Untranslatable

My mother doesn’t understand love. At least not the word. At least not in English. A few years ago, she came to visit from Texas. We were indulging in my favorite pastime, sipping tea and chatting while bad reality TV played in the background, and the conversation turned to language.

I’d been fascinated by the concept of untranslatable words. Like the Danish word “hygge,” I told her. In English, it means something like “coziness.” But in Danish, it’s a whole aesthetic that can take a thousand English words to explain. It’s the soft blanket covering our legs. The flickering glow of the television screen in the otherwise dark living room. Or the citrusy aroma of the orange peel steeping in our tea. It’s all of that, but moreso, it describes a feeling that can’t quite be put into words. Hence the untranslatability.

“Like love,” my mom said. “It’s not the same in Chinese.”

How so, I asked. Because I was pretty sure she was wrong. Love is one of the few words I can still say in Cantonese. It might have been the first Cantonese word I ever learned. Chinese people usually don’t say, “I love you” very much. But growing up, my mom said it all the time. “Ngo oi nei”  — I love you. She was so generous with it. Maybe she wished her parents had been generous with it, too.

“Love is more serious in Cantonese,” my mother explained. “In English, you ‘love’ your husband, but you also ‘love’ a pair of shoes  — it makes no sense.”

I thought of some things I love. My family. My friends. Pasta. Okay, I thought, she had a point. But in Cantonese, how else would you describe the way you feel about, I don’t know, a really good cookie, I asked her. 

“Ngo ho zung ji kuk kei,” my mother said. “You like cookies. You like them a lot. But you don’t love them — not the same way you love your husband.”

That’s debatable, but I could see my mother’s point. In English, love exists on a spectrum from cookies to your children. But in my mother’s language — which used to be my language, too — “I love you” means something almost entirely different. It isn’t just a sweet thing to say, a casual declaration at the end of a phone call. It’s heavier, more dramatic, my mother says. When you tell someone you love them in Cantonese, you’re also telling them how important they are to you. And, what you’re really trying to get at, I guess, is how afraid you are to lose them. How much their identity is also your identity, and thus, losing them would leave you feeling empty and lost. There’s a lot of weight to that. Maybe this is why Chinese people don’t say it very much. It’s not that they love their children any less. It’s that the word for “love” carries too much for everyday conversation. It’s a eulogy, really. Something you save for goodbyes you can’t come back from. Something you tread lightly with because there’s a hint of superstition to it  — my mother is so superstitious — as if saying it out loud might summon the loss.

What do I make of the fact that my mother said it often? Maybe she knew that I would grow up in an English-speaking country, where people need to hear the word “love” all the time and so, she figured, I would need to hear it, too. Or maybe she felt that, even though “I love you” is a bit ominous in Chinese, it still needed to be said. Either way, she said it.

“In Cantonese,” my mother said, “love isn’t so frivolous.”

Sitting there in the flickering blue light of the television screen, I thought about the untranslatability of love. And it hit me: all those years my mother said, “I love you,” she was also saying something else. Something like, “Please be careful out there. You are my whole world. I couldn’t bear to lose you.” All parents feel this way, I suppose, but my mother expressed this vulnerability every time she said “I love you.” Maybe she didn’t feel the weight of it every time she said it, but every time she said it, she took a tiny risk. Her willingness to say it, time and time again, was its own act of bravery. Language is more than words. 

We sipped our tea, looked at the TV, and I wondered: If something like love can get lost in translation, what else was I missing? What else has my mother said that I could no longer understand? And maybe the most uncomfortable question of all, since I let go of my language, what parts of myself had I let go of, too?

“M se dak fan”

There are some Cantonese words I still remember. Like “m se dak fan,” a phrase that means, “revenge sleep procrastination.” In English, these are just three random words that mean basically nothing. In Chinese, “revenge sleep procrastination” is refusing to go to sleep because you want the day to last longer. It’s a way to protest the duties and responsibilities that keep you from having time to yourself in the first place. It’s sort of like the English concept of “me time,” but a bit more passive aggressive.

“M se dak fan” is a pretty common Chinese phrase but one that also feels unique to my mother. When I was a teenager, we would stay up together on Fridays watching television. Eventually, I’d look over at my mom on the couch and she’d be nodding off in the most uncomfortable position—sitting up but slumped over, nestled into the armrest with her chin tucked into her chest. “Mom  — why don’t you just go to bed?” I’d ask. Secretly I was just hoping to jolt her awake so she would keep watching TV with me. She’d wake up, eyes barely open, and whisper, “m se dak fan” before closing them again.

