The Angry Typist

My relationship with Māmā has always been strained. Where other children may have been raised to be dependent on their parents, I never really developed such dependency passed the age of 8.

We immigrated to New York in February 1978. I was 8 years old and knew only two English sentences telling anyone who had asked, “My name is Julie Wu and I am 8 years old.” It made very little difference to what was being asked as I would simply regurgitate what I knew like an obedient circus monkey.

Second grade in the U.S. was a complete blur. Everyone sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me. Their lips would move, and I would strain to hear some garble sounds coming through, but I could not even comprehend what the sounds were. It was as if I had cotton stuck in my ears and my brain just couldn’t work fast enough to decipher the strange murmurs.

Māmā was fluent in Mandarin, serviceable in Cantonese, and knew enough English to secure a job in American Express as a key punch operator. I was in awe of Māmā’s adaptability and her command of the English language.

We were still living in an apartment at the time with Pópo and Gòng gong living in a diagonal building across the quad. Sān yí (三姨 – the third aunt, Māmā’s younger sister) and her family lived in the same building as us but on the 7^th floor. It was a large apartment complex with four towering apartment buildings right off Kissena Blvd in Flushing, Queens.

It was probably April or May when writing the English alphabet was becoming less foreign. There were no Chinese characters to memorize, there were no combination of characters to clue what the word was, no brush strokes to worry about, only letters – string and endless string of letters. Letters that were smushed together to make words, but not all letters were definitive in its function and some, were dependent on how the letters were assembled or where the word was in a sentence to dictate its meaning and pronunciation.

I missed the days when I can look at a Chinese word and based on the Chinese characters, I can guess what the word was. For example, the Chinese character for ‘mouth’ is “口”so any other Chinese words with that character in the first position on the left, has something to do with the mouth. Like “吃” (Chī) means eat or “喊” (Hǎn) means shout. It was so much simpler to understand than “there’; “their”; “they’re” which all sounds the same but means completely different things depending on its usage in a sentence.

I was working on some remedial ESL (English as a Second Language) homework and for the life of me, I could not remember when to use ‘a’ and when to use ‘an.’ So as most 8-year-old children would normally do, I asked Māmā.

“Māmā” I said with a pause to make sure that I had her attention, “when do I use ‘a’ by itself and when to use ‘an’ a-n?”          

She was in the middle of tidying up the living room when she responded without even looking up, “You only use ‘an’ when the word after it begins with a vowel everyone knows that!” Māmā said condescendingly.

I promptly returned my gaze to my homework, completed it based on the information provided, and never asked Māmā another question about anything – whether it be academic or about life again.

In that instant I became painfully aware that to be dependent on someone else for information or knowledge was an opportunity to be made to feel stupid, less than. I became fiercely independent and refused to ask Māmā for anything or risk exposing myself to another opportunity to be made to feel so irrelevant, useless, incompetent. I had convinced myself that I needed to grow the fuck up.

Even when I started to get crippling migraines – the feeling that my head was being squeezed in a vice, the sensitivity to light or to any movement or the faintest noise. The overwhelming sense of projectile vomit to any stimulus rendered me curled up in a fetal position on the closet floor, with a towel firmly stuffed in the door gap to block out any of the pervasive light. Not even that persuaded me to ask for Māmā’s help. Instead, I self-medicated with her stockpile of eastern medicine from the Hong Kong apothecary. The small plastic bottle of round cement-colored pills was uncoated and bitter in the most unpleasant way. It was a complete toss up whether I would vomit from the migraine or bitterness of the pills. It was stored on the top shelf of the bookcase in the living room, and I would simply help myself to two pills as Māmā regularly do and hid in the closet until the symptoms abated.

I can’t recall any gradual comprehension of English or any incremental progress of speaking English. It felt as if one-day someone had simply just flipped a switch and I understood everything, everywhere, and spoke English with native fluency, free of any foreign accent. It was strange to surpass Māmā in English so quickly with seemingly very little effort and I had always suspected that her loosing that leverage over me had made her a bit envious.