Image: Canva.
My mother and I both memorised the same lines of a poem in childhood. A bloodline: a Tang Dynasty poem I learnt at Saturday school about the pool of moonlight at the foot of the bed—
床前明月光
疑是地上霜
Māmā told me there are ways of writing without using ‘I’ in Chinese. I told her, There is the hollow of a dark, unbuilt house within my ribcage. Past the streetlights glittering in gutter water, past the white-green tramlight. Past the tragic and the transcendental. Think an empty room, moonly with phone glow. Think an empty world. Think a world humanless as the sound an orchestra makes from a laptop. Think the twinkling blue light beneath the tapping of a keyboard. Lights on, and all the people gone. Somewhere, a coincidence of limbs. A girl-shaped thing. Cunt-cut. Cock-unsure. Sometime, a long time ago, the first time someone cut and spliced a roll of tape.
*
Years ago. Māmā and I were talking in the kitchen. I wanted to ask if blood, xuě (血), was sterile but Māmā misheard me and thought I was talking of xuě (雪), snow. I’m reminded of how I used to misread the word misled like mistletoe. Mistled. To rain in a fine drizzle. Missiled. My tongue is constantly toeing the line between beauty and violence.
I’ve always had a difficult relationship with English; with language. In high school, I once volunteered to read to the class some of my writing that begins with the line, I speak the language that kills me. The English classroom was always too hot in the summer, and we all know that there is something murderous about teenage boredom. I spoke in earnest to awkward shuffles of rolled-up skirts against the whale-grey plastic underbellies of classroom desks and the tap of new acrylics across phone screens.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to charm everyone with my vulnerability. I found myself constantly toeing the line between public and private. Since I was thirteen, I’ve kept a diary uploaded to the Google Cloud and accessible from my phone. Most of my work is mined from these diaristic notes that I type two-thumbed into a Google Doc. As a member of gen Z, most of my life is spent in consistent, near-religious confession within digital spaces both private and public. Forgive me, Father, I confess—my phone is the love of my life. My heart is bruised blue and Spotify green. I am sorrowless as the members of a 60s boy band drop dead one by one. My heartbreaks take the form of notifications hanging unopened from the ceiling of my phone screen, like jewel drops of blood.
Living alone in Melbourne, my only contact with my family back in Auckland is online. My mother texts me every day through WeChat in broken English which I unconsciously mirror when texting back. She texts me in English because, while my mother tongue is Mandarin, I can’t read Chinese characters. Over the phone, I always speak to my mother, my māmā, in Mandarin. I have the limited vocabulary of a child, unable to understand the radio or news. While I’m able to express myself more fluently in English, I find it unthinkable to have a spoken conversation with my mother in any language other than Mandarin. I think back to conversations with my mother at the kitchen table in the red-brick house of my stepfather—a Pākehā man—where I grew up. He would eat the bloodied rump steak that Māmā cooked at the table and shake his head as we chattered in the corner, thumping at Māmā, You’re in New Zealand now, girl. Speak English.
*
The first recorded use of the phrase ‘on line’ was in reference to railroads between 1915–20—a telegram was said to be travelling ‘on line’, meaning through a train line. How far is the space between a written word and another person? A flight line refers to both an area within an airfield where aeroplanes are parked and maintained as well as the paths of migratory birds in flight escaping harsh winters. I think of my mother on the flight to New Zealand, escaping an abusive relationship with my biological father and desperate for a fresh start. She would immigrate to Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, the land where I would grow up from the age of four and learn to read and write in English. My mother chose a new name for herself—‘Chún’ (纯), meaning pure, simple or genuine.
When I was born, my mother named me through a process of Chinese fortune-telling. The term for fortune-telling, Suànmìng (算命), translates literally into ‘calculating life’. She calculated the number of line strokes in my surname and first name ‘Zhān Xiǎo Lè’ (詹小乐) to ensure I would have an auspicious life. Superstition and mystical forces have a rich history in Chinese culture—people know to not speak openly of illness or death for fear of bringing these evils into reality. This is true even in families where a member may be actively dying, their suffering sometimes left unspoken until the last possible moment. In human lives filled with the human hardships of death, illness and loss, the lines of consequence that string one moment to the next can easily become blurred—by ambiguity, by misfortune beyond comprehension, by unspoken family secrets. Bloodlines.
