When my grandfather on my father’s side passed away in 2018, I had just arrived in the US for my second stint of grad school. I learned about their passing from a text message from my mom on the other side of the Pacific. I was driving through the desert with my friends and saw all the red rocks which belonged to an age called Great Dying 250 million years ago when all life on earth almost died out—the greatest extinction event that ever happened on this planet. I dined at a roadside restaurant in a town dubbed “the biggest small town in the U.S.,” and watched the car lights twinkle in the mauve Arizona sunset that looked like a failed apocalypse. I felt nothing. I searched the interior of the restaurant trying to materialize my unnamable feeling. And all I found was ketchups: Ketchup-colored booths, Ketchup-colored desks, Ketchup on the desks, Ketchup-colored counters, and waitress with Ketchup-colored aprons… I watched a middle-aged man putting Ketchup on his scrambled egg next to a poster of a fishing contest on which a tuna opened its eyes wide in a shade of Ketchup. And I realized I had nowhere to begin to mourn—nothing here reminded me of home.
Then a certain phrase fell out of my tongue. “zen-ya-vu-tan.” I heard myself say. It is a term to express seeing strange and incomprehensible things in Wu Chinese, the largest language in the world that is not recognized officially. It was a bit surprising, or even jarring, for me to hear it for I had been immersed in English, willingly or unwillingly, for the past month trying to acclimate myself. I pressed my mind upon this word, trying to hold onto it a second longer, like observing a dandelion caught on my sweater in the wind, wondering from which distant lost paradise it has been sent. Then I had it. It was grandpa who first “taught” me this word—he didn’t “teach” me the word: he used it, and I understood it contextually. At the time I just thought it was a funny sounding word and somehow collected it in my heart like a strange conch shell on the beach in my half-wet pocket. I didn’t find out which four Chinese character until years later.
It was the last day of my mom’s career. I was helping my mom clean her office which she occupied for more than thirty-years. Thirty years she worked and toiled in her classrooms tirelessly and made this small high school’s name a household one in the province. And yet the school denied her delay retirement for financial reasons. I watched the chromatic book spines taken down from her shelf and imagined the iridescent plumages of guacamayas flying off to the setting sun in the noise of quick and unthinking saws. I caught one falling. It was a marooned covered book titled “Record of Dirt-Tongues.” Dirt Tongues is a colloquial term for the Wu Chinese variant of my town, a language, like many of the other hundreds of “Fang Yan” or regionalects in China, which does not have official recognition and is considered “uncivilized” compared to standard Mandarin. Yet, linguistically, many of them (Cantonese, a dialect of Yue Chinese, for example) are as different from Mandarin than Spanish is from French. I recalled briefly reading a news piece that predicted “Dirt Tongues” were going to die out in thirty years as I listened to my mom talking on her phone in her accented Mandarin. She still couldn’t curl up her tongues or nasalize her “ing’s as she was supposed to in standard Mandarin, but that did not stop her from comforting and encouraging countless young hearts to be what they wanted to be during the last thirty years. (Inside the classroom, only Mandarin is allowed.) Perhaps times change, and the next thirty, indeed, will be different. I cradled the book in my arms as I watched as another unmarked and unnamed cardboard box was taken down to the truck. The office looked quite different now. But I couldn’t point to exactly when, on that mid-summer afternoon with the sun lavishly shining through the windows and sprinkled on the desks like gilded brocades, it started to change. It was one book at a time, one box at a time, one small memorabilia at a time, that the office got rid of the very last trace of its owner who dwelled there for over ten thousand days.
In the bumpy truck which my dad borrowed from my uncle for the day that boasted a 2000’s Japanese AC system, I found out the four corresponding character of that phrase indicating strangeness: it literally means “households of fairies and wild gods.” How fitting and rich in meaning, I thought. I flipped through the remaining pages of the dusty book, which had been collected and compiled by an old friend of my mother who travelled through the local villages talking to the oldest generations who could remember. And I saw visions. I heard voices. I heard my great-grandpa speaking: that one time when I was seven and he came to visit us for Mid-Autumn Festival. He pointed at the convoluted arteries on his leg that looked like curled up pothos stalks and told us all about his time paddling on the waterwheel under the unforgiving sun and even less forgiving whips of warlords in the Republic of China; I heard the voices of my grandma on my mother’s side who told me about how she gathered tree bark and hid it in a wine jar from the starving neighbors to survive the great famine that took the lives of thirty million; and I heard my grandpa’s speech with winds from the rice-fields leaking through his teeth the time he put a red armband on his sleeve and led the Red Guards storming the Buddhist temple of the village but hid the statues underground, shovel by shovel…lastly, I heard my nephew, last week when he boasted about finishing top in school and rank 1 in the mobile game Honor of Kings on his iPhone X in impeccable Mandarin to answer the queries of three other relatives that asked him in “Dirt-Tongue”.
And I blinked my spellbound eyes at the sirloin beef just served in this Arizona restaurant. In the steam, something rushed open my blood vessels and flew torrentially like the toppled Pacific and Atlantic in the aftermath of a meteor that hit Chicxulub 65 million years ago in the Mexican coast. They live on. They live on. Not as an entirety of physique, a collection of memories, or a lifetime of existences—but as small, delicate fragments of words, like snowflakes in your palm, ticklish but cold-less, and melt in you when you press your warmth upon them. And when they die, they die unceremoniously and soundlessly, in bits and pieces, rather than in the explosive spectacle that extinction usually promises. This is what makes it dangerous, because its pain is almost always felt afterwards, in strange, distant places where the source of the suffering is muffled by the thickness of time and distance. There is nothing more tragic than this moment when, somewhere deep down, a profound and nascent cry of pain starts to form but stops right at your throat.
So, I start to walk forward by walking backwards. To peruse every little dying along the way that proves me alive, and my ancestors living in me, too. I make my eyes spellbound on every new thing I see as if only by the apparitional shadows of my former life that the present is adumbrated with meaning. It is a Celtic myth that when one dies, their memory would be stored in otherworldly objects, retrievable only by visions. I would go on to live in America for another seven years, and the idea of home only stayed alive because it died a little each time I pressed my tongue upon it.
Xiaoqiu Qiu is a poet from Tongxiang, China. His poetry collection Other Side of Ocean won the 2024 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. His work has been published in the Gulf Coast Journal, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. Currently, he is a Black Mountain Institute PhD Fellow at UNLV.