中文 (zhōngwén) - n. Chinese

I don’t know Chinese. I don’t know Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, any of them. I don’t know how to make the wǒ sound with my mouth or how to properly pronounce the x’s, or how to bargain with street vendors until they give you discounts on their fluttering rainbow array of scarves. I don’t even know what the major cities are or where the country really is. I don’t know which food corresponds with which holiday, or when it’s the right time to eat 月饼，年糕，汤圆，粽子. yuèbǐng, niángāo, tāngyuán, zòngzi. I don’t know when the Chinese New Year is or why my grandma’s birthday changes dates every year. I don’t know what to say to my godmother after she sits on two ten-hour plane rides just to land at our rural home and rattles off Mandarin like a bb gun firing off pellets. I don’t know how to respond when her river of gibberish flows onto my face and I don’t know what to do except stand there, dumbstruck in my ripped jeans and cropped shirt, feeling self-conscious like I’m being harshly judged by her in her tidy white calf-length flowy skirt and neatly tucked-in black blouse, while she pinches my cheeks and mutters words of praise? Criticism? Love? Disappointment? I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know Chinese.

美国人 (měiguórén) - n. American

There was only one rule in our house for the eighteen years I lived there: American only. Language, culture, television shows, music, and anything else you could think of; everything had to be American. 

I was born in 2003, in Denver, Colorado. In the United States of America. Soon after my sister’s birth, we moved to Aspen – Denver was too diverse for my parents. Too many Mandarin speakers on the streets. They thought Aspen would be better, a town that’s 89% White, and probably 99% American. We wouldn’t be exposed to the mounds of Asian parental pressure, they told us. It’s better for both of you.

My sister and I were the only two people at our school with un-curlable jet-black hair. We were laughed at because of our flat noses and our eyes that disappear when we smile; no one ever associated the word American with us. In elementary school, I would cry to my mom in bed at night. Why don’t I look like other people in my class? Her face scrunched up and she stumbled to find the right words to soak up my drenched sheets. She couldn’t empathize; her parents replaced her social life with studies of law in kindergarten. Focus on school, she said. Bury yourself in your studies. You love biology; spend your days looking at wildlife and getting to know your science teacher instead. My dad would pat my back before sending me off onto the yellow cacophonous bus full of impatient children. You’re not different from anyone else, he’d say. Now go get on that bus. It sounded like he was trying to validate his own existence with that statement, trying to persuade himself that his differences didn’t matter and that he, too, was like everyone else in the States. 

Every day, as I watched my house disappear out of sight, I struggled to ignore my reflection glaring back at me and tried to convince myself I was fully American.

犹豫 (yóuyù) - v. to hesitate

I stare at the screen in front of me, hovering my mouse over the submit button. I don’t know why I’m hesitating. Biology now, medical school in two years. I’ve wanted this all along, haven’t I? Ever since that seventh-grade class we spent examining a frozen pig’s heart, envisioning the way it pumped and breathed, I wanted to see a true heart, one that pulses in the palm of my hand, coated with silky red gloss. I think back to ninth grade, still in awe, when I peered through the observation window as a cardiovascular surgeon carefully slid his blue glove under a live, thumping heart. I place my hand on my chest, imagining what my own must look like. My own AB-positive blood shakily swishing through the valves of my heart, little drops of blood splotching out of the tiny hole in my atrial septum. It’s small, but it’s there, interrupting the thrum of my own life. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thu-thump. I’m running out of breath. I want to – no, need to – slice open my own chest and carefully slide a catheter in with my own fingertips. Fix the hole in my own heart. Patch myself up again. But is this how? Can I stitch up my own wounds? Can I fill in the gap in my heart with just a coil?

I close the tab on my computer and sigh. I have one more day until it’s due.

父母 (fùmǔ) - n. parents

My mom’s name is Gloria and my dad’s name is Steven, both self-selected English names when they were the ages of five. When they spoke their promises at their wedding 20 years ago in San Francisco, California, their families in the front row applauded with tears of pride and love dripping into their laps, believing them to be the most perfect couple to ever exist. Two dedicated and successful lawyers. What more could they wish for?

What they didn’t know was that on that day, up on the wedding stage, the couple leaned into each other’s ears and made one more vow through the veil: to never raise their kids the way they were raised. They swore to erase their nightmares of night-long verbal abuse, nonexistent praise, being beaten to a pulp of nothingness with a tattered slipper, the mental pressure that pushed both of them to the edge of a cliff and nearly tipped them both off. So, when they took off to Hawaii for their honeymoon, they didn’t just pack bathing suits and sunglasses; winter coats, snow boots, cherished photo albums, resumés, and a key to unlock their new Denver home went too. The front door of the newlywed’s San Francisco home remained untouched. My parents’ parents, waiting by their home phones for confirmation of their safe arrival home, were never satisfied with the ring of the landline.

