Chinese topic-comment syntax, which ordered words according to what my mother wanted to emphasize: “You wear that dress so short you want everyone see up to your pi gu?”

  Her version of English did not impair my learning to speak standard English. At a young age, all kids naturally pick up the language of the schoolyard. Actually, I did use some of her constructions here and there, but inconsistently. I would say, “go school,” “go hospital,” and “go library.” That was likely the result of my speaking a modified form of English at home, the one that followed the patterns of her speech. Her vocabulary was limited, and until I read books and went to school, I relied on her same strategy for identifying objects by purpose and not name. “I want that thing you put on your face.”

  By my teens I knew how to speak a modified form of English at home, one that was geared to my mother’s language. For one thing, I instinctively eliminated in real time the words and also the idioms I knew she wouldn’t understand, for example: Ignorance is bliss. Elephant in the room. Shoot the breeze. Among those she probably would have understood, it might have been these: a bitter pill, burn the midnight oil, thumb one’s nose, be glad to see the back of him, costs an arm and a leg, a picture is worth a thousand words, and cut corners. She told me that a lot—that I was lazy and “cut corners.”

  I knew to avoid complicated English constructions and concepts. So instead of reporting, “We’re discussing the amendments to the Constitution,” I might have done a long circumnavigation to explain what this was to my mother. “We read that when the United States started as a country, they created something that was like the number one law, and it means we have the freedom to speak our mind and no one can take that away from us.” There were plenty of times when my mother surprised me with how much she actually knew. With the example I just gave, she would have likely said this in return: “Let me see book. Amendments to Constitution. First Amendment, this not law, not like Ten Commandments. This like saying you own something, now many laws protect. I know this, because Daddy and I memorize this for citizenship test. Got 100 percent. What you think, I so ignorant, know nothing? I know. This important amendment, American right. But this don’t mean you say what you want to me. That’s not American right, this treat your mother bad.” And she did in fact learn about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the amendments, the branches of government, and the words to the Pledge of Allegiance. Her English was sufficient, surprisingly so for someone whose English was rusty. After ten hair-raising years of expired student visas and repeated requests to the Department of Justice to put their deportation in abeyance, she and my father said the Pledge of Allegiance with a hand over their heart and became U.S. citizens in 1961. When they returned home, they were crying. I remember.

  HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

  My father’s first language was not Mandarin. He was born into a Cantonese family whose ancestral home was in Zhongshan County in Guangzhou, in the southeast part of Chin
a. Since he spoke Cantonese fluently, that must have been the language spoken in the home. He also spoke English with ease. And no wonder: he had the advantage of a father who spoke it fluently. I’m told that his grandfather, my great-grandfather, had been educated in English, and I am guessing that he was enrolled in a Christian missionary school, possibly one run by Methodists, since that was the religion my father’s family followed. My grandfather was also educated at an English-speaking school, and, as a result, he learned to read and write in English before he learned to do so in Chinese. My father attended an English-speaking boys school outside of Beijing, and that was where he must have also perfected his English and standard Mandarin. His family likely put to good use their multilingual skills in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English for transactions with foreigners. They ran an export business, and their migratory path of commerce in China went from the south to the north, the north to the south, and also into the middle, to Wuhan, where my father was born. My grandfather wanted all twelve children to learn English. He wrote them letters in English, applying enough pressure on eleven carbon sheets under the original to give copies to all of them. One of my uncles said that the copies he received were very faint because he was much younger than my father, whereas my father, being the oldest, received the original, and that was why my father’s English was the best of all twelve children. That skill enabled my father to give tours to American and British visitors to the Central Radio Factory in Guilin, where he worked as an engineer. It also helped him land a job later with the U.S. Information Agency and the U.S. Army Corps. My father’s favorite sister, Gui Ying, “Jean,” also lived in Guilin. She was the second oldest in the family and thus received the first carbon copy out of the stack. Her English was excellent, if not equal to my father’s. That enabled her to become the English-speaking host of a program broadcast by a station operated by the same radio factory where my father worked.

  In 1977, when my grandfather was eighty-seven and I was twenty-five, he sent me a letter from Shanghai in response to my letter to him from San Francisco. We had never met and it was the first time I had heard from him. My father, his eldest son, who he had not seen since 1947, had been dead for nearly ten years. The letter was written in shaky handwriting on a single tissue-thin sheet. He apologized that he was not able to respond sooner. His eyesight was poor due to old age, he said, and not any other malady, and he found it difficult to read and write. Most of his letter concerned more details about the nature of his vision problem. He added that his appetite was good and he slept well. He was glad to hear my mother was strong enough to still work as a nurse. He welcomed more letters from me. It was not an informative letter, nor particularly warm, but what puzzled me most was his signature at the end, “yours affectionately, Hugh.” I had addressed him as “Grandpa” in my five-page letter. I had signed it, “Love, your granddaughter Amy.” I thought to myself, Why not “Your grandfather,” or “Grandfather Hugh”? Did he think “Hugh” would sound warmer to an American granddaughter? I had heard that some family members had disapproved of my father’s marriage to my mother. My mother resented his sister Jean for that reason. But I had not heard of any disagreement between my father and grandfather. Maybe his vision was so poor he had not read my declaration of love for him. Maybe he simply signed his first name out of habit, without thought of the complications of family relationships that are contained within a name. Whatever the case, I’m certain he could not have known that his signature might cause his granddaughter to wonder the rest of her life what her grandfather felt was the nature of their bond.

