on language

Growing up in Southern China, I learned Mandarin from my parents, Cantonese from my grandparents, and English from math class. Though math was not taught in English, I did approach English grammar like I did long division—a set of logical rules that would lead me deterministically to success.

When I turned 12, the promise I showed in acquiring languages got me into the trilingual class in the city magnet school. Half of the class would take Chinese, English, and Japanese; I, along with my remaining classmates, would take Spanish in place of Japanese. Spanish soon overtook English as my favorite subject: Gendered nouns? More tenses? More rules? Sign me up! What my peers found tedious I found exciting and even comforting. It felt like a superpower to dissect a sentence and explain precisely why the imperfect tense should be preferred over the simple past tense.

Feeling sufficiently armed with a solid command of English and Spanish, at 15, I came to the US for boarding school. But within a day, I began to see that grammar and vocabulary alone could not make me invincible. Having to introduce myself as “Fei Fang” instead of “Fang Fei” made my stomach turn. In English class, my classmates’ animated discussion on Puritanism, Salem, and the imagery of snakes went right over my head. I expected to feel at ease at least in Spanish class, but my use of “vosotros” as the second person plural pronoun betrayed me instantaneously.

At the end of that exhausting first day, I got a call from my parents from the other side of the globe: “How was school?” The familiar sounds of Mandarin brought me to tears. Letting out my first sentence of the day without minding the underlying rules, I felt at home.

As I learned that day and would learn over and over again in the following years, the beauty of language goes far beyond its rules. It lies in the knowing smile I exchange with a cashier in Chinatown when I order dim-sum in Cantonese. It lies in the warmth I feel on Christmas Eve when my partner’s mom asks me “¿Quieres pozole rojo o pozole verde?” It is an audible manifestation of our yearning to connect and to belong, to feel our voices heard, our existence affirmed.

I remember flipping through my classmate’s Japanese textbook in middle school and learning that in Japanese, the word for “word” consists of two Chinese characters: the first one means “language,” and the second means “leaf.” The 12-year-old me marveled at the poetic imagery—how neat it is to use “leaf” as a synonym for “building blocks”! But now, I see much more ingenuity to the metaphor. Words are not mere building blocks. Rather, they bud from the roots we inherit and reach toward the forest we create together. As I wander, microscope in hand, I examine the nooks and crannies of any leaf that falls, and watch it become one with the earth until the next leaf springs forth.