Things We Can’t Pronounce
I sit next to Mama on our cracked, brown leather couch, knees drawn into my chest. Gonggong sits on the adjacent couch. What I hear: words flowing out of the large speakers on either side of the TV, in a language foreign to me. Chinese soap operas, singing, the gentle sounds of a lychee shell cracking, fruit falling into the bowl in front of Mama on the floor. Gonggong coughs and reminds me that he’s there. I hear the flick of a lighter, watch smoke trail from the end of his cigarette.
This is our sacred ritual.
We can’t speak to each other. Tongue-tied, I fumble the pronunciation of xie-xie, thank you, when Mama hands me a peeled fruit and Gonggong pours me a small cup of green tea. I tell them thank you in Mandarin and they tell me they love me in English. This is how we communicate, these two quiet phrases, thickly accented in the living room we share. I want to talk to them, I want to ask questions, and sometimes I think I can see them want this too.
I learned about Chinese death rituals too young, both of my grandparents gone before I finished learning to count to 100 in Mandarin and in Khmer. I could say thank you—I’d been conditioned to say that my whole life—but I couldn’t say goodbye. The foreign words like lye on my tongue. At their funerals, I was frozen. I didn’t understand how I could feel so upset about losing someone I could hardly communicate with. And I definitely didn’t understand the trauma my grandparents endured and took to the grave with them.
In the 1970s, my father and nearly all of his family escaped the genocide in Cambodia and made it to the United States. Once on U.S. soil, their experiences in Cambodia became something they couldn’t pronounce. And since we, the children and grandchildren born from this generational trauma, didn’t have the language in our mouths to ask questions, our family’s past became something we couldn’t pronounce either.
I know that my family made it to the U.S. safely. I imagine there were bumps in the road, close calls, haunting images that may never leave their minds. What I can’t imagine is evacuating a home in a hurry. Corralling your kids and gathering possessions—only what you could carry—leaving everything you’ve ever known. Walking for miles. Trying to stay together. Mostly staying together, but losing some. Inevitability. Crossing oceans onto foreign soil. Trying to explain yourself to people who don’t understand. Opening your mouth and feeling like nothing is coming out. Sometimes I want to ask my family these questions—pry open their experiences and read them like books. I want to ask, What was it like? What do you remember? But I always stop myself. I know they don’t want to remember. So I piece things together with research. Headlines from newspapers all over the world fly past me like bullets, all stinging the same. Some Khmer Rouge guards are still being tried in court. Two million Cambodians died under Communist rule. Cambodian refugees like my family members being detained, deported. Last month, last week, today. I try to create a memory or an understanding of this experience that I feel so far removed from, to honor my grandparents who risked everything to get here.
I may never understand my family’s experiences in coming to the U.S. But I do know that the United States Customs and Immigration Services misspelled my surname. One half-assed shift turned Huang into Haong, and from that, my American family was born. A history and a past wiped away, a new history created, by two messed up letters.
I never got to sit down and listen to my grandparents tell me their stories. But I have memories and images of them that I will keep with me forever. I remember shimmering red envelopes, a buffet arrayed in the dining room. Loud chatter and qipao and making up a dragon dance with my cousins, performing it with so much joy our faces hurt from smiling and laughing afterwards. I remember the scent of incense filling my lungs, every cell in my body. The crisp $10 bills Mama would slip us, beckoning us into her room to give us this unspoken gift and then shooing us out like nothing happened. I remember theorizing with my sister and cousins that Mama was really a secret government agent with a money printing machine in her bedroom. How else did she give us bills so perfect, so untouched?
I can count in these languages spoken only at home. I can sing Liang Zhi Laohu to the tune of Frere Jacques. I’ve been told that the song translated into English doesn’t really mean much, but I know that it put me to sleep night after night as a baby.
I know that breakfast congee tastes better when you load it up with shreds of dehydrated pork. I’m vegetarian now, but sometimes think about how many times my sister and I would sneak into the kitchen, unscrew the lid to the pork, and steal a handful as a snack. I know that no one makes eggrolls like Mama and I’m mad I didn’t learn how to make them when I had the chance.
I remember what it was like seeing a hearse for the first time. Seeing an open casket. Kissing Gonggong’s forehead, goodbye. Bowing. A long funeral ceremony in a language I didn’t understand. The headstone’s sparkling black granite. Mama and Gonggong’s faces engraved in rock, smiling back at us, telling us they love us in English, Mandarin, Chaozhou, Khmer. Telling us they love us in a way that transcends language. Telling us they love us and they’ll protect us from the things we can’t pronounce.
Kailee Haong (@helloitskailee) is a queer woman of color who primarily writes fiction. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. Her work has been published in The Brown Orient, Spokane Writes, Lilac City Fairy Tales, and others. She lives and writes in the Inland Northwest.