Reversed Tones and Borrowed Tongues

The long work of building a home between languages

Dirt-Talk

In the dialect my parents speak, the first tone and the third tone trade places, and so do the second and the fourth. Held against standard Mandarin, the language of my hometown is its mirror image, the same words turned inside out. I have come to think this is the most honest fact about my life. I was born into a tongue that was the inversion of the prestige tongue, and I spent most of my growing up trying to flip myself right-side up.

Xiangyang sits in the north of Hubei, close enough to the Henan border that our vowels borrow the province’s cadence, and Henan, as anyone in China can tell you, is the region the rest of the country has agreed to look down on-unfairly, and to the pain of many Henanese people I know and care about. People in my city, sharing that border, were often the most eager to draw the line. To open my mouth the wrong way beyond the city limits was to be misfiled as Henanese and handed, unasked, a portion of contempt that had nothing to do with me. The safest thing was not to sound like where I came from.

I cannot name the day I stopped. There was no decision, only a slow withdrawal. I began answering my parents in Mandarin. I spoke Mandarin to my grandmother, who had to climb into a register that was not hers to talk to her own grandchild. We called the dialect 土话, dirt-talk, and the verdict was already sitting inside the word. Mandarin was civilized, Mandarin was modern, and the dialect was the soil you wanted off your shoes. It took me years to understand that “civilized” was never a property of the sounds. It was a ruling handed down by whoever held the center, and I had simply agreed to enforce it on myself.

But a suppressed language does not leave. It retreats to the places the conscious mind does not patrol. When I was angry, when I stubbed my toe, when a curse word jumped the fence before I could stop it, the reversed tones came back intact, as if they had been waiting. That was my first lesson in linguistics, though I had no words for it then. Your mother tongue is the body’s language, not the mind’s. You can re-educate the mind. The body keeps its own accent.

Facing the Sea

The first time I left the mainland I was a teenager, and I went to Hong Kong. What undid me was not the skyline but the talk: the way a sentence could begin in Cantonese, pick up an English word without breaking stride, set it down again, and sound offhandedly cosmopolitan, as if the speaker had the run of several worlds at once. I came home and decided that English, Cantonese, the languages that pointed out to sea, would be my way out of a landlocked town that ran on a slow clock. If I could not change where I was from, I could at least change which direction I faced.

At fourteen I was put forward for an English speech contest my school held with a British partner school. I memorized the script until it lived in my mouth and drilled my pronunciation for the English judges sitting below the stage. I wanted what I thought of as a proper Oxford accent, an obsession I can trace directly to watching the BBC’s Sherlock and deciding that British vowels were elegant and old and meant something.

The show marked me in a sillier way as well. I gave myself the English name Sherlock and paired it with Lee, choosing the Cantonese spelling over the mainland pinyin Li on purpose, to scrub the mainland off my own name and file myself among the anglophone Chinese of North America, Hong Kong, and Singapore, a crowd I felt far closer to at the time than to my own passport. It took me too long to discover that Sherlock reads, to an actual English ear, like the name of some elderly Englishman, the kind almost no real person is given, after which I quietly restored my Chinese name on LinkedIn and let only my old friends back home keep using the other one.

Years later I defected from British to American English too, telling myself it was the real “international” English, which only meant my sense of the center had migrated from London to Washington. I did not win. But before the contest my maths teacher, maths being the subject that has frightened me ever since, played a clip of a speech competition for the class and told them to look forward to mine, and that small public expectation did more for me than winning could have. English became the identity I could build when the others felt closed.

Because they were closed. I spent those years inside a militarized compound of a high school, the kind where the uniform stayed on all day and an unzipped jacket showing the clothes underneath could get you named and disciplined. There was no room to be a self in there. English was the one room with a door I could shut.

The Synthetic Nearby

The anthropologist Xiang Biao has a word I keep returning to: 附近, the nearby, the texture of people and places immediately around you, the thing he says modern life has quietly hollowed out. My problem was specific. My nearby had no English in it. There was no one within reach to practice with, no street where the language lived.

So I built a synthetic one out of a VPN and a great many evenings. I switched my phone and my laptop to English. I moved onto YouTube, then Facebook and Twitter, registering my first Twitter account at twelve, and I replaced the Chinese game streamers I watched with English-speaking ones. I played GTA V and Resident Evil with English audio and subtitles, because if you frame a game as language practice you stop feeling guilty about the hours, and I used that loophole shamelessly.

