"Tripas" Response

Note: In the mood to share some writing, so I'm sharing this personal essay that later became part of my graduating creative honors thesis! It was a class assignment where we were to respond to the poetry collection "Tripas" (as in writing that week had to be inspired by it in some way, shape, or form).

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In listening to Chinese music there is one small thing that stops me from enjoying it as much as I yearn to, and that is the fact that it is locked behind a gate that I do not have the key to. This issue is slightly less prominent with songs in Mandarin, I can fiddle with the lock and push the gate open ever so slightly to poke my nose through the crack, but Cantonese songs are treasures sealed behind an iron fortress with biometric security and a 24 hour patrol armed with machine guns. I am a Chinese American deeply entrenched in Chinese culture who cannot understand Chinese.

Sure I can complain that something is expensive in Chinese, sure I can order food at restaurants if I use the tried and true hack of pointing at menu items and saying “zhe ge,” and sure I can write 我是你的狗 in my friends’ instagram post comment sections, but can I understand Chinese poetry? No. Can I watch Chinese TV shows without English subtitles? No. Can I go to karaoke and sing my favorite songs without having to pull up the pinyin versions of the song? No. So really, what do I know?

I find myself standing outside these gates every day always admiring them, trying to think of new ways to get in and finally get to explore what has been kept away from me for so long, but every day I without fail walk away without having made any significant breakthrough? After all, how am I, a literature major with absolutely no background in coding, supposed to disable biometric security?

The silliest part about it all though, is that I think it is supposed to be my finger print that opens the door. I’m supposed to know this. I was born into this culture. Many of my friends are from this culture. It’s in the air I breathe, the food I eat, the water I drink, it’s in the reflection staring back right at me so why is it something that I don’t know?

Every day at these gates when I turn away I tell myself it will be different next time. I was just too busy today, just too busy this week, too busy this summer. There was one year that I really committed and set up my lock picking station in front of the heavy wooden doors barring me from my beloved Mandarin songs and rattled the chains binding them shot long and hard enough for them to slacken, but that was just one year. So now, I can read some song titles and search them up on Spotify, but I still can’t sing along without help. If only I could somehow rechannel that motivation maybe in another year I could open the gate and smell the air on the other side for the first time.

However, perhaps more painful is knowing that even if I were able to breach these gates and finally stumble into the beyond that I have been dreaming of, I might not be able to understand any of it. Because so what if I know that Mandopop legend Jay Chou’s classic hit Blue and White Porcelain is about comparing a woman’s beauty to that of blue and white porcelain if I don’t even know why 青花瓷 translates into blue and white porcelain. Google translate says 青 is green and I know 花 is flower. 瓷 is perhaps the only character that makes sense to me, meaning porcelain. It is a deeper study that is necessary to reveal that 青 actually refers to natural colors such as green, blue, beige, and black, and that 花 refers to the flower patterns often decorating this style of porcelain. How unfortunate that one of the features that makes the Chinese language so worth learning is one of the reasons it is so challenging to learn.

Already I sense this when trying to talk about my sister with Chinese media and she is using Chinese slang translated into English—green tea, white moonlight, stalking horse. It is the same when I am ordering a noodle dish whose English name translates to ants climbing up a tree. It is the same when I wonder what my name means. Sure I may know the meaning of each individual character in 李智琳 thanks to the everpresent help of handy dandy Google translate, but what does it mean when put together, because them being put together is what really gives meaning to Chinese characters. Further, is it even that the characters have meaning when put together or was I named after a person? A concept? Lines from a famous literary text? I might never know considering it was my Grandma on my father’s side who bestowed upon me my Chinese name and the cruelty of old age has made it so that she no longer speaks English. Yet another reason for me to fight tooth and nail to break through the gates that really, should just be wide open doors.

我希望 that one day my family and I will be able to go to karaoke together and we will be able to sing all our favorite Chinese songs by heart and there will be no need for English in the room