what are you trying to say?

i. minefield.

Before I go to Paris three separate people tell me never to forget the difference between le chat and la chatte. When visiting my grandparents, I remember that I should never tell them estoy embarasada. A friend tells me laughingly over lunch that I should never ask for condimientos when I visit her in Italy.

I forge on recklessly. Less than a minute after crossing the Banpo Bridge in Seoul, I ask a man how to get to the Banpo Bridge, hoping that eventually with enough hand gestures I can convey that we're really looking for the pier below. He — rightfully — looks at me as though I've asked him how to eat the bridge. Gasping with laughter, I move on into the night. Sometimes I step incautiously, optimistically, in the minefield, and I end up with my foot in my mouth.

ii. mold.

The way we speak and write directly affects the way we think. The flow of language is the flow of time — left to right, right to left, East to West. They say music is the universal language, but all I know how to read is modern staff notation. "Modern." Associated with progress, with today, with the norm.

Wine and the sea are completely different colors to me. I can't read jazz. Every year, I take up my calligraphy brush and ink, re-familiarize myself with the meditative strokes, and write the 春联。Top to bottom, right to left. 每年我感觉到一种说不清的归属感。But one mold can only produce one shape.

iii. wall.

Look at the reception Rachel Jeantel got to her testimony in the trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Would that have happened to a SAE speaker? Why does the form of the perfectly-intelligible AAVE elicit such unfiltered hatred, to the point of negating its content? What in the reifi-fucking-cation of structural linguistic racism is going on? How do I instinctively know where to put the fucking intensifier in a sentence, in a word, so that it's taken seriously?

Who gets taken seriously?

Necesito usar un gran esfuerzo para leer, para hablar en español. Pero es la responsibilidad de todos, ¿no? To try, to reach out, to build? Glimpsing the other side of the wall is to touch another heart. Ah, abandonato. 代购。我家门前有个大沟，很难过。

iv. bridge.

My mother tells her children that we need both languages to receive all her love. 从小，我们就听她说，天塌下来，总是可以回到家。These days, 妈妈常常跟我说，anything you need, anything at all. I respond, 天塌下来。我知道。我知道。I love you too, ma.

My grandparents, puttering around their apartment, lovingly paging through their pasts, unfolding photo albums and yellowed piano sheet music. My cousin and his partner, raised in Shanghai. My brother and his partner and me, raised in the US. There is no one language all of us speak: the five of us kids speak English together. My grandparents speak in Chinese until they remember to loop in my brother's partner, switching to Spanish. I do my best to play Chinese-to-English translator, but cannot keep up to play Spanish-to-Chinese for my cousin. One hundred percent of my neurons are firing. It's draining. I'm full of love and affection.

v. playground.

Penguin: 企鹅。"Business goose." Owl: 猫头鹰。"Cat-headed eagle." Turkey: 火鸡。"Fire chicken."

I come home after a late dinner with friends and realize I still have to put away an entire load of laundry before I go to sleep. The conses are quencing, I text the group chat mournfully. I have to tell autocorrect I really mean it.

vi.a. archaeological dig.

For a pointlessly rebellious span of about five years, during which I am the kind of teen who self-describes as "irreverent," I make a point of never saying "goodbye," solely because I had read that it came from "God be with ye." Rebel without a cause, at the most insufferable.

I've always loved etymology. It's about intention, I think. 塞翁失马，perfectly understandable. 二百五？No idea! The oldest recorded instance of "the old college try" comes with the equally baffling but long obsolete "that's the eye." I derail conversations often, rubbernecking at idioms and phrases I get snagged on. 

Sometimes we swallow around bones. Sometimes they lodge.

vi.b. graveyard.

The British Museum has a lot of really egregious plaques. "This piece was recovered from." "This mural originated in." "Was gifted to." 

Was your archaeological site once called something else?

vii. war.

I’ve never learned to whistle. Whenever I catch a friend whistling, I ask them when they picked it up. Did someone teach you? Did you learn by watching? Growing up, did everyone around you know how?

This is about whistling. It’s also about when I realized that not everyone means “ensuring everyone has access to food, water, and shelter” when they say family values. It’s also about coming of age when the Obamas were attacked with political cartoons that made me physically sick. 

I play UKIP in our classroom Model Parliament, declaring gentlemen, we should build a wall between us in beautiful England and them in Calais, to waves of giggles from my classmates. Within two months, Brexit passes. Within six, I’m leaving the room in tears as we realize the man who said grab them by the pussy has won Pennsylvania. I sleep very little, that week.

I grew up knowing what we can and cannot talk about freely when we visit China. 天安门，六四。I can scarcely believe the rhetoric now around decarbonization, equity. "Barriers," even. Is this a joke? Life isn’t meant to be lived Executive Order to Executive Order. 

viii.

And language is, and language is.

An artist trains a team of geese to fly to the moon. (No, really: look up Agnes Meyer-Brandis.) This artist visits my undergrad Interplanetary Habitation class, and has us all Naruto-run across a circular lawn for twenty deeply bizarre minutes, pretending that we are geese flying across the moon. One of my classmates and I become very close friends. I write, for her wall, 长鹅奔月。I do explain the legend of 嫦娥，but it is possible I am the only person on earth who will ever find this as funny as I do.

吃掉。Eat [until] gone. 我吃不掉。I eat not gone: I cannot finish eating this. The negator, 不，goes in the middle of the two-part verb. The characters I know how to read and write are often simplified versions of the traditional characters; sometimes, you just sim-pu-li-不-fy the characters down any further, and the simplified and traditional characters are the same. I tell this to a friend in passing. Now three years later, whenever differences in grammar structures between languages come up, my friend brings this up as the first example, cackling hyena-wild. This is the only Chinese grammatical structure this friend has ever learned.

I spend a solid amount of that time learning how to use 他妈的 in a sentence from a beloved uncle. My mother is caught between horror, amusement, and — I like to think — some amount of pride.

My family visits me in Boston. I tell a story at dinner about a mild irritant in my life. He was such an asshole, I sigh. 说地好听一点儿，Mom says, meaning for me to change my language. Pasting on my brightest smile, I sing-song out: "ass-hoooole!" Dad laughs so hard he throws his head back; Mom is startled into giggles. I genuinely fear my brother's gales of laughter are going to get us kicked out of the very-nice restaurant.

We make minefields of playgrounds. We make bridges of bones.