I think of the lines of colonisation like lacerations across the globe as Captain Cook—who my Pākehā grandmother says she is distantly related to—made his first voyage to Australia and New Zealand. When I was young, I thought that I, too, was related by blood to whom I thought of then as a great voyaging hero.
*
Sometimes I feel an uncanny consolation in the thought of generative AI—trained on open internet datasets of dimensions beyond the comprehension of one human brain—extrapolating onwards with complex but traceable lines of connection and consequence within otherwise unparseable webs of data. If our lives are a series of calculable consequences, I want to be able to follow the lines from the very beginning to the very end. But I am only human. Easily misled. While I found a home in lines of English, Māmā only spoke English to me when she was angriest. Why you do this to me? I give you so much. I give you always so much.
Shortly after I first moved to Melbourne for university, I struggled with depression and the weight of discovering family secrets that felt unforgivable to me. For months, I refused to answer my mother’s texts and calls. Bǎobèi hǎo ma? (宝贝好吗?) Darling, are you well? Her voice asked too much from me. The horizon was a line I was forced to press into again and again like a red-blooded apple refusing to drown. One day Māmā wrote to me in English, the text lighting my room ghostly with phone glow, I need you as well.
*
Our lives seem to me a blurred line of consequences. Between consequences, where does a story begin? Somewhere, the place where music goes once the hands leave the keys. The smell of smoke from a birthday cake. A purple dress with torn wings. The red-brick house where I grew up with my little sister. Māmā names my sister Xiǎo Yuè (小月), Little Moon, but we call her Dòu Dòu (豆豆), Little Bean. The space is damp and the day is brain-grey and everything undulates like the sand in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I
walk backwards into the identical red-brick house next door where my Pākehā grandma lives. She is timid and gentle. She makes lace doilies and has the kind of self-effacing politeness and naivety that fills you with the sadness that you might feel for the skeleton of a small bird on the sand. She tells me that if I eat my crusts, I’ll have curly hair like my little sister. Dòu Dòu has brown hair and green eyes and a Pākehā surname. Somewhere, a box television set in a green room. The small bedroom of the first flat Māmā and I lived in alone when we first came to Aotearoa. Cartoon animals with American accents singing to me in a foreign language while Māmā dries my hair with a white towel. Somewhere,
my Pākehā grandfather rises from the earth and from death. He frightens me with his rough voice and pokes me with his walking stick. I run to Grandma and she takes me into her tall arms. She says to me, Grandad used to have to kill people with brown eyes like you. Somewhere, children scootering on their bums past the red-brick houses down the cul-de-sac. I trust her like a small bird developing eyes. She says to me gently, but you don’t have to worry. You’re not Chinese anymore. You’re kiwi. Somewhere,
Māmā looks at my face and tells me her heart was like a closed fist all her life. She tells me that when she first came to Aotearoa, leaving her past wounds in China, her heart unclenched. Somewhere, Māmā’s elder sister—my yímā—cries when her parents tell her to stay behind in the small Guǎngdōng village to work and fund her younger siblings’ university education. Somewhere,
I am sitting in a van painted white with spots rusted black like a ridiculous steampunk cow. The van belongs to the Pākehā man who takes Māmā and me to the beach. Māmā tells me this story, but I am too young to remember. Somewhere, the hands are still on the keys. The music loops over and over. Māmā tells me she sees the man holding my hand by the waves and feels safe for the first time in a long time. Sometime,
the first time someone cuts and splices a roll of tape. I look up at the man’s big rough hands with nails always blackened with the diesel of the cars he fixes. The sound of whirring in a darkroom. Fiction can take fifty years of human life, chop it to bits and piece those bits together. My laptop glows in a small bedroom in Melbourne where I am reading the assigned Annie Dillard the night before a tutorial. No degree of rapid splicing could startle an audience raised on sixty-second television commercials; we tend to be bored without it. Colours flash bright like the childhood memory of bloody action movies I wasn’t supposed to see passing me by on the TV.