妹妹 (mèimei) - n. younger sister

I sometimes wonder what my sister thought. I wonder if she also noticed how her hair fell differently than others at school, if she saw the kids tugging at the outer corners of their eyes and pointing at her behind her back, if she heard the elementary schoolers shout “KONICHIWA” at her from across the hallways. I wonder if she had that same churning feeling in her gut every so often, the one that made me question my existence, my identity, the one that settled into my bones and tried to convince me that I had been raised wrong throughout my entire childhood. I wonder if she heard that persistent voice in the back of her head, the whispers that once crept into my veins and crawled under my skin chanting you don’t belong here, you will never be equal to the people around you. I wonder if she felt the pulsing, underlying feeling of get me out of here as I did. 

But when I looked at her back then, I know she didn’t. Lip gloss, mascara, eye shadow, a Brandy Melville sweatshirt, and brown hair dye were always scattered across her bedroom floor. I didn’t understand why she decided to kill her hair and turn it blond, why she stripped it of color and repainted it light brown, like stripping away her intrinsic identity and painting another one onto it. Coating it, masking it up. White-washed. That’s the word. I looked at her and saw someone so distant from me. We were so different that sometimes I didn’t even know how to interact with her.

One day she had asked me to come and help her clean her room up. I paused editing my research paper on the ethics of CRISPR and silently complied. We began reorganizing her makeup and hanging up clothes, and I remember wondering if I should ask. Ask her all of my wonders. If she didn’t feel comfortable with herself, with her own identity. If she felt the same way I did. If I wasn’t alone.

She kicked the last garment into her bin and kicked me out, telling me she had to get ready for a party. I held my tongue and watched my sister disappear into her room.

音乐 (yīnyuè) - n. music

It wasn’t my choice; the playlist isn’t mine. It was on shuffle. That’s my cover story. The one I’ve planned so if the blankets are ripped off over my head late at night when I’m curled up, engulfed in the peacefulness of the rhythm, listening to the latest release from Ren Ran, I won’t immediately be kicked out of the household. 

It started the other day when I was preparing for the Science Olympiad. Amidst cramming knowledge on triglycerides, Darwin’s finches, and why a change in pH changes an enzyme’s function, I accidentally clicked the playlist “chill study music” instead of “chill study beats”. It wasn’t my fault that this randomly generated Spotify playlist decided to subtly sneak in Chinese songs. But I guess it was my fault that I couldn’t remember why zebra mussels are considered an invasive species the next day when the sheet of paper presented a bleak colorless illustration. Because instead of studying the previous night, I had spent hours and hours scrolling through new playlists, clicking on random song titles whose characters seem the most elegant and prettily put together, feeling a sensation I had never felt before, one that I couldn’t pinpoint with a singular word but that felt like a warm magenta and deep orange sunrise peeking through the spinning clouds, watery blood-like clouds swirling like those gymnast’s ribbons, gracefully dancing across the horizons of my vision, leaving a trail of warmth in its wake. 

祖父母 (zǔfùmǔ) - n. Grandparents

My mom and dad had no contact with our grandparents after their honeymoon–until the phone rang on a Friday morning as the toast curled black wisps into the air, tendrils almost reaching the smoke alarm sensors. My mom cursed as the fumes snuck under her glasses and scoffed at my dad, sitting nonchalantly at the dining table with his glasses balancing on the tip of his nose doing today’s Wordle. My sister and I were frantically rushing in and out of rooms, slamming doors left and right, trying to pack up all of our textbooks and notes in time for the 7:30am bus.

They barely heard it. My dad barely rushed over in time to lift up the landline on the final ring. No one paid attention to the call until he blurted: MOM? The house grew quiet. My mom stopped fanning the stovetop and abruptly strode over to the living room phone. I will never forget the two of them huddled there as if they were trying to contain something, trying to prevent something from escaping that black plastic phone and snaking its way into our house. And I will never forget hearing those different sounds roll off their tongues, so harsh and sweet and hushed all at once. It sounded so alien, so different from the smooth notes that had been streaming through my earbuds late at night and drenching my soul with dreamy lyricism. But it also felt comfortable in a way, like I’d heard and seen those lip movements my whole life. Like the Chinese was all beginning to come together, all thanks to my impulsive self, the one that spent hours online looking for my grandparents’ contact information and anonymously forwarding my home phone number over Facebook.

