[Story] Counting Leaves

I’m four and my Chinese is horrid, but I have to say it—if not now, he would die, and I would be sad, and he would die and I would be sad and he would die-and-I—

“You’re going to die, you know, ye ye, you’re going to die if you keep smoking and you’ll get very hurt,” I say, unable to express what I really mean in this inflexible, cursed language. But what do I actually want to say? Don’t smoke, because my teacher says you’ll get lung cancer, and lung cancer is a Very Bad Thing. Please don’t smoke. I know that People in China smoke and smoke and smoke, but this is America and People in America do not smoke. Please don’t smoke. Please don’t die.

“You’re going to die,” I end my speech lamely, haltingly, unable to share my newly gained knowledge with my grandpa, who walks beside me with his impossibly long stride, holding a cigarette in one hand and my hand in the other.

He looks at me intensely, scrutinizing my tiny face from underneath his bushy and whitening eyebrows. He is aging far too fast, and I am afraid. My grandpa has black hair, but this person beside me does not, and I am afraid.

“I’ll stop.”

“What?”

“I’ll stop smoking, Muo na, now and forever.”

And he does. For thirty years, the Chinese legacy of smoke and cigarettes has overflowed into the lives of his children and his grandchildren – but now, this strange chain of chain-smoking ends with a single promise. My ye ye no longer holds the cigarette; he holds my hand now, and holds to this promise, now and forever.

---

Yi, er, san – one, two, three years pass. I am older now, but my early triumphs over this intractable language do not last. Now, when I say “Tu zi ye shi ren! Bunnies are people, too!” in Chinese, my grandparents laugh and laugh and laugh, before admonishing me and carefully explaining that rabbits cannot possibly be human beings. But “ren, people,” I think to myself, has a different, more beautiful meaning – “people,” to me, is a word that captures what it means to live and breathe and be, not just the presence or absence of fur, or the species called Homo sapiens. But “people,” to my parents and grandparents, takes on an exclusivity that encircles and chokes my vision of the world; “people” can now only mean ren – human being, man, person, adult, grown-up. The “people” of my imagination no longer exist; there is no community of living, loving and feeling beings – there is only ren. I choke back angry tears, but cannot choke back angry words: “Ben dan! Stupid egg!”

Even as I scream these words of anger, I realize that they are empty. When I say “ren,” I do not understand the intricacies of “ren.” I say “people” without knowing what “people” are. I say “stupid egg” without knowing why eggs are stupid in Chinese. I speak Chinese without knowing what Chinese is. Now, when I speak angrily to my grandparents, their indulgent smiles suddenly make it clear to me that my angry words, too, are words borrowed from a language that I do not understand. Borrowed words are the words of an ignorant child. Borrowed anger is the anger of a tu zi, not a ren—a rabbit, and not a human being. Even as I scream, my grandparents laugh and laugh and laugh at the little child making up words—the rabbit stomping its foot in futility.

But even as I scream, angrily and unintelligibly, I want to tell them this: “I do not own words, but at least because of that I do not own the word ‘condescension.’” But I cannot because I do not know how to say this in Chinese.

In English, too, I am a borrower of words. I cannot pronounce “World War II” without five extra R’s, and I avoid conversations involving “war,” “whirlpools,” or “wisterias.” I do not own words; I do not possess them in the way that they deserve to be possessed, known, sung, understood. I am a borrower of words, and now, I feel like a borrower of worlds. And, I realize, I cannot say either: words and worlds remain inaccessible to me, Chinese and English alike. So in the middle of the night, I count my leaves furiously, unceasingly, counting to one-hundred, one-hundred one, five-hundred seventy-two, and… I stare into the darkness of the ceiling above me, listening to the soft snores of my grandfather and my grandmother and beginning to wonder if they are people, too. And suddenly, I realize—I no longer own these leaves, these words, these numbers. These strange and alien leaves, wonderful in their difference from sheep and from American dreams, were never mine. They were, and are borrowed: the leaves, the words, and the numbers.

“一, 二, 三, one, two, three.” I count these borrowed leaves out of a sudden desperation to be Chinese. But saying a few words, “一, 二, 三,” does not make me more Chinese, and, I realize, it is time to accept that truth.