“M se dak fan” is a common Chinese phrase but one that also feels unique to my mother, a woman who values hard work but also resents how much of herself she gives to her work. My mother worked hard because she had no choice, but she always found small ways to experience joy, even when it came at the expense of her own comfort, sitting there on the couch with her chin tucked into her neck while the television hummed in the background. This is how she sees the world: hard work and pain lead to pleasure but you have to fight for that pleasure, and even then, it’s scraps. Be lucky you have them.

If language shapes how we see the world, does it also shape how we live in it? “M se dak fan” is a good thought experiment for this  — savoring the night isn’t uniquely Chinese, but it does describe a cultural trait that Chinese people seem to especially value. It seems I’ve inherited my mother’s ways. If you asked me if I agree with this worldview about the postponement of pleasure, I would scoff at the idea. Intellectually, I disagree. Yet it’s unmistakably how I live my life. I hold off on eating the expensive cheese until it expires. I never use my good journals. I refuse to drink my last sips of coffee, then it goes lukewarm and I toss it out. Maybe this is more of a human trait, but for me, it feels undeniably Chinese—a small remnant from a culture I no longer live in but still carry in ways I can’t explain. And maybe that’s why this untranslatable word feels like home.

“Yook gun”

I learned Cantonese from my grandmother. When I was four years old, my mother, aunt, grandparents and I lived in a run down apartment complex in Houston. My grandparents lived below us, and my grandmother would stay over often. She taught me Toisanwa, a Cantonese dialect which she spoke in the village where she grew up. Some of the words didn’t translate, and my mom would joke that no one knew what Grandma and I were talking about. It was like we had our own secret language. 

My grandmother called me Kiss-i-tin—her best translation of my name to Chinese.. When I was a toddler, I sat on her lap and ran my tiny hands over her face, examining the deep, thick wrinkles in her cheeks. She had cheekbones like my mother’s. I would smack her face, partially because I was an asshole toddler, but also because this is how my family expressed love, through tiny acts of aggression. My mom would pinch my fat cheeks until they turned pink. Even now, my Aunt Grace slaps the hell out of my arm when I make her laugh.

I never thought this was a Chinese thing, I thought it was just something weird and borderline violent that my family did. But I recently came across the Cantonese word “yook gun,” and it seems to describe the way my family expressed their love. The words literally mean “meat tight,” which is meant to describe the way your muscles tense up when you get excited or nervous. But it also describes the intense feeling of wanting to squish or pinch something that’s so cute, it makes you anxious. You know the feeling when something is “so cute you can’t stand it?” That’s “yook gun.” One might also call this “cute aggression” in English. You become almost obsessed with the cuteness, the way I was with my grandmother’s cheeks. “Hou dak ji!” I would say to her  —  “so cute!”  —  and she would laugh this deep, guttural laugh. A laugh that sounded more like a grunt. “Kiss-i-tin,” she laughed, “don’t be so violent.”

My grandmother’s language, and the traits embedded in it, are partly foreign and partly familiar. Whenever I hear strangers speaking Cantonese  — walking down Mulberry Street in New York, shopping at the 99 Ranch in East Pasadena  — I’m reminded of my grandmother and her cute, tight cheeks. Sometimes, I can even understand what they’re saying. I hear the words, but I can’t seem to speak them.

“zit oi seon bin”

During our late night couch sessions, my mom would often tell me stories about our family’s history. Stories that sounded straight out of the Joy Luck Club. Chairman Mao’s army torturing my great-grandmother and stealing her family heirlooms. But the imperialists were bad, too. When she fled to colonial Hong Kong, my grandmother would get kicked out of shops run by the British who posted signs on the door: No dogs and Chinese allowed.

By the time my mother and her siblings were born, her family immigrated to the United States. It might as well have been a different planet. They experienced run-of-the-mill racism — people pulling their eyes back, taunting them, yelling at them to go back to China. Which was better than starvation and torture but was still dehumanizing in its own way.

To survive this discrimination, my mother assimilated. At work, she jumped through hoops. She never asked for a raise. She laughed at all the “flied lice” jokes, even when she’d heard them a thousand times before. She wanted to fit the textbook definition of the “good immigrant,” the kind that contributes to the economy, does what she’s told, and doesn’t ask for anything in return. I can’t judge her for this, because I assimilated, too.

