take my language back

language

Oral expression, official document report, drawing explanation, presentation and publicity... I have always been good at and like to express and communicate. I did not deliberately cultivate these abilities, but they silently escorted me in the workplace. Unknowingly, at the end of 2018, after the company made several high-profile reports, I suddenly felt unwell. When I was speaking about the content of the appointment with the company's corporate publicity department, a voice faintly sounded in my mind:

This is not what I want to express at all.

So what do you want to express?

Once out of the corporate publicity framework, my own expression became rigid, my opinions were vague, and my language was not smooth; so I signed up for a number of different writing workshops. The news media industry in New York is developed, there are many writing enthusiasts, and there are many corresponding training courses. Therefore, I have been exposed to a lot of methodologies, and I also met some friends in the writing class. Therefore, I met once a month to do some writing exercises. Share articles written by each other, supervise and encourage each other, and make progress together.

For more than a year after that, I was writing English stutteringly. Friends in the sharing session have different interests: Kerry likes to write novels, Miriam likes to write poems, Kohzy likes to translate Chinese prose, Shan likes to write short stories, and Jessica likes to write slices of life. My own writing themes and genres are very broad, fictional, non-fictional, rational, lyrical, where I want to write, and when I can't write it, I just draw it as a cartoon. After writing it, read it at the sharing meeting, everyone commented, and even if you laughed.

As luck would have it, an epidemic broke out not long after. At that time, most people in New York were still ignorant and fearless going out for gatherings. I participated in an overseas Chinese writing camp to jointly record the epidemic situation in my place. As I was writing, I suddenly discovered that even though I haven’t written Chinese seriously for a long time, I made up some vocabulary from time to time without fear. The choice of words and sentences has the calmness of returning to the main field, which is completely different from the cautiousness when writing in English.

However, after reconnecting with the Chinese-speaking circle, I realized the hustle and bustle of the Chinese-language Internet, the strict control, and the serious regional antagonism. Many articles on the WeChat public account about the epidemic were reported and deleted before I could quote them. Going back to the Chinese-speaking world makes me very divided. On the one hand, I am delighted to be reunited with my native language: grammar and vocabulary, I don’t have to think about it, slang, classics, come with my mouth; Self-censorship consciously.

In the spring of 2020, many deleted articles were transferred to Matters, which made me understand the original intention of Matters. I also registered an account here. The earliest personal introduction here is:

Hopefully one day we will all be free to write in our native language.

Ice and Fire

Looking back, 2008 was a very depressing year for me.

During the Tibet riots in March, I found that if I emailed my friends in China about Tibet, they would not receive them. Since then, I have drifted away from friends who use QQ or 163 mailboxes.

In the Wenchuan earthquake in May, countless dissidents who helped the victims' families to speak out were suppressed or even arrested, investigation volunteers were harassed by the police, writer Tan Zuoren was sentenced for drafting the "5.12 Student Archives" proposal, and artist Ai Weiwei organized the collection of the list of dead students He was attacked by the police in a hotel in Chengdu and "disappeared" for several years, under house arrest, under surveillance, and slandered.

In August, they finally got their wish to hold the Olympic Games. I heard that they worked hard to restore the blue sky in Beijing for a while, unblocked the banned website, and set aside a venue for people to protest and demonstrate 😂 Although no demonstration application was approved .

In December, Charter 08 was published and signed, after which Liu Xiaobo was arrested, and he was not free until his death in 2017.

Ironically, China tends to refer to 2008 as the first year of civil society , saying that it saw the volunteer power of civil society organizations in disasters. I heard that NGOs and NPOs have flourished in China since then. The subprime mortgage crisis in the United States in 2008, and the European debt crisis in Europe in 2010, the Western society was filled with a decadent atmosphere, and China went from inferiority complex to conceited at this time, and began the dream of a prosperous China.

Many of my friends who went abroad with me came back around 2013. China's development momentum is very strong, and many friends say that I have missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity if I don't go back. Maybe? But my personality is not the kind of person who knows how to get in the air. I don't think I can make a fortune when I return to China and achieve a high-level leap. Instead, I might be taken advantage of by others.

Chen Guanzhong, a writer from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Beijing, wrote a magical realist novel "Prosperity : China 2013 ", which kept me vigilant in those years, not to be fooled by the bluffing prosperity.

Inside the wall outside the wall

I read a report in March that people in Russia didn't believe Putin had invaded Ukraine. Even when their own relatives called from Ukraine to tell them the shells were falling around them, they preferred to believe the official Kremlin news. Many angrily broke with their families amid tearing and frustration.

This news made me think of my relatives who are still in China, and I couldn't help crying. In fact, we are all used to not saying too many deep things to each other, and the gap of thought seems to be difficult to bridge. When the crisis has not fallen on our heads, we talk on the phone about trivial things about eating, drinking, and having fun. It seems that the relationship can be maintained like this. But when the crisis hits, when events soured to the point where we had to take a stand and take action, would we still be family?

I feel that I can no longer avoid using my native language and that I have to say something important in my native language.

@ZHANG Jieping  Under this totalitarianism , it gave me a lot of strength:

The fall of politics begins with the fall of language.