I found an app where I could pay English speakers, mostly ESL teachers from the Philippines, Britain, and North America, sixty to a hundred yuan an hour simply to talk with me, and I talked. It bore fruit. I came out of it able to write in English on my own, to think and to make things and to reach people in it. Most of my classmates in that mid-sized city had been handed the same subject as a thing to be tested on and to resent. They finished school with a mute, exam-shaped English and never once set foot in the world it could have opened. The difference between us was not talent. It was that I had treated the language as a place to live, and they had been taught to treat it as a wall to clear.

At university I leaned harder into that self, into Model UN and the small thrill of international rooms. There was a fork in that world most outsiders never notice. The Chinese-language committees were the serious ones, running sophisticated simulations of wargames and national security decision-making, the kind of exercise that actually rehearsed how a state thinks under pressure. The English-language circuit in China was mostly low-politics multilateral conferences, plenary halls full of political rhetoric with very little genuinely at stake. I chose English anyway, with my eyes open, because I was not really there for the simulation. I was there to sharpen my speaking and my writing, and I was willing to trade the depth of the exercise for the practice of the language. That trade was the shape of those years in miniature. The first time I ever set foot in NTU, the school where I am now finishing a master’s, I was there to chair a Model UN session, with no idea I would come back to study. The path I thought I was inventing turned out to be laying itself down ahead of me.

What You Cannot Drill

And still it was not enough. The first time I actually lived inside an English-speaking society, on a fully funded summer research program in Canada, I caught myself constantly checking and correcting, bracing before I spoke. My first ever native-speaking friend was a second-generation Pakistani Canadian from the east of the country, and sometimes he spoke so fast that I lost him and had to spend effort just to follow him, and far more effort to push a complicated thought or an abstract value across the gap into English. That summer rearranged the whole project for me. The thing that separated me from people like him, from Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians, was not a deficit of proficiency and not an “improper” accent. It was confidence, the kind that is almost impossible to imitate because it is not learned late but installed early, in a childhood that encouraged you to take up space and say what you meant in your own language. I had spent years perfecting the instrument and missed that the music was a question of permission. You cannot drill your way into having been allowed to speak.

By then borrowing tongues had become a reflex, and the next ones I reached for were closer to home. In Guangzhou where I studied for undergrad, I was drawn into the Cantonese world and tried to make it the ground of a new self, a way to leave behind a past that was nothing but repressive years bent over exam prep. I re-engineered my Mandarin toward a softer, Taiwanese inflection. In Taipei, the first time, I tried to pass, borrowing the island’s pronunciation and vocabulary and hiding the mainland in my mouth, though I suspected it cost a native ear almost nothing to catch me out. I learned to avoid northern references entirely, because in Guangdong people carry their regional heritage with pride and resent what they experience as the arrogance of Beijing and the north pressing down on everyone else. I started listening to Taiwanese Hokkien and felt the same pull I had felt toward Cantonese. And yet even now my Cantonese and my other southern tongues stay shallow, and I still feel a flush of panic at the thought of mispronouncing something while ordering dim sum.

A close friend of mine, now studying in Japan, used to argue with me, seriously, that a second language has a hard ceiling. He had Wittgenstein on his side, the idea that the limits of my language are the limits of my world, and he carried it to its bleakest conclusion: he could not see himself ever dating across a language line, because something that deep and that personal could not, he insisted, be delivered through a borrowed or transplanted organ. The same conviction surfaced the day I asked him to come on my podcast for an English episode and he turned me down, saying he could only think and speak about social questions with any real substance in his mother tongue, and that English would flatten him into someone he was not. I never fully agreed with him, but I knew exactly what he meant, because I had spent my life as the patient on his operating table. Every tongue I took on was a graft, and a graft can be rejected. Some of mine took beautifully. Some never quite did.

Made in the In-Between

Look at the pattern and it is hard to miss. I have always preferred to speak in other people’s mother tongues, partly to meet them where they live, partly to keep announcing my distance from the town I never managed to feel any pride or belonging in. I have envied, with something close to ache, the people who wear their local language and culture as a source of pride, the Cantonese who would not trade their city for the capital, anyone for whom the sound they were born into is not an embarrassment to be managed. After diaspora-ing so many times, after pouring so much of myself into escaping a small, slow, inward-facing place toward some freer world of difference and welcome, the plain ease of a native speaker remains almost unimaginable to me. It is the one accent I was never able to acquire.

