The smell of Peking duck, of shao mai, of hong shao rou, of egg flower soup, and sweet hong dou bao zi sickens me to my core. I sit on my lacquered mahogany chair and trace its carved grooves with my small hands, cold sweat in my fingerprints, shame beneath my skin.
A cousin I don’t remember asks me a question in our mother tongue, and my family members look at me expectantly. I see anxiety in the small droop of my mother’s brow, and I fear I might sink into this chair out of guilt. Into oblivion. Let jetlag fold my eyelids close because I am too tired.
My mother answers for me like she always does when my silence lingers beyond the acceptable. There’s the sound of biting into a skewer of tang hu lu in the words, sour before it’s sweet. Then, it returns to laughs and unfamiliar characters oscillating between family members—like the dragons that swim across Shanghai streets during Chinese New Year celebrations.
But I can’t bring myself to eat another bite. Watching aunts and uncles and the distant branches of my family tree wind themselves together in reunion paints me as an outsider, a guest no one knows the name of. It’s wrong to be sitting with them when I am out of tune with the lyrics of my mother tongue. I couldn’t even name all the dishes on the table if I tried—even in a broken American accent.
My mother asks if I am alright, so I bitterly tell her that I’m too full to continue. She goes back to chatting with these people I don’t know, clinking their glasses together like tanggu drums.
Shame breathes its smoke and embers into my lungs. I want to scream at everyone to stop talking, stop eating. That I don’t understand what they are saying. That I am embarrassed to be here. That I want to go home.
Home—to a land where fat and cholesterol pollute its people’s blood vessels the way industrial waste lights the Cuyahoga on fire. Where freedom is as free as caged canaries, and the streets are smudged with colored blood.
To name this land home is the pinnacle of irony.
Still, I try so hard to fit in. If I skin myself to grow a new, white layer, would I look the part? Carve my eyes wider from their almond shapes. Dye my hair into hay. Wear contacts and pray the blue might bleed into my irises.
Or I could cut my tongue; maybe Mandarin will finally be the language that spills out pain. If my ancestors could rewire my being, I’d tell them to with a plea in my mouth.
I am still sitting on my chair, ashamed of what I am. My mother, māma, enunciates her words elegantly, and everyone else answers her. I can hear an ancient history in the language that swarms me—but fail to truly comprehend. It’s so beautiful and intricate and out of my tongue’s reach. An exotic experience. As foreign as I am, sitting here.
There’s a side that remembers she is the color of the silk robes of ancient emperors that stood unshaken by European power—Chinese characters in her soul and visage.
But the other has already conformed to what her “home” wants her to be. Unable to sit through a dinner with her family.
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