From her research it seemed that even when perfect pitch was not flipped on, tone language speakers still had some kind of neurological advantage that seemed directly tied to music.
So how would I get there? Perhaps in another twenty years, the research will have continued and linguists and psychologists will have hammered out how to effectively learn languages by tapping into the natural ways music and language overlap. Until then, I had the practical matter of how to put this knowledge to work in my studies.
As a child, I took clarinet lessons and later oboe, so I had some music background. I could take music lessons again, perhaps train myself on relative pitch, the second-best option when you’re not blessed with perfect pitch. There were ear-training CDs I could buy that expose your brain to music and train your ear to hear the differences between notes, but that seemed to me to be a very specific kind of hearing and I wasn’t convinced that being able to hear notes was necessarily the fastest way to hear Mandarin. While people with perfect pitch might be natural Mandarin learners, there’s no evidence that music education in general prepares English speakers for the task. I didn’t need to learn relative pitch; I needed to train my brain to recognize the musicality of Mandarin, to hear the differences in tones. What if I listened to Mandarin music, as a way to develop my ear for the language? That would require source material and lots of it.
The search engine Baidu had a music portal, so I started downloading artists at random from the front page. Music played while sleeping has been shown to aid everything from insomnia to mild depression to schizophrenia. Researchers from Northwestern University published a study in Nature Neuroscience in 2012 that showed that hearing a piece of music while you sleep can improve your performance of that same piece of music when you’re awake.
I wasn’t sure what music would be best for this exercise, so I started with the most popular songs. Every night before going to bed, I would start my Mandarin music playlist, pop in my earbuds, and lie down in bed. After a few nights, though, I began to wonder if this was the right approach. After all, pop music sung in Mandarin (or Cantonese for that matter) favors the melody over the tones. It’s impossible to do both—you can’t pronounce the up and down tones of each word while also harmonizing with the music. So they drop it or deemphasize it. I could listen to C-pop (or Mando-pop as it was sometimes called) all day long, but without the tones, would it be any different than listening to any other kind of music?
I had hoped to combine the awesome power of music and language, but like so many things in China, I felt thwarted before I even began.
I changed directions. I downloaded advanced Mandarin lessons because they don’t use any English, unlike the beginner or intermediate lessons, but they also speak slowly and clearly when compared to native speech. I loaded up my iPhone again; I started listening to the soothing sounds of gently spoken Chinese each night as I slept. Perhaps this would be similar to the effect the researchers at Northwestern found when they studied the effect of listening to music on your ability to play that music. Maybe listening to spoken Mandarin at night would help me speak it better the next day. Of course, I still had to use the language during the day and continue my studies, just as the students had to be actively trying to learn the piece of music they were listening to at night. So far there wasn’t any Matrix-like ability to download a language into your brain.
“What are you listening to?” Drew asked me in the dark.
“It’s a podcast on nanotechnology in Mandarin,” I answered.
“You’re weird.”
Every morning I woke and put my earbuds on the pillow next to me, the muffled sounds of looped lesson plans still audible. Would this work? Could my brain be forced to adjust to Mandarin while I slept, the neurons firing with each word heard, eventually forming new synapses? It was worth a try.
Nine
Life with Mei Hong was helping one person learn Mandarin: Cole. I was thrilled. Mei Hong came to us five days a week, from eight a.m. until five p.m., and she chased Cole around, saying things to him that only the two of them seemed to understand. She called him Ke Ai, which means “cutie.” She made us lunch—usually noodles and some kind of vegetable dish—and while we ate she followed Cole around some more, trying to feed him mashed-up peas.
Then again, Mei Hong’s sense of boundaries was, let’s just say, unusual. For example, my naptime ritual with Cole became a bizarre situation where I would breastfeed my baby to sleep as he played with my necklace, looking into my eyes—the calm, peaceful look of drowsiness washing over him—and next to us, Mei Hong would rub his back and watch me, too. I would just think: Dear Mei Hong, please stop looking at my breasts.
Here I was, unable to say anything because of a tangle of problems beginning with the fact that I didn’t know the word for boobs in Mandarin and complicated by a social face-saving system that I was still figuring out. The bedroom was darkened, the door was closed, the soft hush of pumped-in heated air lulling Cole and me to sleep, and she’d walk in and lie on the bed next to us, forming a mommy-nanny sandwich around my twenty-two-month-old.
Um, hi, Mei Hong. How are you?
For Cole’s part, though he loved Mei Hong, his apparent dislike of Beijing was becoming more obvious. One day I was carrying him the four blocks home from the store, because he still wouldn’t walk in the cold. I had him plus two bags of groceries on my hips when he arched his back and started to throw a fit. I tossed the groceries on the ground, unzipped my jacket, and unceremoniously shoved him in. It didn’t entirely quiet him down, but it helped a little. I trudged back toward the house, fussing toddler inside my coat, heavy plastic bags cutting into my hands, the biting cold stinging my cheeks. Beijing was so crowded, at any time of day, throngs of people, dressed in dark, somber colors and striding with purpose—yet none of them with cranky toddlers shoved into their jacket.
