I still cannot quite say why I chose French in my very first semester.
I had not been long on this side of the sea. My English was still poor, and my French was very nearly a blank page. Someone who stumbled over ordinary English at the tip of the tongue had nonetheless walked headlong into another language; looking back, the decision verges on the absurd. Yet the things that truly stay with us seldom arrive under the name of fate. They begin as a single square on a timetable, a course chosen one unremarkable morning, a room one steps into long before knowing what, in the end, will be the thing to remember one.
When I was still in China, I was afraid to speak English aloud.
Not for lack of study, and not because I failed to grasp how much it mattered. The opposite: the more I understood its importance, the more that opening my mouth felt like a public execution. A mistake in writing could be erased; a wrong answer could be slipped into the middle of a stack of papers and lost. Sound could not. Once a syllable left the mouth it carried the print of the tongue, the throat, and years of habit, and fell straight into another person’s ear. In those days most people’s English was poor, and mixed together we could manufacture a cheap sort of courage. But I always knew my pronunciation was off, my intonation stiff, so many words seeming borrowed from another body, worn with sleeves and shoulders that never quite fit.
After I came to this colder country, the discomfort only grew sharper.
Here English was the air many had breathed since childhood, while every sentence I spoke felt like carrying wind in from somewhere else. Others spoke as naturally as water slipping over the lip of a cup; I spoke with effort, the way one works a rusted nail out of wood. French was worse. To my teacher the syllables and liaisons and pauses were perhaps the light of a familiar room; to me they were one unmarked door after another. I stood at the threshold wanting to go in, and afraid that the instant I spoke I would give away that I had never belonged.
The ancients wrote: I left home young and return old; my accent unchanged, the hair at my temples thinned.1
I was not old, of course. I had been gone only two years; there was no frost at my temples, and by any count of years I was far too young. But some things do not wait for white hair to show their age. A person can learn silence very early, learn composure, learn to press a sound down and then further down until it no longer sounds like a plea. One can understand very early, too, that what people call maturity is sometimes only the rewriting of a cry for help into politeness, of fear into discipline, of every unpresentable longing into I never needed it anyway.
My accent has always been plain. Mandarin and Cantonese run together in it, making a voice that is neither quite standard nor easy to place. My English improved later, and my French slowly grew a shape out of its first blankness, yet whenever I spoke I still knew I came from elsewhere. Certain syllables would surface like a loose thread at the hem of a coat, reminding others, and reminding me, that to leave one’s homeland is not the same as having one’s homeland leave you.
At the start of that first semester there was a perfectly ordinary question in class: do you like cats, or dogs?
It was only the kind of exchange any language class is made of. The teacher asked, the students answered, and the answers drifted off among the blackboard and the laughter and a handful of simple sentences. Nothing about it should have lasted. Yet I kept it for a long time. She said she liked cats. She said it lightly, the way a person mentions some small fact about herself that needs no solemn account. But I was then so much the newcomer with nothing yet settled that the least preference, the least turn of tone or smile let slip by accident, I would store away deep, the way one pockets a stone found in the snow, something by which to take a bearing.
When my turn came, I said I did not much like dogs.
It must have sounded cold. Dogs are too eager. They set their affection too close to you, in the eyes, the tail, the whole body thrown forward, a kindness that leaves no room for refusal. That kind of nearness I have never known how to handle. Some warmth comes on too fast, as if it expected an answer the very next instant, and when none comes it either sinks at once or bristles. That flickering heat between approach and guard was something I could not catch for the longest time.
Cats seemed different.
A cat looks as though it needs no one, though in truth it may not be so; it simply refuses to make the need loud. A cat is like something living under the eaves, neither coming inside nor truly leaving, pausing at the door and then walking off, feigning unconcern when watched and not necessarily unconcerned when unwatched. For years I knew that posture best: staying not far from people yet never reaching out first, waiting a while where I was, and when no answer came, turning away as if nothing had happened.
That air of indifference was never real indifference. It was only that the cat dared not put out its paw first. So long as it had never reached, it had not been refused; so long as it had said nothing aloud, it need never admit it had been waiting all along. Waiting for a glance to come back, for a sentence like you did well, for some word that meant you may stay.
And for that very reason, the closer someone truly came, the sooner it raised its guard; the moment of nearest approach was often the moment it most wanted to turn away.
