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Excerpt
During my first couple of days in New York, the sky was grim and heavy rain would pour down without any warning, breaking my umbrella. I spent most of my evenings curled up in bed, left hand holding a cup of tea, right hand gripping a pen. It’s been a long time since I wrote something down in Chinese, a language that is now becoming more and more unfamiliar to me.
The unfamiliarity comes not just from disuse, but also from censorship. On Chinese social media, if one wants to say ‘politics,’ one will type ‘ZZ,’ which are the initials of the pronunciation of the word ‘zheng zhi.’ If one wants to talk about immigrating to a new country, instead of expressing it directly, one has to use the character 潤 which has a similar pronunciation to the English word ‘run.’ Any post, any account, can be taken down or banned if they contain topics deemed sensitive by the government. Recent victims of this are World Health Organization chief Tedros Ghebreyesus as well as Wang Sicong, a famous Chinese billionaire with over forty million followers. Their accounts on Weibo, a popular Chinese social platform, were both permanently banned because they criticized China’s COVID-19 rules (Gan; Yip).
In China, the Chinese I speak has to be twisted, spliced, and edited; the Chinese I write can be easily banned, deleted, and forgotten; and the Chinese I see is already censored, crushed, and sugar-coated. I almost forget how the language is supposed to look and sound. That evening in New York, I realized how much I missed writing—really writing—in Chinese. The sputtering sound of the pen and the intricate characters on the paper brought me back to my family, my home. I reconnected with the language and culture again, like two lost best friends. Also on that day, a friend invited me to see a movie with her—a Chinese LGBT movie that was banned from screening in China but was showing here at a small theater in Manhattan, ten years after it first came out. “Isn’t it sad,” I wrote in my notebook that night, “that I am able to watch more films in Chinese, write more freely in Chinese, be more of myself in Chinese, here, in a city six thousand miles away from the place I used to call home. In that place, everyone is speaking in Chinese, but no one is speaking Chinese.”
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