When you can't speak your mind honestly and openly, the "public" foundation disappears. When expression returns to the private realm, the basis for communication and debate will be lost, and the quality of thinking and judgment will also languish. Furthermore, if everyone hides from the public, there is nowhere to organize and connect, and the community tends to collapse.

Most importantly, you who have given up language may unconsciously become part of the totalitarian system.

When we give up our language, we become part of the mechanism of "dehumanization". To resist this mechanism is first to resist the possibility of this mechanism working in ourselves, to counter fear, and to take back our own language.

Just last week, at my English writing sharing session, I said goodbye to my fellow writers. I told them that for the above reasons, I would focus on Chinese writing for the foreseeable future.

Miriam, who wrote the poem, was born into a Hasidic Jewish family in the United States, and the entire community is very conservative. However, she chose to become a scientist, an outlier in her family. She said she can understand the feeling of separation. At this sharing session, she gave me a poem, which I couldn't put it down, so I translated it as follows.

The Sea ｜ Ocean

In this neighborhood, people yearn for heritage
People here long for the inheritance of history
Cherish words, phrases, scraps of a lost language
The words, the phrases, the fragments of the lost language are so familiar
They hunger for old music,
They want to hear old music
Tell me I'm lucky to have a reservoir to draw from
And how lucky I am to have this inexhaustible ocean
Because, where I'm from, the language isn't dead
Because where I grew up, ancient languages are still alive
These words were the amniotic fluid in which I materialized
The amniotic fluid of this language gave birth to me
Where an angel taught me a song for each letter of the alef beis
The angels there taught me - every letter has a song of its own
I was born underwater, thrashing to the surface
I was born from the bottom of the water, born on the surface of the water
I crawled out of a sea of words
Then slowly climb out of this sea of words
Choking, gasping, wringing melodies from my hair
Choking, panting, I squeeze the melody out of my hair

I offer you the songs stuck to my skin
Let me give you the songs that still cling to my skin
Burned into my brain, engraved on my heart
Imprinted in my mind, imprinted in my heart
In a language I can refuse to speak but can't stop understanding
I can refuse to speak the language, but I can't help but understand it
Sharing them makes me feel less like a stranger to myself, so I offer you
Saying it and sharing it with you makes me feel like I'm not so strange anymore
So, here--
Polished memories with the pain sanded off
It's a polished memory, erasing the pain
Smooth-stemmed stories from which I've
like thorns stripped of their thorns
Plucked the thhorns of guilt and shame
In the silky narrative thread, there is no more regret and shame
Are they still authentic if there are no sharp edges to wound you?
But are they still real when they can't sting you anymore?
And where do I put this pile of thorns I'm holding?
And where should this little thorn in my hand be placed?

my language anarchy

My native language should be Chengdu dialect, but my grandmother's home is in Chongqing, so I also imitate Chongqing people to speak. I was in Jiangnan when I was studying, and I watched a lot of Taiwanese variety shows in those years, so the Mandarin is a bit of a mixture of Taiwanese accent and Shanghai-Hangzhou area. Recently, I met some friends from Beijing, and I got a little bit of Beijing movies.

When I first came to Matters, I considered writing in traditional Chinese, given that there are many users from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But the traditional characters are actually written with a sense of place - Taiwanese call taxis a taxi. When I wrote the DAO model derivation , I used taxi as an example throughout, and I found that I was not used to saying "taxi". After writing a few paragraphs, I decided to find a traditional-to-simplified converter to change back to simplified Chinese, and changed the taxi back to the "taxi" I am used to.

But I also know that Hong Kong and Taiwan refer to software as software, and the mainland translates it into software. I don't know why, but I'm more used to talking about software . 🤣

All that said, my language is a bit of a hodgepodge of things right now.

When V God talked about decentralization, he mentioned that language is centerless. Just like you can't force Americans to speak English like Australians, we can't actually use "standard Mandarin" to coerce anyone. The primary purpose of language is communication, then aesthetics, and then style. The so-called official standard language is often just to establish authority and divide the people who use the language into three, six, nine, and so on.

Based on this consideration, I decided to make myself comfortable and express it in the way I am used to. Make adjustments when you encounter communication barriers. This is my language, Anarchy!

Sing at last

At first they...

At first they suppressed the student movement,
I'm silent because I don't understand politics.

Then they persecuted Tibetans and Uighurs,
I am silent because I am Han Chinese.

Then they imprison human rights lawyers,
I am silent because I have no need for rights protection.

When they attack religious beliefs,
I am silent because I am not a Christian.

When they cracked down on the LGBTQ affirmative movement,
I am silent because I am not gay.

When they arrest feminist advocates,
I am silent because I have not been sexually assaulted.

When they silenced independent reporters and the public questioned,
I am silent because I am waiting for the official announcement.

When they detain asymptomatic infected people,
I am silent because my nucleic acid test is negative.

Finally when they came for me,
No one stood up and spoke for me again.

All illustrations in this article are from screenshots from thegame Gris . Thanks to Gamer Walkthroughs for the detailed storyboard introduction (spoilers, beware) . This is a beautiful crying single heroine adventure game, which is highly recommended for everyone to play! Available on Steam, Google Play Store and Apple Store.