The class did not seem like anything at first.
I simply sat there repeating unfamiliar sounds. Some sounds in French do not grow where I am used to finding them. A few must be ground softly out of the throat, a few tucked up into the nose, and certain letters, plainly there on the page, fall silent when spoken. A sentence looks short and turns out, once spoken, to be all seams. My tongue often failed to reach its place in time, and the sentence would slide out crooked.
I hated that instant.
When a wrong sound was heard, the air would go still for half a second. The teacher may not have minded; my classmates may not have remembered. But that half second seemed to me very long, long enough for a person to catch sight of everything in herself that was not good enough. A mistake in mathematics can be worked again; a mistake in code can be run again; a mistake in language is a drop of ink in water, already gone wide. It has left the body and is no longer yours to govern.
She rarely let that half second turn to humiliation.
She would correct, repeat, set the sentence back in a truer place. More often she simply waited, patiently, for me to finish. The waiting was light, so light it scarcely counted as anything; but for someone long in the habit of folding herself away before any denial could land, what registers first is exactly that kind of sound, the kind in no hurry to come down.
She taught me for only half a year.
That was tenth-grade French. In the two years after, I went to another teacher’s room, my English settled, and life took on at last a little order. By then I was no longer the person who, freshly arrived, had asked only to understand, to keep up, to sit in a classroom without too much disgrace. I began once more to take marks gravely. Assignments had to be perfect, tests had to be perfect, and the smallest uncertainty could leave me hanging the whole day. In tenth grade I only wanted to keep up; by eleventh and twelfth I was hearing the old drums again: faster, steadier, no mistakes, do not fall behind.
When a place is still strange, one can afford to ask less of oneself. To survive, to keep up, to avoid looking too wretched is already cause for private relief. But once the footing firms, the old things come back. They are the mold in the corner of a wall, ordinarily hidden under fresh paint and then, the moment the air turns damp, spreading through patch by patch. Marks, rankings, perfect scores, competition, a transcript without a single flaw: these words gathered around me again like a set of very courteous creditors, who make no noise and cause no scene and only sit at the door, day after day, waiting to be paid.
When people called me clever I felt almost nothing. I have never wanted for such words, and heard often enough they come to sound like a formality. Besides, clever is less a compliment than a sentence passed: clever, and so excellence in all things is expected, perfection a mere duty; managed, it is not worth mentioning, and failed, it is a scandal. No one cares to see the clumsy labor done over and over behind it, the hours of the night with no witness; or rather, they would prefer not to. To file it under talent is the easiest account, since talent asks no one to admit that the person had only been more willing than they were to work themselves half to death.
And precisely for that reason I think back so often to the first half year.
I did not dare ask much of myself then. My English was poor and my French poorer, and merely keeping up felt remarkable. I remember telling her, very early, that one day I wanted to go to McGill. Later I learned the mountain had never stood as high as I had imagined. The famous universities are sometimes temples: what they keep on the altar is rank, what they take in is incense,2 and whether the ones who enter are ever truly lit from within is not their first concern. I did not know that yet. I only needed a name set far off, a single lamp glimpsed by a traveler in a strange country,3 proof that I was not standing in the wind of exile for nothing.
After that I seemed to want to tell her everything.
It was not, I see now, that everything mattered. A person newly arrived in a far place will treat the smallest things like letters home:4 today I understood a sentence, today I got a sound right, today I did not stay completely silent in class. They were too small to post and not worth any ceremony, but I wanted her to know I was gathering myself back together, a piece at a time.
It sounds a little ridiculous.
The longer one lives, the better one learns to dress such a need in something respectable. Call it gratitude. Call it respect. Call it the ordinary traffic between a teacher and a student, or some reverence for education. Peel the pleasant words away and there is nothing noble underneath. Only someone with almost nothing, who finds all at once that another person is willing to listen to the end, and so wants to hand over every small, awkward, unfinished thing, the way a poor man lays his few coins out on the table one by one, afraid no one will see that he did, after all, manage to save.
She did not trust me entirely at first.
Once I showed her an essay I had written. She read it a few minutes, came over, and asked: did you write this yourself? Did you use a translator?