We’re all still sick. I’m always tired. Burned out. Mandarin is hard. Everything is difficult. The city is too big.
My stubborn resolve to stay and make it work—to force Beijing to fit—had exhausted me.
The day after Cole’s meltdown, I enlisted Drew to come with me to search for baking supplies for Cole’s second birthday cake. Our giant grocery superstore didn’t have any baking pans, save for a few casserole dishes, and while I could get flour and sugar, I couldn’t seem to find baking soda, or even boxed cake mixes because Beijingers don’t seem to bake at home. We got an apartment with an oven (or, as I joked with Snow, the sock warmer), but my victory was short-lived because I couldn’t find the pans to put in it. We had spent the last two years eating out of hostel kitchens and staying in kitchenless guest houses, so I was desperate to cook again, to do all the baking and household nesting I had been putting on hold—and that counted double for a birthday cake.
We hadn’t left Cole alone with Mei Hong—or anyone—before, at least not completely; even when I went out, Drew was always there in case Cole needed him. But Cole loved Mei Hong, and we’d only be gone for a short time, we reasoned. It was practically sunny as we headed out, and I told Mei Hong that she could text me if there were any problems. Cole was sleeping. I figured he’d be okay for at least two, if not three, hours.
We didn’t find the baking supplies I wanted, but we soon ended up at a café working on our laptops and had a surprisingly nice time. I enjoyed a huge latte, writing about our experiences in China with Cole, and sorting through some photographs I had taken at my last cooking class (I was making an effort to get out more, even if it took me an hour to get anywhere). I started to worry about Cole, so we headed back early—just two hours after we had left.
As I walked in the door, I heard crying. Cole tottered out of the darkened bedroom. He hadn’t slept through his nap at all—the tears streaking his face showed that he was completely cried out. He looked exhausted and defeated like I had never seen before.
How long has he been crying?
I
scooped him up and pressed my face into his neck. He softened into me. I motioned to Drew to come to me, and I whispered to him to ask Mei Hong to leave. I took Cole into the bedroom and lay down with him. After he fell asleep, I sobbed into my pillow. Everything that had been building for the past two months—the fatigue, the challenges, the constant sickness, the cold and frustration and the unrelenting pollution—it all came spilling out of me.
I couldn’t do this to my child.
My mother removed me from our home when I was twelve. The day before, her hockey-player boyfriend had been fighting with me, yelling at me about something—I couldn’t even remember what now, but it was usually because I didn’t make my bed or he was drunk, or both—and I yelled back. You’re not my father, I’d say. The vast injustice of this awful man coming into our home, still married to his wife, making my mother cry when he stood us up on holidays, and determined to break my willfulness, set me on a stubborn path of no return. I knew he would hit me, I knew it would hurt, but I didn’t care, he was wrong. So I yelled back at him when he yelled at me. This time, he grabbed me by the throat and lifted my ninety-six-pound body off the ground, his face red and his eyes dark with hate. He wanted to kill me. I thought, Good. Do it.
My mother was standing in the room, arms folded over her chest, watching. It was my little sister, two years younger than me, who ran over, screaming and crying, “Stop it! Stop! You’re killing her! You’re going to kill her!” She tried to pry his hands off my neck. For a long moment, he refused to stop. I couldn’t breathe. He stood there, lips curled into a snarl, until he finally dropped me to the ground. I ran to my room and slammed the door.
I heard him yell at my mother, “That’s it, Karen. It’s either her or me.”
The next day, my mother took me for a drive and didn’t tell me where we were going. We arrived at my aunt’s house and inside, I sat on the edge of her sofa while they explained to me in neutral tones that I would live there now. The raw wave of emotion that rose up from my gut cut through all my defenses. My mother had chosen him. She was giving me away.
Twenty years later, I became a mother who never lets her child cry—ever. My mother had told me stories of me crying it out for hours. She told me these stories as proof of my innate angry disposition, inherited from my no-show father. I heard them as stories of an unloved baby who was left to cry alone.
So when Cole cried, I picked him up. I comforted him. I would hold him in my arms until he fell asleep; then, afraid to wake him, I would sit for hours with him sleeping on my chest. I wasn’t just mothering my baby; I was trying to heal myself. To convince myself with every sacrifice, with every kiss and embrace, with all the softness and love I could conjure, that I was not like either of my parents.
I had hit my breaking point. To see Cole crying, to walk into that scene was triggering for me. I saw myself, the sad little girl, walking out of that room. No one had scooped me up. No one had saved me.
The ground felt like it shifted.
I had been operating under the premise that I could do this hard thing, I could figure out China and the language, while also protecting my son from the effects of change. I would be his constant. I would shield him from the stress of living in an unfamiliar place, emotionally creating a bubble to protect him, where his days were largely the same: time with Mama, playing with toys, a nightly bath, and snuggles in the bed. But I had been distracted. I was always studying. In the last few weeks, Cole had started biting—hard: Mei Hong, mostly, but sometimes he would run into my office while I was working and go straight for my arm. It was like he was trying to escape her and send me a message with his teeth.