Some time or another, when I wasn’t paying attention, this tree of mine became a lonely tree on a lonely hilltop, halfway between earth and sky, between a Chinese world from an unknown past and an American world of the present. The leaves fall now, and they fall unseen, uncounted. There is no intermittent world between earth and sky; there is no intermittent language between Chinese and English that could ever make these leaves more than just leaves. Slowly, the leaves count off in whispers,

“nothing, nothing, nothing,”

as they fall.

I am seven, and I cannot count myself to sleep.

---

When I am older, my extended family stops speaking to me in Chinese. My uncle Zhang Pei shu shu uses a slow and careful English drawl to ask me how I’m doing in school; my Zhang Lei bei bei laughs while translating a joke solely for my benefit; my aunt Qingyan shen shen holds conversations with me in pure, unstilted English, making me feel the first bitter pangs of jealousy and shame. My relatives are considerate people. I love them, and they love me, but each holds scorn for muteness and ignorance—for my lack of heritage.

I have learned to smile instead. In the lonely Thanksgiving dinners we hold every year, I smile at the single relative that has found the time to join our family. I smile when I don’t understand; I smile when I do understand; I smile when I’m secretly willing myself to disappear into who-knows-where.

But then, my father interjects, “Do you even understand why that’s funny?”

My smile, a generic response to an unknown situation, has been revealed for what it really is – feigned understanding, real ignorance. My father steals my last escape with a single, well-spoken English sentence.

“No, I don’t,” I say, smiling still.

“It’s a shame you don’t know more Chinese,” he says, with a smile.

---

It is around this time that I learn, for the first time, that “shu ye zi” does not mean to count leaves. My grandmother meant for me to count its homonym: “ye zi,” or numbers. “一二三四五, one, two, three, four, five.” And now, in the sleeplessness of night, a vicious parody of Count Dracula’s portion of Sesame Street plays on repeat in my mind. Mocking blocks of numbers float into the periphery of my vision, and replace any memories that remain of my sweetly falling leaves. “Ooneeee,” whispers a high-pitched, friendly voice. “Twooooo,” it adds. “Today’s Sesame Street is brought to you by the number twooooo!”

“Ooneeee, twooooo…” For the second time in precious few months, I realize how little I know about the Chinese language—the language that ties my family together, but leaves me in the dark, unable to sleep.

---

I do have one dream, though.

My family lives in China, in this dream of mine. My mother is witty, beautiful, and gracious. My father is well-dressed, well-spoken, and admired. My grandparents are respected; my relatives are many; my family is well-adjusted and well-off. We know everyone in the city, and we are liked by all.

We all speak Chinese.

I have always dreamt of this world, where the language of my family is intact and beautiful, like the good-natured Chinese banter that traverses across our table during dinner. I have always dreamt that I belonged to that world, a Chinese-speaking Chinese person, who could engage in Chinese dialogue and Chinese humor.

But the language of my family is not always intact and beautiful. Outside of our home, our voices are broken, harsh, and grating. I listen, and I hear the voices of my parents:

“How you are?”

“Where you are from?”

My mother and father greet others in broken, uncomfortable English. They sometimes speak softly, hiding their mistakes by never making themselves loud enough to hear. They sometimes speak obnoxiously loud, with stilted accents and nasal vowels. But they always, without fail, speak with an uncertainty that sounds all too familiar to my eight year old self.

Listening to that uncertainty, I suddenly know that they, too, share my dream. But they cannot have that dream, because they abandoned it long ago.

I look around me, and see everywhere the wealth of American legacy: Fitzrandolph Gate and Faulkner’s South, Strathmore and Stanford, Carnegie Hall and Carnegie-Mellon. This, I suddenly realize, is what my parents had in China. And this is what my parents had abandoned.

My parents do not have the luxury of this American legacy; they have neither the history nor connections to truly belong to the United States. There is no Zhang Street, no Zhang Library, no Zhang Center for the Arts. There is no Li, Yang, or Chen Hall; there is no Shan, Xu, or Gao University. No, these names simply do not have a place among these distinguished buildings or places – they have no place here, where history has already been decided. The name Zhang hangs instead on the dusty plaques of doctors’ offices, on lightly burnished nametags of stained lab coats, and on the darkened store-fronts of faux-Chinese restaurants. Here, my parents exist as Dr. Zhang and Dr. Li, pharmacologist and physiatrist, Ph.D. and M.D. – they do not exist as dancers or singers, neighbors or mayors, entrepreneurs or diplomats.