I was frightened. And almost in the same instant something in me went cold, and I heard myself answer in a flat voice with a little guard already in it: only a few words, looked up. That was true. She did not press. She handed the essay back, and the matter passed.
But I sat uneasy with it. Not from being wronged; I had not been wronged. I knew quite well that my improvement had come far too fast, fast enough to feel unreal even to me. A person starting from almost nothing, what right had she to catch up in so short a time? When that look settled on me I could not meet it with a clear conscience. The thing she asked aloud was a thing I had quietly asked myself.
I had almost nothing then, and my progress ran abnormally fast, from barely a sentence to suddenly keeping pace, like a plant forced up too quickly in too short a season. In that stretch I often felt I was standing under a lamp with my shadow drawn long across the floor. The harder I tried to prove myself, the more I feared a single mark of it would be misread; the harder I pushed ahead, the more I feared someone would say the road was not mine.
But she did not stop there.
She went on watching. She watched me speak in class, hand in my work, set those unwilling sounds back into my mouth again and again. In time I came to see that some doubts do not harden at once into verdicts. Some looks stay on a person not to pin her down but to wait for a fuller answer. She did not spare me the work of proving myself, and she did not shut me inside her first question either.
This did not change my life.
Nor should it be dressed up as some grand turn. The hateful thing about life is how seldom it goes good for keeps on the strength of one person, one classroom, one gentle sentence. The old days are not so generous as to let a person off. They only step to the back, change into cleaner clothes, and return under the names of discipline and ambition and clear goals. So my marks rose, my languages grew easy, and life looked smoother and smoother. I could write the emails, give the presentations, trade jokes with teachers, carry myself in unfamiliar rooms like someone who adapts fast. Yet some of the sounds did not go.
They do not surface in every sentence, but they come at certain moments: when a silence runs too long, when praise arrives too suddenly, when kindness presses too close, when I make a small mistake and feel my whole self has been overheard. What others see is only that I have grown better and better at speaking, better and better at studying, more and more like a student who has successfully fitted himself to a new place. How fine. How inspiring. How well it would sit in a brochure. The brochure is never obliged to explain why a person should have to be so successful, as though to be even a little ordinary were to be swallowed back at once by something unseen.
On this side of the sea the two years went by like that.
Winter passed and spring returned, the coffee cooled in the thermos, the printed pages and annotations stacked higher in my bag. I went from unable to speak to able to speak, from unable to keep up to unwilling to let myself fall behind, from afraid to want much to wanting everything done flawlessly. The days seemed to carry me farther and farther out, and yet, looking back, many of the roads had never really left where they began. They had only changed language, changed classroom, changed into a more respectable way of putting things.
Two years are not long. But to the person just arrived, the exams that mattered before graduation had seemed so far off she scarcely dared think of them, a mountain on the horizon with its shape not yet clear. By the time I drew near, the speed of it was frightening: in the turn of an eye the mountain stood at my feet, and soon enough lay behind me.
Our school did not often run courses of that kind. Those two were opened for me alone.
On the day of the exam I was the only one in the room. With half an hour left before the papers came in I had long finished and sat idle. She came in then with a coconut bun in her hand. She had just got back from Vancouver, and it was the kind with the Chinese taste. I did not dare lift my head and look at her straight; I kept my face shut and caught her shape at the edge of my sight. She said a few words to the other invigilator, left the bun, and went. I knew why she had brought it. I had once said in passing that I had never tried that kind of bun, and she had kept it.
I had finished, and still I could not raise my head. To meet an exam with grave seriousness was what had always been wanted of me in China, an instinct grown deep into the bone: let nothing around you touch you. Even the small warmth she left I shut out with the rest. I think now that to have looked up and smiled at her would have been the better thing; but instinct pressed my head down first. It was only a bun. And yet that a person remembered a sentence I had let drop, was willing to carry something back on purpose, and set it down and left without making anything of it, is a small thing that has stayed warm until now. It was a kind of warmth I had long since stopped asking for.
We were, in truth, nothing alike. I was the textbook sort of bookish child, with little beyond the textbooks save a couple of skills I was half ashamed to own: cooking, and drawing. She knew about both. She, though, carried a real air of art about her, theatre and dance and an ease I could neither learn nor counterfeit. Even now I cannot work out why two people so unlike should have been given this small share of fate. Perhaps some affinities owe no account of themselves. They ask no resemblance between two people, and ask no one to explain them.
