what language loss looks like
how about this
my mother fights with Starbucks baristas
and her accent is thick enough to carry herself, one 9-month-old,
and two neatly packed suitcases across the Pacific.
how about this
I didn't have an English name until I was four.
some days I wonder what my parents did
with the orphan of their mother tongue,
the toddler that they never called down the stairs again.
why am I ashamed to be one of them?
how about
the one time in the 3rd grade they printed two photos of me in the yearbook,
Ting Wei and Juliana, and no one told me I had to go around
crossing Ting Wei out of everyone else's book but I did,
I did.
how about
lunch next Wednesday, says grandmother, and I tell her I can't.
I do not tell her about the skeletons, vestiges of long lost lovewords
underneath my tongue, bodies are not the only things
people want to exhume.
how
could I have known what I was giving up?
she grasps my hands, eagerly asks me
a question I cannot understand.
when I give her a blank smile,
slowly shake my head, she falters.
here is the part I wish I knew how to say
I'm sorry.
remember the street with taro and thick rain?
remember how we got lost?
remember how I talked
the entire way home?
Juliana Chang is a sophomore at Stanford majoring in linguistics.