My parents do not have the pre-requisites for American success. They mispronounce “fog” as “frog”; they haggle in Old Navy; they assume that a daughter in Princeton demands immediate respect. They operate on a strange currency of values only applicable in China – they use the yuan and not the dollar, and suffer for it. My father came here with only twenty-four dollars in his tattered lab pockets, but somehow, I can’t help but believe that he came with much less: he came without money, but above all, he came without language, and he came without the fundamental knowledge of how to live in America as an American.

Perhaps this is why they push all their hopes onto the next generation – without roots of their own in this country, they cannot achieve the same level of success possible in a country where they once knew the language and the people. Here, they can only establish a material basis, setting the foundation for their children to grow in their place and seek the sunlight of a world that seems unintelligibly sunless.

And, I finally realize, maybe that’s why my mother and father fear the loss of language within their only children. In such an un-rooted world, children have no place to return to, and so they stretch onward and onward into the sunlight, the Icaruses of the Orient, until they can no longer spare a glance for those ancestors behind them, who continue whispering an intangible and indispensable wisdom despite all the disdain and fear and hatred shown towards them. And if those children fall, those voices are there, and will always be there.

I hear those voices, and those voices tell me a secret that I have never realized. My lonely tree on a lonely hilltop will always be halfway between earth and sky, reaching upwards by straining away from the hill that it rests on. But, these voices say: this tree will never be lonely, and you are never alone.

Before, I could only think of being Chinese in terms of leaves—in terms of words, words, words, and numbers, numbers, numbers. But I am not connected to my heritage by a single, fragile, disembodied leaf. I now know, and will always remember: leaves grow and leaves fall, but leaves always come from somewhere. My heritage is not something that I can use as a self-serving lullaby, because this heritage has been built up on the discarded roots of others.

I cannot just count leaves as they fall. I used these leaves as a symbol of my culture, but these leaves are also a symbol of my duty—a duty to those who have sacrificed everything for their children and grandchildren.

I hear those voices, and I speak back to them now: you will never be alone.

---

I breathe in seven, out seven. One-two-three-four-five-six…seven-six-five-four-three-two…one. Every breath sounds faintly into the darkened room, soft exhalations of a small mouth and a small child, in a small room and a small world. Back then, I didn’t know that I could do something other than breathe – that there were more beautiful, more wonderful things to count than numbers. Five, four, three, two…

---


People here call me Si Hua, or “remember China.” It is summer and I am nine years old now, visiting China—an unknown, unloved country, untouched by my memories or expectations—for the first time. There are black-haired, yellow-skinned people everywhere you look, and suddenly everyone is a brother, a sister, a friend from a past life. I am you and you are me, I want to say, but then each face contorts and I do not see a brother, sister, or friend. I see a stranger, with strange facial and idiomatic expressions and an even stranger language. I cannot understand the people here merely by peering into their faces; there is something deeper in every gesture, something not easily understood by my nine-year-old eyes.

When I visit my cousins in Hunan, Li Cheng ge ge picks me up and whirls me around, laughing and wondering how much I weigh—he guesses forty-five kilograms, and we laugh as we translate numbers between cultures (that is, we laugh until I realize that forty-five kilograms grossly overestimates my weight)—and Li Dexin mei mei patiently explains her drawings to me in the simplest Chinese she can muster up. Li Cheng brings us to the dark, cloth-covered doorways of arcades; my mother brings me to a shrine, and we pray to an unknown god in front of an unknown name on an unknown tombstone, who my mother tells me is my great-grandmother. I believe her, though, because she cries when she says this, and then she tells me her story, even though I understand a little less than half of it.

The next day, my mother takes us on a safari ride. We ride a rickety bus, and a poor, speckled chicken sits clucking in a rickety old metal cage near the front of the bus. There are no fences between our bus and the lions outside, and at some point, someone grabs the chicken by the scruff of the neck and throws it out the window. It disappears in a whirl of feathers, and the lions outside look satisfied, feathers adorning their jaws.