I have always remembered that she likes cats.
It should not have weighed so much. It was no exam, no grade, no hinge on which any future swung. It was one sentence let fall in an ordinary conversation at the start of the first semester. But a person will sometimes hold to very small things because the large ones are too hard to trust. The less one dares believe anything will last, the more one hoards the details. A person who likes cats, a person willing to wait for you to finish a sentence, a person who doubted you and did not, for that, take her eyes away: such things are so small that said aloud they hardly seem worth the breath. And it is just because they are small, because they look unarranged, that they come nearer the truth.
She never hurried to draw me in, and never turned and went because I drew back a moment; she only left a little room, a little time, and waited for me to decide whether to come a step nearer. Through those six months that was about how I moved, an inch at a time, toward that door. It was, as far as I can remember, the first time no one hurried me and no one shut me out.
When the ancients wrote that the accent goes unchanged, they wrote of a man come home to find the homeland no longer knows him; only the voice still does. The children meet him and do not know him, and laughing, ask from where the stranger comes.1 The question is light, and in it a person learns all at once that he has become the stranger.
But I have not truly come home.
I have only walked from one place to another, from one language into another, from one way of speaking slowly into another. The hair at my temples has not thinned and I am still young, yet there are times I feel that the person who sat in that classroom slow to open her mouth had heard age in her own voice very early.
I do not know how long these sounds will keep with me.
A long time, perhaps. Perhaps a person simply goes on living with the final notes of the early years. They are like the letters at the end of a French word, set down but not always sounded; like a letter home never sent, kept at the bottom of a box, the paper gone old and the writing not yet faded. Time cannot always undo them. A new city cannot. A new language cannot.
Only later did I learn that there is at least one other way of listening in the world.
That listening is not grand and not dramatic. It is only a patient sentence in an ordinary room, a pause, a gaze willing to go on looking; the air that did not turn cold the moment I got something wrong; the way my suspiciously quick progress was still let alone to make its case through time; it is someone, in an early class of the first semester, saying lightly that she likes cats; it is an empty exam room where someone remembered an offhand sentence of mine and held out a bun.
I am about to leave high school. Next year she will not be here either. Strangely, I feel no useless grief. That there was once such a person in my life, someone who truly cared for me, is already enough on its own. From here our roads run apart, and there is no need to make sorrow of it. To have been treated this way at the hardest time is enough to keep for a very long while.
And so I think again of the line.
Young, I left home; old, I return. But I have not returned, and I am not yet old. The hair at my temples has not thinned, and still my accent grew old early. It followed me across the sea, into new schools, new rooms, new languages, and into all the steady-looking life that came after. It was not changed. It only fell quiet for a while, now and then, inside another voice.
The accent goes unchanged.
And yet, in those two years, I was once gently heard by another language.
—For my first French teacher. She likes cats.
Notes
1. The lines adapt Coming Home (《回鄉偶書》) by the Tang poet He Zhizhang (c. 659–744), one of the most familiar poems in the Chinese canon. An old man returns to his birthplace after a lifetime away; his accent alone is unchanged, and the village children, not recognizing him, laugh and ask the “stranger” where he is from. In Chinese the poem is shorthand for the ache of belonging nowhere completely. The essay turns it inside out, since the speaker has neither returned nor grown old, and hears that age early, in a new language rather than an old home. ↩
2. In Chinese folk religion one petitions a temple’s gods by burning incense; the same word, 香火, also names a temple’s continuance and its steady flow of worshippers and offerings. To call the famous universities temples that “keep rank on the altar and take in incense” is to cast admiration for them as a transactional cult: prestige is what is worshipped, and whether the worshipper is ever truly illuminated is beside the point. ↩
3. The lone lamp glimpsed by a traveler far from home is a recurring image in classical Chinese travel and exile poetry (羈旅), where a single distant light stands at once for isolation and for a fragile point by which to take one’s bearings in a foreign place. ↩
4. A letter from home (家書) carries unusual weight in the Chinese literary tradition; Du Fu’s famous wartime line prizes one, amid separation and chaos, as worth “ten thousand pieces of gold.” To treat trivial daily progress “like letters home” is to load very small things with that same disproportionate longing. ↩
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