metamorphoses | Yuxin Zhao
December 29, 2022
image: Lucy Blagg
At school she learns to say each day of the week, each month of the year, and each season in English. She learns the birthdays of her family members, their ages, and the names of their jobs. She finds out the word teacher describes what her grandparents did, and that her parents are engineers. The subject her grandparents both taught was engineering. It comes to a total of two words. What her uncle and aunt do no one has yet told her. She does know that she shares the same birthday with her uncle, and it is only three days apart from her mother’s. Her father and grandmother were born in winter, her aunt and grandfather in spring. She likes the way the months start with a simple pattern, January and February, but then quickly explode into random, faster, shorter words with warm March. Then, when the weather cools in September, the words grow long and unified again.
As she sits in her new classroom, surrounded by faces she can’t yet pair with names, following the teacher’s lead, reading every word out loud, she suddenly realizes that in all the family albums, there isn’t a single picture of her mother celebrating her birthday. Cameras were expensive when her mother was growing up but still, no birthday photos from childhood, college, or her career. She remembers her mother telling her that since their birthdays were so close, they could just celebrate together. Her mother’s birthday is June 4th. She holds onto that date as the class proceeds. She is anxious for the school day to end. She is going to rush home and talk to her mother. But, then again, it’s very likely that her mother won’t be home before her. Maybe she’ll ask her grandparents. Maybe she’ll wait. The school bell rings.
The next day she sets off again, early in the morning, and it goes on like that. For the first few weeks she compares elementary school and kindergarten. She knows there will be less play. Chinese classes are redundant. She can already read and write the characters. After lunch the students are told to nap. She didn’t expect the naps to continue. There are no longer small, wooden beds for each child, just the desk to lay your head on. “Go to sleep,” the teacher says, and the lights are dimmed. She can’t fall asleep. The posture is strange, her cheek pressed against the hard surface of the desk. It’s how you might rest aboard a long-distance train if you get a train that comes with plastic tray tables on the back of the seats.
She keeps her body still and lets her eyes wander. One difference between elementary school and kindergarten is what the windows open onto. She used to be able to see into the distance and stare at a shiny pink building. Now there is more school. There are two side-by-side concrete buildings housing all the classrooms and all six grades. There’s a smaller building for the auditorium and the library and activity rooms, and a sports field instead of a small playground. So as she sits in her seat, not sleeping. She looks out the window and realizes that they are enclosed by stone, wood, plastic, sand, and paint. She listens to the breathing of the other forty-nine students, some dreaming, some mumbling, some wide awake too. She thinks of her mother’s answer to her question. “I don’t like my birthday,” her mother said. And then, “Regardless, I don’t like birthdays in general.”
It was 1989 the day her mother turned twenty-five. Her grandfather was on his way to the US for the first time. His student drove him to the airport since all public transportation had come to a halt. A heavy silence fell around the city. Sitting in the car, he thought he could feel a hum, maybe a pulse. He saw college students marching with banners, their tiny square a mirror image of that enormous vacancy a thousand miles away. But they heard no sound, starring out the car windows.
She presses her cheek against the desk as hard as she can. At first the desk is almost cold and smells of metal not wood. Slowly it becomes warmer and warmer until she can barely sense it. Bit by bit she eases the pressure. She imagines the shape on her cheek. Like a birthmark or a healing scar, visible when the lights are turned back on and the students are allowed to leave their seats.
She recalls an English-learning activity she took part in several days ago after school. There were ten students and their parents stood by and watched. A teacher brought huge, thick sheets of drawing paper. The teacher told half the students to flatten their paper onto the floor. The other half were instructed to lie down on the paper. The smooth white sheet in front of her was big enough to lie down on with arms stretched out. The other students crouched and began to trace the contours of their bodies. She kept still. The fluorescent lights buzzed and the room felt cold. Her partner was a quiet girl from class who usually sat two rows to her right. She could tell the girl was trying to avoid contact between the pencil and her skin. After what felt like a long time, they got up. The contours of their bodies, bulging with swollen limbs, looked nothing like them. The kids were giggling, pointing, comparing, and pushing each other. When the laughter died down, the teacher started to teach them English words. That day she learned left and right, and head, arm, hand, leg, foot. She watched the teacher move from contour to contour, body to body, writing each word at the correct place. She watched and considered. Like the rest of the kids, she could barely write the English alphabet. Somehow the process felt like the revelation of a hidden structure. So it was like that, she thought. What she had known to be 头 (tóu) could also be head, and 手 (shǒu), hand, 腿 (tuǐ), leg, 脚 (jiǎo), foot. She wondered why the English words looked so alike. She thought it would be very easy to get confused.
There were still many blank spaces, but they were told those were more difficult words for another day. She didn’t know what necessitated such an activity. Why such large sheets of paper? Why their actual bodies? And the lines that made up the letters were a light grey, too faint and delicate, prone to smudge and erasure. And the sound. They were quiet words, better for writing. She couldn’t imagine screaming those words.
Every other language began as sound, as casual chatter and conversation. It was over dinner and bedtime stories that she learned to read Mandarin. Before bed her mother would read to her from Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. She always kept her eyes open in order to trace the words, the syllables slowly settling into their physical shapes. Her mother told her to close her eyes and just listen. “Otherwise you’ll never fall asleep,” she would say. First there was a sound, which became associated, sometimes clearly, sometimes vaguely, with meaning, and eventually there was a character the sound represented, or two or three characters to make a word, which became phrases, which became sentences. The characters were an entirety of meaning. This was why she was shocked when she got to first grade and they were taught 拼音 (pīn yīn), the romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. It was a reversal, taking a sound that meant something and breaking it into shorter sections that meant nothing on their own, so tóu became t and óu and shǒu became sh and ǒu. Part of it felt like a breathing exercise, part of it a revelation, not so different from the moment, months later, when she would stand there and watch her hand being named hand.
For a long time English would remain a language that began with individual letters. Each letter meant nothing on its own, but when they were grouped together to make a word that had a meaning, the word would take on sound. In studying her mother tongue systematically, she was taught to take everything apart, yet in learning English she had to assemble. By romanticizing 手 as shǒu, the letters pointed at some structure underneath the Mandarin character. The word hand was simply a skeleton that could not metamorphose into a more condensed form. English was for writing. Many years later people would criticize the way English had been taught in China, with little emphasis on speaking or listening skills. They would say that her generation and the generation before had learned “Mute English.” Unable to speak fluently or grasp daily conversations, she knew it was true. There was an undeniable muteness in her lying there, holding still, waiting for her body to come into shape on paper, waiting for the shape to take on quiet, foreign, handwritten names. She knew, or thought she knew, this muteness, which meant silence, refusal of speech, secrecy.
She listened to her mother read the story of Princess Elisa. Her brothers, transformed into eleven swans by an evil witch, are carried off to a foreign land. Elisa is obliged to take a vow of silence so her bewitched brothers might return to their human forms. While listening to the story, she often wondered what Elisa would have said. What was on the tip of her tongue? Who would she have spoken to? How foreign was this land? Was it foreign enough for silence to mean wings and wings to mean arms, and swans to mean humans? Maybe the story of metamorphosis was one of words rather than of physical beings. As her mother continued reading, she imagined herself with two wings covered in heavy brown feathers, hiding two human arms. 左手臂, 右手臂. Left arm, right arm. She stood up and saw the contour of her body, looking nothing like her body, and then her hands, skin, and flesh that were also hiding places for new names.
Yuxin Zhao is a writer from Hangzhou, China, currently based in the UK. Yuxin writes experimental prose and poetry about family history, migration and immigration, distance and desire.