“They can’t do that,” my brother says, wide-eyed.

A sea of black-haired heads turn towards us, perhaps wondering at the fluent English pouring forth from my brother’s mouth as he chatters, half in horror and half in admiration, about the chicken incident. But some of these glances are not inquisitive or wondering; some are fearful. We are the real lions, my brother and I – we are the real danger to the Chinese people, because we represent the loss of language and the loss of all that is beautiful in the history of this ancient land. We are the lions who sit inside the bus, devouring language and leaving feathers of broken Chinese around our jaws.

---

It is our last day here, and we are peddling across the lake in Yi He Yuan. I close my eyes. It is our last day, I whisper to myself. Our last day, and then nothing will be left of me in this country that my mother and father call home. It has been a home, I think, even to me, and I have met the many brothers and sisters that could-have-been if I had lived here.

We pass through seventeen arches of ancient white stone, and I count each one, slowly, carefully, so that I might remember each stone and each arch and each moment. Our dragon boat, red and sleek and glistening in the water, cuts through the crystallized surface of the lake, leaving dying ripples in its wake. Suddenly, I am very afraid. There will be no more ripples now, no more Muo na in China now; and there will be no more China in my own life. Gripped by this sudden and irrational fear, I pull at a strand of my black hair—the hair that contains a bit of me and my heritage both, and—

There is a saying in Chinese that my father told me the other day: “树高千丈，落叶归根.” The leaves of a tree, though three thousand meters high, will still fall back to its roots.

This summer, I have fallen from a land far more than three thousand meters away, to the roots even below my Chinese-American roots.

In America, if we want to succeed, we learn English, speak English, breathe English. We turn our backs on Chinese, because we can either mispronounce W’s or mistake numbers for leaves—and mispronouncing W’s is a far more dangerous faux pas, in a place where everyone can pronounce their W’s with perfect grace. We stretch onwards and onwards without ever looking back, but with every passing day we begin to forget the voices behind us.

But summer turns to autumn, and I can still hear my father’s voice: “The leaves of a tree, though three thousand meters high, will still fall back to its roots.” This summer, miraculously, has been an autumn to me. It has been a time to rest; a time to return to what it means to be Chinese; a time to live in only one world. This summer, I stopped living for the inexhaustible struggle of Chinese-American success, and for once in my life, lived with the old and familiar: the Chinese. Spring, I know, will come again, but when that time comes—

Three thousand meters is a long distance, for both roots and leaves. I have difficulty remembering my Chinese heritage from half a world away. My cousins and relatives share that difficulty, unable to remember the struggles of one of their own, displaced across an ocean. But when springtime comes, I want my roots to remember that I exist, and that I am trying to survive, and that I am endlessly grateful.

I pull at a strand of my black hair, and I drop it into the shimmering lake. I watch until it recedes into the unseen depths, passing three thousand meters to return to where it once came from, long ago.

It is our last day, I whisper to myself, but I will remember China, and China, I hope, will remember me.

---

I realize, for the first time, that roots are not just places, like lakes.

I am sitting down at a kitchen table with my grandparents on a rainy October morning, listening to my grandfather’s story. It is hard to listen, and even harder to understand. But through the fragmented silence, I hear the unspoken moments of his life—of eating moldy mantou every month, of his little brother whom I have never met, of his days as a political commissar—and I can hear the pain and the triumph and the bitterness of hard work through the haze of an unknown language. I also hear the desperation of an unheard voice: a voice that no one hears or cares to hear; a voice suppressed by an unbreakable silence of mutual cultural and linguistic ignorance.

This unheard voice sounds all too familiar in its silence. There is always a moment in your life, regardless of who you are, when you realize that whatever you say reaches no one and nothing and nowhere, because no one cares to listen. I was seven when I realized this, and I was afraid to speak Chinese for years and years. Over the course of those years, I have chosen English over Chinese, fortifying and relinquishing my hold on each language, respectively.