This wasn’t working, especially not for him. The idea that I could make the same mistakes as my mother, even accidentally, was unthinkable.
I took a shower and pulled my hair into a still-wet bun. I curled up with the laptop on the couch, blanket over my legs, and started planning. It was two days before the end of the month. Everything from the apartment to my tutors to Mei Hong was on a monthly payment schedule, and our fees for the next full month’s rent, lessons, cleaning, everything was due in just forty-eight hours. If we left now, like right now, we could potentially exit China with the least amount of financial damage.
With my credit card in hand, I bought flights to Thailand. I found a guesthouse along the river in Chiang Mai and booked it. I sent Drew downstairs to tell the front desk we were vacating. I had prepaid for Mandarin lessons, cooking classes, and a photography workshop, but I could not bear another moment in Beijing.
I took all my Mandarin books and threw them in the trash. Drew took all my Mandarin books out of the trash and poured me a glass of wine. We packed up what we could and left behind our kitchen supplies, a few toys, some books, and a bunch of CDs.
I texted Mei Hong and told her we were leaving. She never wrote back.
Drew seemed relieved but worried that I’d regret the decision. I wanted to reassure him, but I didn’t know what to say. I was just done. That was the only thing I knew for sure. No more cold, no more Mandarin, no more pollution, no more Beijing. I fell asleep in Drew’s arms that night, my cheek against his warm chest.
Ten
On the flight out of Beijing, I sat in the window seat, with Cole on my lap. As we flew higher and higher through the ashen clouds, I scowled out my window. Then it happened. We broke through the cloud cover and the sky was filled with light. Above the smog, the gray miserable day, was a cloudless blue sky and blazing sun.
“Look, Cole,” I said, and pointed out the window.
It was a beautiful day out; it just depended on your perspective.
We touched down in Thailand during the burning season. The farmers in the north were lighting their spent fields on fire, an environmentally treacherous yet effective way to renew the soil for the next year. The haze that hung over the city was cause enough for local residents to flee to the south, if they could afford it, to wait out the annual burning of the fields. Coming from Beijing, we took a deep, long inhale of that smoky air and sighed in relief.
“Wow, what a difference,” Drew said.
“I know,” I said, smiling. “I feel like I can breathe again.”
It only took a few days of sun and watermelon smoothies for the persistent throbbing in my forehead to go away. My sinuses cleared. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla that had been sitting on my chest for the last few months was gone. We took long walks along the Ping River, wearing flip-flops and T-shirts. Cole jumped at the opportunity to play with other kids, making friends with the guesthouse owner’s toddler and playing happily in the dirt together with sticks.
At first we didn’t talk about Beijing. We remained in a state of shock, making the motions of living—eating Thai food, reading books, and playing with Cole—but an endless horizon of the unknown stretched out before us. Now what?
Childhood trauma is a wound that never heals. It scabs over, forms a scar. It fades to just a slivery thin line on your skin, a story you tell, the time that thing happened to you. But unlike physical wounds, it can break open again. I had packed away my childhood for a decade before having Cole. It was my origin story, but it didn’t define me. I never used it as a crutch. In fact, I prided myself on most people never suspecting that I went through high school as a ward of the state, living in foster care. I got a little thrill if someone assumed I had an idyllic childhood. All I had ever wanted was to fit in, to pass. I was normal, damn it! Even in my graduating class, people didn’t know that when I turned eighteen, not only could I vote and buy cigarettes, but I officially aged out of the foster system. My social worker left me a voice mail. I never heard from the Department of Social Services again.
So it had surprised me when having a child brought old, buried memories forward. Even the pregnancy had kindled emotions I hadn’t felt, memories I hadn’t thought about in years. When I was six weeks pregnant with Cole, I officially cut off ties with my mot
her, formally and for good, struck suddenly by the clarity that no, I do not want this woman in my child’s life or mine anymore. I mourned the loss of that relationship over those nine months as my belly swelled, but when Cole was born, all of that changed. I had a child now. Whatever reasons my mother had used to justify her actions over the years paled against the glowing love I had for my own child. I could never, ever do to him what she had done to me. It was beyond belief.
Drew gave me space to sort through those feelings, but then he gently pulled me back.
“So how are you?” he asked late one afternoon as we sat reading our books. Cole was napping next to us on the bed. The sky was all reds and oranges, a final flare for the passing day.
I stretched my legs out from beneath me.
“I’m better. I think.”
Drew moved over closer to me and put his book down. “I am so sorry I made you go to China in the winter,” he said.
“Ha! Please. I volunteered. Besides, it wasn’t just the winter. It wasn’t just China.” I tried to figure out what I was trying to say.
“Well,” Drew ventured tentatively, “it was pretty bad.”
I tossed my book on the bed and faced him. “Yeah, but we also totally isolated ourselves. I mean, there’s a huge expat population in China. We could have made friends with Americans, we could have had some support, a friendly ear, anything.”
Mother Tongue Page 9