*
Somewhere, in Spotswood 1951, CSIR Mk 1—a computer owned by Melbourne University—produces the first notes of digital music. By the 1950s, musicians were able to start cutting and splicing tape to manipulate music and time. I imagine myself finding my grandmother’s lace doilies in an antique store long demolished before it was built.
Every present moment counts, as well as no moment at all; a given moment is not merely regarded as the consequence of the previous one and the prelude to the coming one, but as something individual, independent and centred in itself, capable of existing on its own. Music students in my cohort groan at the lengthy manifesto on moment form in which Karlheinz Stockhausen—like a familiar, over-precocious teenager—anguishes over time. Yes, I say to Annie—an inside joke between the two of us—time is in smithereens.
*
Five years ago, I open a drawer in Yímā’s house on Christmas Day and look into the unfamiliar face of my dead father.
*
Sometimes I feel those long, bald walls curving in to lightly brush my cheek. Bàba. I think of you dead in our dark, unbuilt house, the heartless flowers on the table. The first time I saw your face was an accident, in the drawer at Yímā’s house. The first time I learnt of you was an accident, in documents splayed across the cold table at my high school entrance interview. When you phoned Yímā’s place before you died asking about me, I never heard your voice. There was a gum tree seed on the desk of my high school counsellor, and when I said Māmā couldn’t bear to speak of you, she asked me to squeeze the spiked edges in my palm, hard. Some things are too painful to remember. Other things are too painful not to remember. But how does one hurt for that which never was?
*
Wǒ téng nǐ (我疼妳). This is the more common way of saying ‘I love you’ in Mandarin. The character ‘téng’ (疼) means ‘to hurt’. Wǒ téng nǐ translates literally into ‘I hurt for you’. When I phone Māmā from my new home in Naarm, she tells me she loves me by asking, Nǐ chī fàn le ma? (妳吃饭了吗?). Have you eaten? She tells me she loves me by knowing our time difference by heart so that she can text me Zǎo diǎn huí jiā ó (早点会家哦). Oh, don’t get home too late. Love in Mandarin is a verb in the centre of which pain burrows. When I ask Māmā if she missed home when she first left her village for high school in the big city of Shēnzhèn, she says, Not until I got sick and nobody cooked for me or looked after me. I missed my mother then, and I cried.
Māmā tells me her heart hurts, wǒ xīn téng (我心疼), when I tell her I am ill again over the phone. I suddenly see myself beside myself—as a child kneeling beside a rock pool that catches the light, scared as any small living thing—and then I see my mother kneeling beside her bunk bed in high school, where her own teenage self is eating out of the greasy takeaway container her classmates brought her for dinner before leaving her alone with her fever. I spent most of my time in bed in a mental fog during the worst of my depression. I became an unwilling spectator of patchworks of my childhood replaying in endless cycles. Sometimes I have the uncanny feeling that everything that could ever be said has already been said; all possible lives already lived.
I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists. I think of these words spoken by composer Valentin Silvestrov in an interview. We are surrounded, or to be more precise, submerged in the sounding memory of all times and peoples. My mother journeyed alone for school in an unfamiliar city and cried in her room before me. Composing music in our time is the galvanisation of a corpse. Pain echoes through generations.
*
床前明月光
(There is a pool of moonlight at the foot of the bed)
*
My sister’s face was round when she was born. Māmā thought her face was round as a moon. Her hair was black and her eyes were swollen shut. Is she mine, the Pākehā man asked. Don’t be silly, Māmā told him. And then five years later, I want my own room. Sleeping with Māmā in the summer, I wondered if the mosquitoes knew us by their noses.
*
Is she mine, you asked when I was born. Bàba. You didn’t believe it until you followed us home months later. Māmā was hiding from you. Her mother—my pópo—slipped you the address. Is she mine, is she mine, is she mine, goddammit. There were two photographs in the drawer. In the first, you are holding me and I am bald and expressionless as dough. In the second, you are holding me, and I have become a toddler.
*
Sometimes I believe I am decades of consequence in the flesh. Goddammit, is she mine mine mine. Māmā couldn’t work the next day because you kept her up all night crying. Her eyes were swollen shut. Stay away from her, the Pākehā man yelled at me when Dòu Dòu fell from my back and began to cry into my hair. At the dinner table, I began to scream the way I did as a child when Māmā and I lived alone in the room with the green walls. Xiàng shā zhū (像杀猪), like slaughtering pigs, Māmā told me.