旧金山 (jiùjīnshān) - n. San Francisco

We first visited the place we were supposed to live a year later. I didn’t expect it to feel at home as we rolled over the hills of San Francisco. It would make sense, of course; I had never visited before. But I did. I felt a sense of familiarity. The ocean drift settling a misty cloud over the city was so alien from the dry cold of Colorado, but it felt natural. Instead of snowy white hillsides, car exhaust-filled roads stretched up towards the horizon with a mixture of street trash and sweet bakery fumes, and I did not miss the colorless nature valley. I watched people stroll down the street. People with the same straight black hair, same facial features, smiling and chatting with each other in unrecognizable languages. People that looked like me.

The first thing that hit me when I stepped through their battered wooden door was the family portrait. Taken nineteen years ago, a year before I was born, at Mom and Dad’s wedding. All of my grandparents look happy; their smiles beamed off the worn image and almost brought it back to life. The two couples’ only children getting married. The prized possessions of their lives, the beings they spent every ounce of energy on, the ones they spent years forcing their own wants and wishes onto, never looking out for their childrens’ actual well-being or wants. Even in that photo you could see the creases of anxiety drawn into my parents’ faces. Fear of abandoning their lives in hopes of better ones. Desperately needing to finally break free from the short leashes their parents had wrapped around their necks but terrified of leaving their entire worlds.

Yet despite fifteen years of no contact, this photograph still hung on the entryway wall. And I watched my father’s parents’ limbs slow with age, bolt as fast as they could towards my sister and me with tears of admiration streaming down their cheeks. 宝贝, 宝贝, 宝贝. bǎobèi, bǎobèi, bǎobèi. Baby, baby, baby. They engulfed us in their arms, pushing the smell of flowery laundry detergent up our noses. They held us, in the foyer, swaying their bodies left and right, soaking up our presence, our existence. My grandma’s arms wrapped around me loosely and pressed her face against mine, gently caressing my plump cheeks. They then moved on to my parents. It was quiet shuffling at first, scared that the decade of disconnection would make things awkward. Yet soon enough, it was a desperate river of tears. 对不起，对不起. duìbùqǐ, duìbùqǐ. I am sorry, I am sorry. Droplets trickled out of my parents’ watery eyes and merged with the ones on their parents’ faces to create steady streams that oozed down their chins and permeate through the fibers of their shirts: a stream of happiness, end of wishful longing, and innate blood-bound love. Welcome home to San Francisco. 

最后一天 (zuìhòu yītiān) - last day

On the last day of our stay, Mandarin flowed freely from my parents’ mouths like a stream whose dam had just been lifted. I watched my dad help his parents type their numbers into his iPhone amidst loving squabbles: 你傻不傻？是1，不是9! Nǐ shǎ bù shǎ? Shì 1, bùshì 9! Are you stupid? It’s a 1, not a 9!  I sat beside my sweet and patient grandpa, trying for the fourth day in a row to shape my mouth to properly make the wǒ sound. I learned that even though 月饼 was eaten to specifically celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, it could be used as an offering of apology. I discovered that 汤圆 is the most delicious chewy, black sesame sugar-filled item to ever exist. The lunar calendar pinned on my grandparents’ worn oakwood bedroom door explained why my grandma’s birthday didn’t fall on the same day every year. I recited the Mandarin words for love, words spat out in anger, and phrases used for praise over and over and over in my mind, feeling a hint of confidence that I’d be able to understand my godmother the next time she visited. 

Now, two years later, I stare at my computer screen the next morning and hover, once again, over the submit button. Biology is my life–or is it? I’m not so sure anymore. I think about holding a pig's heart, how much I wanted to feel it pulsing alive in my palm, but my mind wanders to my own heart, my own source of life, my own self. The fond memories drift through my consciousness: the way the spicy aroma of my grandparents’ kitchen infuses itself into my every garment, how the hums of both traditional and pop Chinese music swirl through my ears, how I tried to mimic the flicks and rolls of my grandpa’s tongue sitting beside him on his 40-year-old couch, and feeling that powerful urge to learn more, to rediscover myself after all those years, to follow this newfound gut feeling of belonging.

It’s the last day we have to submit the form to declare our majors. Instinctually, as if I’m guided by the hand of my incomplete heart, I open the dropdown, click East Asian Studies, and press submit.

Sammie Shim