Family Phrases: On reconnection and returning
One writer reflects on a recent trip to China and navigating familial relationships via linguistic and geographical distances
My sister has always been very clear about her desire for a Pig Baby – a child born in the Year of the Pig, according to the Chinese Zodiac. People born in this year are characterised in Chinese culture as happy and humorous. Indeed, my sister was so committed to this plan that she orchestrated her wedding, conception and eventual C-section to fall just within the last days of the Year of the Pig.
My nephew, the Pig Baby, was born in January 2020. Our family were delighted; my father killed a buffalo in celebration and sent pictures to the family group chat. Meanwhile, lockdown froze flights, family gatherings, festivals, and I took up knitting. Over those first few pandemic months, I knitted a hideous blanket, socks and a hat so tiny it would have been better off worn by an Innocent Smoothie bottle than a child. It wasn’t until last September that I was finally able to go to China to meet my nephew.
I was adopted from China into the UK as a baby and reconnected with my birth family aged eighteen. I have written and spoken about my adoption a lot over the last few years; despite this, it still feels hard to know where to begin stitching together familial relationships after so much time apart. The linguistic, cultural and geographical divide occasionally feels too large to breach.
A lot has changed since I last visited China in 2018 – my sisters have both changed their hair and we have all moved houses and jobs. Love and money have come and gone; my maternal grandfather is no longer with us. There is much about my adult form that my birth family find confusing. Until I showed up on their doorstep at eighteen, they were unaware of the phenomenon of international adoption. In September, it felt as if they were teaching both my nephew and I how to be Chinese in the ways they felt appropriate: my birth mother shelled mountains of prawns for my nephew and I, while noting the best way to catch crabs and how to check bamboo shoots for disease.
I have spent an awful amount of time learning an embarrassingly little amount of Chinese. I spent a year in Shanghai studying Mandarin unsuccessfully – this fact is not lost on my birth family and it would be a generous lie to say my nephew and I are on a par linguistically. During this recent visit to China, my nephew and I trailed around after my sister, mouths open, fingers poised and pointing asking, "What is that?" at every opportunity. We watched cartoons together – Peppa Pig in Chinese – and I practised my characters with my little cousins as they did their homework on the kitchen table.
Illustration by Yuying Chan.
In China, I felt like a TikTok dog with talking buttons; frantically stamping out sentences with my limited vocabulary – "Bunny! Want! Outside! Now! Please!" I felt large, embarrassed and awkward at the paucity of my spoken Chinese: a delivery man in an elevator argued over whether I was Chinese or English; a woman at the beach asked if I was “simple.”
However, after a few days it felt as if the knobs of a badly tuned radio had finally clicked into place. Some of the background frequency slipped away and I began to mutely follow dialogue. It still felt frustrating to be trapped within a child’s vocabulary and unable to express myself but, despite this – even if language were not a barrier – I would not know which words to begin to scrape together to say all the things I want to. It feels strange to see my sister now a parent; to see my birth parents as grandparents and to see how the years have both softened and hardened them in my absence.
Now back in Scotland, there is no one in my day-to-day to practise Mandarin with, and so I speak Chinese to the dog. He is very patient, if confused. The dog spends his time with his head half-cocked to one side, ears desperately straining for the word "dinner". Chinese is a good language for scolding – it is a dramatic and tonal palette filled with melodrama. In China, I watched my sister discipline my nephew; now the dog too is becoming overly familiar with these turns of phrase.
I always find re-entry into the UK difficult. China is not a country I can describe in words and leaving my birth family there makes me feel disjointed, like a child’s toy with its legs bent backwards. This time, I felt more in touch with my Chinese identity than I have before. I feel torn between the two countries in a way that hurts internally. I look forward to going back and seeing my nephew grow over the years, to seeing him happy and humorous, and hope I can share the UK with him as well one day.