  While my father’s English was far better than my mother’s, I had always assumed until recently that their Mandarin was equal. People used to remark that my father spoke it beautifully. They said the same about his Cantonese and English. He was a minister, accustomed to public speaking, whose job was to convince and console. Even when he switched his career to engineering, he still gave spiritually invigorating sermons as a guest pastor. He performed weddings, served as the unofficial MC at celebrations, the person who offered the toast, and led friends and family into song. People had many opportunities to hear him speak. My mother, on the other hand, was not called upon to speak at any gatherings. She was the silent better half, who spoke forcefully at home.

  I used to wonder what Chinese people perceived in my mother based on the way she talked. Language usage is an instant marker of age, education, regional habitat, and upbringing as reflected in the polite and nuanced ways that you speak. But language usage can also fool you. Many autodidacts I know sound more articulate and knowledgeable than those who have advanced college degrees. And many American mothers today will imitate the upward questioning intonation pattern of their children’s English. I was at the same restaurant? And I ran into a friend I knew from high school? I used to think millennials in search of jobs would sound more confident and mature if they dropped that upward intonation pattern. But then I heard a college professor my age use it.

  In China, your vocabulary is also telling in another way: a Chinese person who left China in the 1940s may leave linguistic footprints of that in their vocabulary. Words or expressions that were popular then are archaic now. I would not know what those were, but a friend who has the skills of a linguistic detective told me that my mother used them. She is a film director and actress, who speaks Shanghainese, Mandarin, Cantonese, and also nearly flawless English. I saw her ability to discern accents in action. We were at an elevation of about eight thousand feet in the Sierra Mountains, hiking down a rocky path on a hot day. Even with hiking boots, I often lost my footing when we trudged over scree. A Chinese couple dressed in street clothes and sneakers were climbing up the same path. They were sweating and red-faced from exertion. As often happens when Chinese people encounter one another in unusual places, we exchanged greetings, and then my friend asked in Mandarin where they were from. The man looked evasive and said they had just moved to this area and gestured to the mountains behind him. My friend clarified that she meant what part of China they had come from. The man said, “Beijing.” My friend clarified further that she was asking about his family origins, not where he lived now. He again stated “Beijing.” My friend smiled sweetly and nodded. When we continued our walk, my friend said, “No way he’s from Beijing. That guy’s from somewhere like Shanxi. He has a crude way of speaking, like someone who’s been in the army a long time and never had a college education. He’s probably one of those corrupt officials who embezzled millions and is being hunted down by the Chinese government.”

  That’s when I asked how strong my mother’s accent was, and she said, “A really thick one. You know how bad her English pronunciation was? That’s what her Mandarin was like.” I was incredulous. I asked if my Mandarin had a similar accent, and she confirmed that it did. I recalled a Chinese friend who laughed every time she heard me speak Mandarin. She said that I spoke like a baby, and that it was very cute. I thought she was referring only to my vocabulary. But she must have been referring to my accent as well, a Shanghainese one, which is a dialect I don’t even speak and only vaguely understand, just the gist of the conversations. I have heard other people describe Shanghainese as sounding like baby talk. To me, Shanghainese conversations sound like nonstop arguments and not quarreling babies. But there are indeed Shanghainese words that have traits of baby talk, for example, those words that are reduplicative, like yi di di, “a little.” In Putong Hua, “common Mandarin,” the equivalent is yi dian dian. And in Beijing Mandarin, which is the standard accent of newscasters and film stars, yi dian is pronounced with a retroflex r, and sounds more like yee-dyarh, and no reduplication would ever be used, not even in baby talk. None of those distinctions matter when you’re a baby and your Shanghainese mother is holding a morsel of food before you, telling you to eat yi di di.

  I had barely grasped this news about my mother’s Mandarin when my friend added that my mother’s Shanghainese pronunciation was excellent—and that she had had only a slight Suzhou accent;
Suzhou is a city about ninety minutes away from Shanghai, a lovely place with canals, famous for the classical gardens that inspired great poets. It is where my grandmother was born. The Suzhou language is actually prestigious, because it is identified with gentility. “Many think it makes Shanghainese sound prettier,” my friend said. “Some people try to imitate the accent.” It’s commonly said that a person from Suzhou speaks so delicately that the tone of their arguments makes it sound to Shanghainese people like they are merely having a normal conversation.

  My mother, it seems, spoke no language that was purely of any region, and how lucky I was that this was the case. Her idiosyncratic language skills were clues to our family history. Generations of her mother’s side of the family had lived in Suzhou and ran a good business selling fine embroidered silk cloth before an unknown catastrophe sent them seventy miles to the east, to Shanghai. My great-grandmother likely continued to speak the Suzhou dialect to her daughter, my grandmother, when she was a baby, and that was the language of the home my mother heard and likely spoke, alongside the Shanghainese dialect that other family members used. Although her mother died when she nine, she evidently retained its influence, the Suzhou shadings of pronunciation but not the gentle tone of arguments. Her Suzhou-tinted Shanghainese-shaded Mandarin-accented English was what she spoke when I was growing up, and it embarrassed me as a teenager when she spoke it in public.

  My friend assured me that to a Shanghainese person, my mother sounded both articulate and refined. Her words were a little old-fashioned at times, as were the expressions she used in her letters. But her writing style was especially telling. It conveyed she was educated, intelligent, and from a family with class.