My parents tell me that in the car on the drive home from Costco I started to cry. Started to sing on repeat yinyaoyao, yinyaoyao, yinyaoyao, wouldn’t calm down until they played the soothing tones of a lullaby over the car speakers. They think I meant to say yinyue. I had not yet learned how to produce the correct sound, but I kept chanting it. Yinyaoyao, yinyaoyao, yinyaoyao, until I was finally lured to sleep.
In class I learn the English word for it. Music. America is the only country I have ever known but its language comes to me like broken puzzle pieces strewn across the floor. I rearrange them and combine them but bits and pieces slip through the cracks. Dandelions growing where they are unwelcome, until they are blown away.
In many years I meet my piano teacher for the first time. After plonking out the first few notes of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star—C, C, G, G, A, A, G—she rewards me with a bag of Costco sweet potato chips. Says I have the makings of a real musician. By then, English flows out of my mouth and my chubby fingers on white and black keys have made music and I feel like I can begin to understand what it all means.
In school I learn a new phrase. Mother tongue. It’s your first language, says the teacher. Before I can answer, she adds, Your mother’s language. Oh, I respond, in the Cartoon-Network-meets-Peter-Rabbit tones I have learned to form. Two different answers rest on the tip of my tongue. I learned yinyaoyao before I learned music before I learned yinyue, pieced together a fragmented tune from the sounds others had given me. The soft uncertainty that marks the words of my family no longer colors mine. Do my mother and I share a tongue?
In the car when I drift into dreamland my fingertips tap against the window playing out their own rhythm. Yinyaoyao, yinyaoyao, yinyaoyao. The drumbeats of my heart sing me to sleep. We are here for you, they say. This is a language you will always understand.
About the author
Ally is a freshman who calls the Bay Area, Switzerland, and China home. She likes to express herself through speech, dance, and mediocre rap lyrics.
Description
Yinyaoyao is a vignette about the notion of a "mother tongue." As a first-generation Chinese-American, I have had a complicated relationship with English and Mandarin, but language has also been a source of cultural connection and comfort for me. The untold story I hope to present through this vignette is a childhood of having no defined "first language," but instead mimicking, mixing, and creating language.
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