Katherine Hong

There has always been an empty space inside of me, an unsettling feeling that something important had been forgotten—like I was blindly searching without knowing what had been lost. My first indication was the sadness I felt at not being able to communicate with my grandmother. I wanted to ask her about her life in China, before she came to Canada to raise her grandchildren.

I hungered for the lessons held by those who endured a lifetime of bitterness and hardship. On rare days when I did catch her in a good enough mood, I stumbled through endless makeshift analogies in clumsy mandarin to express myself. Her replies were full of unfamiliar words that left me struggling to understand. 

I daydream about an alternate, parallel childhood where I grew up fluent in the language of my grandmothers and their matriarchs before them. I fantasize about an upbringing where arguments didn’t escalate in volume simply because I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say, so I just repeated the same thing but louder. I imagine what could have been if I had a beginning where misunderstandings due to my parents’ poor English and my almost non-existent Chinese could have been cleared up in minutes, rather than in the following days, weeks, and months, and years.

Most of the time, my grandmother looked at me with tenderness behind her puzzled expression, a small comfort that only slightly softened the sting each time I was reminded of the language barrier separating me from my ancestors.