My own taste gives me away, if I am honest about it. As a teenager the music I reached for pointed outward, the same direction as everything else: Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Troye Sivan, the international pop that felt like a passport. These days I find myself retreating into Mandopop, sometimes with a little Cantopop, for a narrow band of feeling I cannot reach in any other language. There is even a name for it, the 芭樂歌, the cloying sentimental ballad that is almost the signature of the genre, and it only works on me in the mother tongue. The borrowed organ can argue, report, persuade, even charm. It cannot quite ache. For that, only the mother tongue will do.

The story of Babel is usually told as a punishment: a single people with a single tongue, scattered into mutual unintelligibility as penalty for their arrogance. I have started to think the scattering was never the curse. The curse was the belief that one of the tongues stood at the center and the rest were provincial. The curse was the ranking. What I see forming now, in the seams between all the language-worlds I have passed through, is something that finally refuses that ranking, a culture made in the in-between by people who feel no need to imitate the center. The Singaporeans speaking Singlish are not failing at English. They are not trying to sound like the ang moh, and the freedom in that is total. They built a tongue that belongs to no metropolis and apologizes to none.

The Dirt on Anyone’s Shoes

For all the dislocation, I have come to think it was still a blessing to have lived and moved between so many spheres, because it left me able to do one thing in particular: to carry into language lives that would otherwise never reach it. Not in the sense my friend in Japan meant, the deep self that resists translation. I mean something cruder and sadder. The people I grew up with, the ones who stayed in that mid-sized city, will mostly never tell their own story in any language, high or low, not because the mother tongue fails them but because economy and literacy never gave them the means to narrate a life to anyone past the street they live on. I spent years climbing a ladder of prestige tongues. They were never set anywhere near the ladder. Whatever fluency I bought with those evenings and those hundred-yuan hours has begun to feel less like an asset than a debt, something owed back, carried into rooms they will never be let into.

I did not set foot abroad until I was twenty. Hong Kong, as a teenager, had been the farthest I had gone, and it was still, on the map, China; everything cosmopolitan about me before then I had assembled in a bedroom, out of a VPN and other people’s broadcasts. There is something absurd in where I ended up, and I try never to lose sight of it. For years I remade myself in the image of a global elite, and I will never be let in as one of them. I sit in their rooms now, daily, through work and study, beside people born into this world, well-off families, years inside the soft bubble of an international school, the ease that arrives pre-installed with an address, and I have never once felt we were the same cohort. You can buy the accent. You cannot buy the birthright, and they can tell, and so can I.

What that leaves is the only thing it can, an ambition smaller and harder than the membership I kept chasing. The work is to become the fullest version of the person I actually am, and to stay alarmed at the soft flattery that gathers around anyone who travels well, the quiet conviction that you have joined some shining cohort of young leaders the world was waiting for, that you have earned a seat above the people you came from. I try to catch that feeling whenever it rises in me. The discipline is to keep the route visible, to remember that I was carried here at least as much as I climbed, to keep tracing my way back to where I actually stand, and to keep close the reversed tones and the people who still speak in them, whose suffering I have no right to turn into a line on a panel and then forget.

Too Western to read as Chinese, too Chinese and too Asian to read as Western, fluent in several places and native to none: by the usual measure I am a failure of belonging here too. For most of my life I treated that as a wound to keep dressing. I am no longer sure it is one. The seam between languages is not an absence of ground. It is its own ground, and it is filling with people. What I cannot yet decide is whether the body ever follows the mind into that seam, or whether home simply has floors. I can work and argue and fall into something close to love in the upper, borrowed rooms. The Mandarin I once fled toward turns out to be only a landing. The basement, the place anger and the deepest tenderness still come from without asking my permission, is the reversed tones of a small city in Hubei, the one language I was given before I was old enough to be ashamed of it. Maybe the point was never to be transplanted whole into one body. Maybe the point was to become the seam itself, the place where several tongues meet and, for once, none of them has to be the dirt on anyone’s shoes.