Five years later, Dòu Dòu is a toddler in pigtails. The grainy video is on the family computer. Māmā, Māmā, she babbles, and walks to Grandma. Is she mine. Māmā began to cry. Oh, if only I not go back to work so early. If only I rear her longer.
Māmā, I whispered in the dark, why does Dòu Dòu not know how to speak Mandarin?
*
My forehead is wide and round like yours. Bàba. Like a curved palm, or an open fifth upon the keys of a piano. You didn’t want me until you knew you could own me the way Māmā never allowed you to own her.
We should ship you back to China, the Pākehā man tells me at the dinner table. We should send you to a boarding school to teach you some good. I picked up prizes in class and then tore them up at the back of the man’s van. You’re going to end up in jail one day.
I am five years old and Grandma’s hands are white against my ribs as I strain for the open window on the second floor of the house. Oh, she was a howler, the landlord laughs. I am blind with crying and my feet make it onto the ledge.
Love you so much and you so rude, Māmā says to Dòu Dòu as they argue in the next room.
*
Sometimes I wonder what Little Moon can know of love if Māmā has only ever loved her in English.
*
There were hot typhoons where Māmā grew up. The adults worked the rubber tree plantation while the children played in toppled banana tree boats when the stormwater flooded through the fields. I remember Pópo always spoke loudly, her voice entirely different from Māmā’s controlled Mandarin. When Māmā told me that Pópo would reprimand her husband, Māmā’s father, for his idleness and whimsy, I could imagine her voice clearly. Sei liu, mu yung. Oh, your uselessness will be the death of me.
Māmā’s father enjoyed singing Chinese opera in a high male soprano voice and, though he never had the chance to finish his secondary education, he would teach himself sums on the abacus in his sheepishly stolen spare time. All manner of useless things, Pópo would tut, better he help her wring the washing or mind the chickens. Pópo never learnt to read but was shrewd and resourceful. Pópo knew how to make delicious fried forest grub that Māmā and her older brother and older sister harvested. For each one of her children’s birthdays, she would ensure an egg was set aside to boil on the morning of the special day, and every Chinese New Year the children would wait in excitement for the set of new clothes that she sewed them once per year.
Māmā was the youngest child and the brightest at school. She picked up academic prizes and was quickly named the dux of her village primary school. She would go on to university where she completed a master’s degree in chemistry. She would go on to complete a graduate diploma at the University of Auckland, securing her first job in Aotearoa. She would go on to raise me.
*
疑是地上霜
(I thought the ground was covered in snow)
*
We’re here in the dark, unbuilt house where we live together from now on in the hour of your death. Bàba. The flowers are dead on the table. The only light is blue from the text Māmā sent to the phone I had two years ago before the screen gave out and I buried it among the laptops and LED lights and copper-gouged circuit boards of the digital waste bin. The house is a glowing screen. The rooms are sentences filled with stories I cannot write you into.
Since I was thirteen, I’ve kept a diary uploaded to the Google Cloud and accessible from my phone. I am not a child anymore, Bàba. I am not even a teenager anymore. I
want to believe that I can draw webs of connection between the smithereens of text that I type two-thumbed every day into my phone screen, that I can follow the lines from the very beginning to the very end. But I will always be misled in ways that matter. Even when everything that can be said has been said, there is more I want to say.
Between the public and the private, perhaps I have always been writing this story to you. Bàba. Perhaps I am writing somewhere and nowhere at the same time.
There are ways of writing without using ‘I’ in Chinese, but I never learnt how to write in Chinese. After all, I ended up dropping out of Saturday school when I was ten years old. I am writing to you,
wherever you are. I am writing to you not because you deserve to hear these words but because these words are all I have.
*
And tonight, I’ll phone Māmā from my room in Naarm.
Nǐ chī fàn le ma, she’ll ask me.
I’ll ask her if she remembers the last two lines of the poem we both memorised in childhood—
举头望明月
(When I raise my head, I see the moon)
低头思故乡
(When I lower my head, I think of my hometown)
This essay is the winner of the KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize 2023.
