Two pieces
A Glossary of Unspoken Terms
怀孕／运 (to be of child/hope) : Some people have never known lucky, and that’s how they learn forgiveness. My mother said we had many people we had to forgive. But I grew up in an attap house, amidst salt and wild paddy, chasing mudskippers and balking at thunder with fistfuls of rain. I never thought that was anything other than lucky.
变化 (revolution)：They moved us into a high-rise apartment and told us change was good. Even then, I knew good was a nebulous, understated idea constantly shifting within the four walls of chipped mortar and molted cigars. When we left, the mudskippers had run into the longkang and drowned. The ones that survived learnt to climb trees in school uniforms, their shirt tails flapping in the wind like a flag of surrender.
影子 : My mother’s shadow, like the long ear of the moon, follows me. Sit up straight. Respect your elders. An accent that sounded smooth like butter on the television, now feels clunky and precarious on my tongue. I ate baos for a week to save up enough for a designer bag from the mall basement, just like those I’d seen on Pretty Woman. Why are you rocking a boat that has been safe all this while? But maybe this was my coming-of-age ritual, a test I had to pass to become all that I was meant to be, like the 5 o’clock shadow of a boy.
甘苦 : We’re together, for better or for worse. A lie in your wedding vows, a mere platitude at one of our last dinner-table conversations. The leaking roof. The water that had turned our kettle black. What you were quick to christen as misfortune, I had merely dismissed as inconvenience. Even then, I suggested that we could mend them. You asked, what’s the point. But wasn’t that what we’d always done — we put things together only to watch them fall apart?
刻苦 (every bitterness, its own knife) : There are some things that stay with you. For me, the first time someone laughed at the hole in my shoes. The first time someone told me they gave my mother a quarter at the local laundromat. I imagined running a knife through matrix and marrow to find 6-year-old you with 20 pence, alone and sitting on a stoop, staring at a bun-cart just 5 pence short while your mother works the graveyard shift as a go-go dancer. Nine-year-old you running barefoot to school through rain and torrential mud as you wear through your last good pair of shoes, all the while your parents are smoking and dancing through the final chorus of 何日君再来.
自怨／愿 (self-blame/wish)：But none of it was your fault. Some people have lived all their lives for worse. And if they lived long enough, it became even the best part of them.
反映 (or, reflection)：So then, does it make me the bad person for leaving, or does it make you one for only having the courage to stay? Or maybe, good and evil are merely a false dichotomy to detract from the larger burden of our lives? As if any choice was solely our own. Maybe this was why I hated painting, even as a child — how every dot would bleed into another until the whole sheet was ruined. How every dot of your life has bled into another to leave you crying into the fishbowl-eye of a laundry machine.
离别 : Leaving for a better ___? Place? Hope? Idea? Maybe a better ending.
小谎 : Do you know there is no direct translation for a white lie in Chinese? They call it a small lie, a lie of kindness. But there was nothing small or kind about what I’d said, which was I’ll come back. I swear, I’ll come back.
麻辣 (the kind of pain that numbs) : When all the pain was done and felt, there was only indifference from a thorn that should have been uprooted many years ago.
渴望 (also, desire) : For every person that walks away, there is a mother, looking out the window, calling after them to stay. Stay.
I always wondered why 求? What makes one beg for her dream? But Love is a train that never leaves the station. The turning of wheels, the easy gush of tires back-rolling on the asphalt. When the carriage is room enough for us, and the chandeliers aren’t hanging off their limbs and I am not drifting, circling the rims of the glasses when I’m expired and contemplating the futility of being a frog at the bottom of the well, it seems almost liveable.
The frog sees only the sky and longs for it, not realising, on the other face of the wall, there is a river that leads into another ending. How, small as a rosary bead, it finds its way through redwood and biloba to carve an eye out the other side. Yet, where the river opens into the sea, I can only imagine the shifting cloisonné patterns of each dinner conversation. Every I’m glad you’re following your dream, but then oh, how could you ever think to leave?
I know now why they call it 孝顺, or to flow with the wishes of your elders. Every travel advertisement neglects to mention the family. And every family holds a candle, mouthful of ashes, at the wake of the leaving, chanting remember us, remember us.
Come back. And so, every meander of the river opens into another ending, into another station that flashes under the same umbrella sky, leading right back into the same backyard.
From the bottom of the well, love hangs like an amber light that never changes, singing—love conquers all and, sometimes, it is all we can convince ourselves is enough.
2 Jǐng dǐ zhī wā: A frog at the bottom of the well, also used to describe a person of limited perspective
Chim Sher Ting
Chim Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese currently residing in Australia. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a 2021 Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published/forthcoming in Colorado Review, Pleiades, OSU The Journal, The Pinch, Salamander, Rust+Moth, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is forthcoming with Cathexis Northwest Press. She tweets at @sherttt.