But once, long ago, I wasn’t afraid to speak. I was four, and I lived in both worlds, both languages, for this very same grandfather. Despite my insecurities, I spoke in broken Chinese, convincing my ye ye to—as I saw it—live. It was a matter of life or death where my pride didn’t matter anymore. True, now it is no longer a matter of my grandfather’s life or death. But now, my grandfather’s voice will either live or die, and my grandfather’s voice is worth far more than my pride or my hurt feelings could ever amount to.

He tells me now, of his father and mother that he never knew – and suddenly, despite all the pain and humiliation of suffering years of ridicule from my own father, I know that my grandfather lost something deeper, something more significant than just wounded pride. He lost his roots and his entirety; he is a piece of driftwood in an unknown land, with no hopes for himself except for the little vegetable garden that he keeps meticulously neat and clean and green and beautiful—so very beautiful, with its cucumbers and mint and tomatoes; with its trailing vines wrapped lazily and wonderfully around home-made trellises; with its miniature green-picketed fence standing silent sentinel to our resident possum—so very beautiful, and so very sad.

I hold his hand, as he did long ago for me. I listen, now, to his story, not understanding, but listening, and hearing. I hear my own voice within his, and know that he is my ye ye, now and forever.

---

I remember standing on the edge of a darkened metro station, grabbing the hands of my mother and father, laughing and gesturing wildly and sporadically and dragging my parents into an uncontrollable dance. This is a different fall—a fall of one year ago—as I open an acceptance letter from the place I would call home for the next four years of my life. I am speaking, in this memory, in a frenzied Chinglish, a language of spontaneity and life and effusion of ideas – “Yes, ni men liang ge shi wo de roots, and xian zai wo men ke yi finally put out our branches here, and here, and here—”

Even now, we are still reeling from the realization of all these years of sacrifice and sorrow and shame. It is finally over. My parents’ hardships as immigrants have finally yielded results—solid, pure, tangible results—that they can bring home to their friends and family in China. After abandoning their home for eighteen years, my mother and father needed reassurance of their purpose; they needed proof that the struggle was worth the sacrifice – and suddenly, it was. It is. It is over, now, and they can rest knowing that their children can survive—and maybe even live—in this unknown world, with food, shelter, and even a little bit of happiness.

But it isn’t over. It doesn’t stop with happily-ever-after, and I don’t suspect it ever will. Here, in Princeton, there is a certain, vague sense of loss that I cannot name – perhaps it is a loss of language, or perhaps it is a loss of something more. Perhaps I’ve forgotten what exactly I’ve lost in the first place. It is far too easy to forget parents and grandparents here; their voices, faint and distant and lovely in their familiarity, have disappeared under the weight of sleepless nights spent reading and writing papers.

I call home during the Moon Festival, barely remembering that this is an important holiday to my grandparents and parents, even though it means very little to me. I have never understood why exactly the roundness of the moon means home, but when I hear disembodied voices on the phone, I suddenly feel oddly far away and wonder if this is what it feels like to be oceans apart. This, I realize, is what my grandmother and her sister felt. This is what my grandfather and his closest friend found so hard to bear. This is the distance that was so very painful when loved ones died over the phone and not in reality, not in a bed where you could at least embrace them. I hear my grandmother’s voice, happy and strong and beautiful, and I remember her words, “Shu ye zi ba, Muo na...”

Wandering around here in Forbes College, I can hear unfamiliar voices speaking familiar words in the nearly deserted lounge—“Ni hao. Ni hao. Zai jian. Zai jian”—it surprises me, to no end, how many people speak—and ardently wish to speak—Chinese. Sometimes, I sit very still and close my eyes, and listen to the intonations of every word that remind me of my parents and my home and my heritage. I sit, and I remember why I am here; I remember how I have gotten here; I remember my parents’ simultaneous hopes and fears that I would leave them far behind. I hope, and fear, that I have already.

There is a Wu Dining Hall here. Behind that, there is an avenue of trees. On early October mornings, I walk through the row, watching and counting golden-red leaf after leaf after leaf… and I’ve finally realized that behind these ye zi, there are trees, and behind those trees, there are roots. These ye zi stretch towards the sunlight, urged on by their whispering roots that say, “You are not alone.” And as they fall, they fall back to these roots, whispering leaves to whispering roots.

Here, in the end, I return to the beginning. I “shu ye zi,” for myself, and for the others behind me.