For the Sonorous

I Know

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     Don’t tell me I don’t understand. When you’re tired and stressed and falling apart, when school swallows you whole and buries you in papers and dust, when night blurs into morning with your desk lamp still glowing, don’t tell me I don’t know what it’s like.

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     I was the first in my family to go to college. The school you so dread, I savored like the dumplings and new clothes that I got once a year on Chinese New Year. I knew education was a privilege, and I dared not forget it. On late nights with sore backs and aching hands, I never forgot that I wasn’t doing it just for myself. I was doing it for my father who, at just 18, had given up school to enlist in the military during the Korean War. I was doing it for my mother who, as the eldest child, had been forced to stop school after eighth grade to take care of her nine younger siblings. I worked hard enough for all three of us, hard enough to land a sponsor who was able to get me an American passport, a pocket-sized bound book that held my past and my future.

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     I came to America like all immigrants do, with a head full of fantasies of freedom and opportunity. My image of America was built upon the stories I had heard from classmates and coworkers and the wisps of street conversations that I had caught onto; it was an image of clear skies and towering buildings, of greener grass and bustling cities, of glory and independence and hope. In 1990, China was still very much trapped in the past, always two steps behind the West. It wasn’t until I arrived at the airport that I realized I would be two steps behind everyone around me. I could only vaguely make out the overhead signs and duty-free store advertisements, the English words a mix of letters I recognized but could not quite decipher. Meandering through the terminal in a daze, I relied on symbols and simple words to guide me. I was a college graduate at the top of my class, and I could barely exit the airport.

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     Graduate school was far worse than even the hardest days in college. My professors taught classes in rap, the words flying out of their mouths and whizzing past my foreign ears. English was the song always playing on the radio that I still didn’t know the words to. I learned to learn quickly, to adapt like the waters of Huangpu River. Spending hours hunched over a textbook with a Chinese-English dictionary sprawled open by my side, I immersed myself in words that made up sentences, that made up paragraphs, that made up ideas. I read until my thoughts flowed in English, but I never let Mandarin spill out of me.

 

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     Your biggest struggle is school, with its endless mountains of homework and tests. You know nothing of what it’s like to move mountains just to put food on the table. Every day after class, I walked two miles to the small Chinese restaurant on Fourth Street. There, I put on my paper white uniform and a paper thin smile to greet the customers, most of them white. I migrated non-stop from one customer to another, a worker bee flitting between raised hands. With black trays balanced precariously on my arms, I brought them their platters of honey walnut shrimp and moo shu pork and chow mein. They ate quickly with their heads bowed, not the way Chinese food is supposed to be eaten. Back home, we’d never had enough food to fill our stomachs, but we were never short on hot tea and long conversations that filled our hearts. Here, they left as quickly as they came, leaving crumpled money underneath the plate and pushing past the creaky door. After I cleaned up each table, I picked up the paper bills, took a deep breath, and ushered in the next customer.

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     Three hours later, with sweat dotting my forehead and stars dotting the sky, I hung up my uniform and headed back to the campus. By the time I got there, the library had long lost its pulse. There was that kind of quiet that was richer and deeper and seeped into your bones. The desktop screen illuminated with a tap, and I opened up the bare traces of my yet-to-be-written essay. My fingers danced across the keyboard no better than my feet did on the floor, tripping over each other in an attempt to weave words together. I sat there until the black scratchings on the screen added up to ten pages. When I looked up, the crackling light of morning sun had already filtered in through the spotted glass windows.

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     So when you say that school is too hard, you forget that I went to school six thousand miles and an ocean away from home, with an English vocabulary like a broken CD of muttered phrases and fragments. When you say that everything is just too much, you forget that you have everything and I had nothing. You forget because you are the one who doesn’t understand. You are the one who doesn’t know what it’s like.