When I was seven or eight, I walked to the bus stop on my block. Two boys in my neighborhood paused their conversation to look at me. One of them elbowed the other. “Asian delight,” he said. They both giggled. After so many of these kinds of experiences, I started to develop some kind of internalized xenophobia. A fear of the parts of myself that felt foreign. I began to resent the things that made me Chinese. I wanted to fit in, not because I wanted to be like everyone else, but because I wanted them to stop noticing me. So I changed who I was. When my mom asked me questions in Cantonese, I started replying in English. When the Chinese woman at the bank asked if I spoke gwong dong wa, I shook my head. 

This experience is so common that there’s a term for it: language attrition. It’s the process of losing a language over time. Language attrition is also how entire cultures are lost  — authoritarian regimes force people to stop speaking their native language in order to smack the Welsh or Maori or Irish or Cantonese out of them. Losing my own language felt like a microcosm of this.

At first, it didn’t seem like that big of a loss. My mother is perfectly fluent in English, we could still communicate with total ease. But so much of language is untranslatable. When I stopped speaking Cantonese, I didn’t realize what I was giving up. Letting go of my language felt like letting go of my identity and letting go of my identity felt like letting go of my mother.

Since then I have been trying to find my way back to her, and trying to find my way back to myself, too. I’ve tried re-learning Cantonese, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t stick. I keep trying. Maybe I’ll spend my whole life trying to get those parts of myself back.

When my mother tells me stories about the hardships she and her family endured, I feel a strange mix of grief and anger and resentment — what the Korean call “han.” The anger isn’t just about my family, it’s about all the families that have been forced out of their homes and their cultural identities. “Doesn’t it make you angry?” I once asked my mother  after she told me one of her Joy Luck Club stories. “That’s life,” she said. “What can you do about it?”

My mother and I see things differently. She shrugs and surrenders to the universe, but I’m stubborn and insist on making things right. It’s always frustrated me the way she won’t sit with difficult feelings. She runs from them. For example, a close friend of mine died recently. “Just move on and think about something else,” my mother said over the phone. “It’s called grief,” I told her, and wondered how she could be so cold. “And I’m okay with it,” I told her, a passive aggressive jab at the fact that she wasn’t.

My mom is afraid of sadness, something I’ve always chalked up to her superstitious nature. She treats grief like a virus. If you mourn a friend’s death, get too close to the tragedy, maybe you’ll catch it. To me, this approach to life has always felt callous and paranoid. But when I became interested in untranslatable words, I came across one in Cantonese that I hadn’t heard before: “zit oi seon bin.” 

In English, “zit oi seon bin” means, “to accept the change and restrain your grief.” It’s a formal way to console someone when they go through a loss, like the death of a loved one. Instead of “I’m so sorry for your loss,” or “my condolences,” in Chinese, you might tell a grieving person something like, “It is what it is,” or “Try not to dwell.” Or, as my mother told me, “Move on and think about something else.” These kinds of condolences are unimaginable to the fragile American ego, where the pressure to say just the right thing to a grieving person is so strong that sometimes I have said nothing at all. When a friend once went through a bad breakup, for example, I told her, “Time will heal.” Months later, having forgotten our exchange, this same friend complained to me about someone who had told her “time heals.” She forgot it was me, and I felt bad for invalidating her feelings, but the truth was, I didn't think it was insensitive. I thought it was true. My mom had once said the same thing to me after a breakup, and I found solace in it. Still, Americans don't handle grief this way. We process things; we don't rush through acceptance. But acceptance and restraint are embedded in my mother’s culture. You move on because you do not want the grief to eat you alive. It might be callous and paranoid, but it is also survival.

However, as a fellow mental-health loving American obsessed with quoting my therapist, it’s hard to see things from this point of view. Yet my mother is quick to see things from mine. The day after my mom’s flippant remark about my friend’s death, she texted me. “It’s really sad what happened to your friend. I’m so sorry.” She could see the value in sitting with the sadness, even though she had grown up believing this was the worst thing to do. 

My mother has always been this way, open to the ways she might be wrong. Receptive to other ideas. I wonder if her ability to switch between two cultures has anything to do with her ability to switch between two languages. And, because culture is not just food and drink but also a set of philosophies about the way the world works, multilingual people like my mother can see the world through vastly different lenses. She can see a world where grief is like a virus, but she can also see a world where grief is a process.

There should be a word for this skill, for the ability to seamlessly switch between opposing ways of looking at the world. And what a shame that, when I gave up my first language, I lost this ability, too. Or is it still hiding in me somewhere?