Inscribed

by Kailey Walters (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Hong Kong

“Wash your chopsticks.” I looked at Tim next to me, then around the table at his relatives dunking chopsticks and soup ladles into white tea cups filled with warm, amber-colored herbal tea. Light brown splotches dotted the white tablecloth. “Like this.” Tim picked up his own chopsticks, swirled them around in his tea cup, and lay them on his plate to dry. “Now do yours.” Hesitantly, I followed suit. I had never done this in Brooklyn -- but still, for the most part, food was easy. Although it was my first time in Hong Kong, my childhood quickly returned to me at dim sum restaurants and bakeries in the form of baw lo bao, har gow, siu mai, and my favorite, dan tat. But visiting my boyfriend’s family while lacking basic Cantonese skills was a different story. One day, Tim and I accompanied his aunt to Po Fook Hill Cemetery. We stopped along the way for incense sticks and brightly-colored fake paper money before ascending an escalator up Sha Tin mountain. I expected to see gravestones but was instead greeted by flights of white stairs and pristine white rooms whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with plaques for the dead. I gazed in wonder at all the faces of people who had left this world, all the Chinese characters inscribed on their plaques that I couldn’t read. Tim’s aunt began lighting the incense sticks and burning the fake money. She said something in Cantonese. Tim said to me, “My aunt asked if you know which one is my dad.” There were so many plaques, and most didn’t have years of birth to death. After I’d made several wrong guesses, Tim pointed out the correct one. I drew closer, hungrily searching for any resemblance to Tim in the face of this young man who was to be his father. Try as I might, I couldn’t see it -- maybe in the eyes or the smile, if I looked hard enough. “A lot of people say I look like him,” Tim said. His tone was measured, neutral, as it always was, but that made me wonder even more what he could be thinking about the father he had never met. That night, we had another dinner with his family. There were more aunts, more uncles, a cousin who spoke a smidge of English. At one point, they began sharing stories about Tim’s father -- how he used to take Tim’s mother traveling all over the world when they were young. Curiously, I can’t remember how I discerned this information. I know Tim didn’t translate for me, which leaves only the possibility that I understood his relatives’ conversation in Cantonese. And I remember the wistfulness in their voices, the picture they painted of Tim’s young parents having the time of their lives, and their pride and joy in Tim, the world traveler, the faithful young man who visits his family all the way in Hong Kong, truly his father’s son. Tim’s memory of his father is shaped by stories his family tells: memories and pasts that are not his own but that he inherited, forming the basis for his life. My identity as a Chinese American is shaped by my memories, of things remembered and unremembered, that I have inherited through my circumstances. My language of memory is perhaps stronger than the language I cannot speak well. Although I don’t know the words for “I don’t know what I want to eat”, I know the chatter and cadence of Cantonese conversations rising and swelling in fluorescent supermarkets among the pungence of dead fish. I know the sound of my grandmother calling me to brush my teeth, wash my face, go to sleep, from the time I was an infant. I know I’m shaped just as much by my Chinese experiences as my American ones, that the memory of growing up Cantonese is inscribed on the walls of my life. “How much can you understand?” Tim often asked me as we listened to his relatives talk. I shrugged. “A little.” Enough to understand snippets, words and phrases here and there, to piece together a story that would become the truth in my memory.