good atlas

#1

During a pickleball game, a stranger entered the court and started speaking to me in chinese. I hadn’t yet said a word, but quickly she asks, ni shuo ying wen haishi zhong wen? Ying wen, I said.

With that, a perception is formed. A positioning established.

#2

When I was 20 years old, I worked as a customer service representative at a bank, answering phone calls upon phone calls from nine to six. A bulk of my conversations usually went like this:

Hi, my name is Lilly, how may I help you?

Someone, usually an older aunty or uncle, speaks to me in chinese.

Sorry, I can’t speak chinese.

Oh are you not chinese? they say in chinese. Chinese person cannot speak chinese?

Sorry, cannot cannot. English ok?

English cannot. Very bad.

We end up speaking in Bahasa Malaysia the rest of the conversation.

#3

It has never occurred to me that when I enter a dai pai dong or chinese restaurant, about forty percent of its universe is rendered unreadable to me. So maybe I don’t order the thing I cannot read. Instead, visual cues come to my aid.

A stall that says “PAN MEE” right across its lighted sign. Or sometimes pixelated pictures of yee mee soup, popiah, or the sight of hanging roasted chickens at a chicken rice stall, to which I point at and say yi ker, xiao de. These are the things I order and they then become my go-to dai pai dong foods.

#4

In 2020, when I told a friend that my name is “en”, which meant love, she corrected me.

It’s not exactly love. Not that passionate sort of romantic love that we usually think of, anyway. It’s more a sort of endearing, earnest, love. Something more…warm? And went on to say: I think this name suits you perfectly!

I never saw my name the same way again.

I only recently learned how to write my name in chinese. With that attempt, I discovered that a small part of the “en” character, is also the character for “heart” (xin).

I never saw my name the same way again.

黄恩平

#5

Then, I learned about chinese radicals: chinese root characters that forms the basis of other characters.

A world forming other worlds.

Like, do you know that the character for ‘tea’ is made of three separate characters, ‘grass’ (radical), ‘person’, and ‘wood’? I said to myself like a child discovering a new sensation.

#6

And that the character for rain, looks just exactly…like rain?!

雨

#7

The language I speak—and the world from which I construct it, live and love through it—comes largely from Western media and literature (though increasingly less so through the years). In the early part of my life, it was mostly the voices of men. Even the philosophies I studied, even the so-called deconstructivist and anti-colonial works, were rooted in white, colonial modes of thinking and writing. All of it has shaped the bubble of my reality.

So when I read an explainer about the Shijing, and encounter phrases like:

Ai er bu shang
Le er bu yin

and many others, like:

Keyi bu ke qiu

I realise I don’t truly know what they mean. The translations, rendered loosely into English as “moderation” or “a serendipitous meeting”, are just shadows of the originals. I understand them intellectually, but I cannot feel them. The meaning doesn’t land in my body.

#8

I attemped to speak chinese to a friend one day. She asked me about my plans for the next day, what I was having for dinner, and in my family, “who usually decides what to eat for dinner”? She said all these to me in chinese, which I understood perfectly.

When I tried my chinese with her, we laughed at the attempt. We laughed until our cheeks hurt. Smattering of rudimentary chinese words, punctuated with english for the words that did not arrive in my mind. My head hurt just trying to translate everything word for word. I can only describe things. I can’t even begin to describe feelings, observations, thoughts and opinions.

Immediately in my body, there is this sense of smallness. I felt like a three-year-old speaking to an adult. Every complexity and nuance, the vastness of inner landscapes that I know myself to be, born out of an english speaking world and experience, all reduced and flattened and hollowed out in an instant.

I could not, even if I tried, utter myself into being.

This is one reality of a Malaysian speaking to another Malaysian.

# 9

In which new vocabularies are also formed. Upon seeing a grafted tree that is a large trunk with a small hat of tiny leaves, I said it was xiao xiao ke ai. A little cute.

My friend bent over in laughter.

Oh man, xiao xiao ke ai is very ke ai! she says.

You butcher a language and everything is seen in a delightfully new light.