I read this story when it came out, and got reminded of it again when @AiJiang_ mentioned it was up for Nebula consideration. And I remembered why I had forgotten it.
The narrator, English name Gillian, opens the story thus:
I traded my last coffee for a coffee.
As she embraces the reality of dark bitter liquid in a cup, the word vanishes from her mind. Very Taoist. Gillian lives in a future New York, an immigrant from Fujian like her author, dominated by Langbase. The Langbase, in everyone’s head, is the sum total of their vocabulary in every language and their currency. Little spare ands and thats get dispensed as small change, but other words, more important words, like coffee and tea and 咖啡 and 茶, get bought and sold for real goods, for bus tickets, for rent. And rent in New York is always expensive.
She accepts her c—– and her own Langbase changes from 987 to 986 words.
When Gillian goes to the Language Exchange, she always says the same thing: “Give me English.”
She spends most of the story in the company of Jorry, another Chinese immigrant to America, so thoroughly Westernized he sold his Chinese names long ago on the Exchange, and so thoroughly Chinese he preens and fronts and lords it over his family back home even though his real business is gambling his words in vast language casinos and prefers Gillian
silent, docile, obedient.
Jorry is a piece of work.
But the real meat of the story is in the other people Gillian interacts with. Two New Yorker mothers with their perfect blonde babies in overpriced strollers bragging about the cost and effort of purchasing entire dictionaries’ worth of words, in multiple languages, for their scions, and we know this to be the real wealth of the world. Language. The Silent woman, homeless, mute, having long bargained away her last paltry ands and thes, that Gillian tosses a few ands to, and who bows her head in gratitude, muttering “and” like a mantra, now that she has it again, now that Gillian has loosed her tongue. And Gillian’s mother, back in Fuzhou, who tries to communicate with her daughter but even she, proud as she is of her daughter making it to America, realizes somewhere in the back of her mind how much it cost, how Gillian has had to sell almost everything of her native tongue(s). Everything but “home” and “mama.”
All through the story, we see words like “c—–” and “L—–.” We never find out what they are. And they unsettlingly grow more numerous as the story goes on, leaving us to wonder.
The end of the story scares me. I’m not sure if it’s a choke of the Kindle edition, or if it’s there on the printed page, but after rejecting Jorry and selling his name to gamble on, after meeting the former Silent who got her name back because of Gillian’s kindness, Gillian hits the exchange again, and says “give me English.”
My eyes scrolled through my Langbase and then on home and then on
and
I’ve stood in many gwailo bars, many classrooms, many taxicabs, that were the Language Exchange. English for Mandarin, Mandarin for English. I started a romance with the one woman in the room who would trade her Cantonese for French. I taught English from the Mongolian border to the Shenzhen river, from the foothills of the Himalaya to the streets of Shanghai. It was always additive. Everyone gained by sharing their tongues, sharing liberally like wine at Cana.
What if it wasn’t?
What if language really was a zero-sum game?
What if it is?
Now I remembered. I’d felt the edges of my English wither and die under the onslaught of everyday Mandarin, felt the Mandarin vanish like concrete-shoed bodies in the vast Cantonese sea of the Pearl River Delta. It’s why I defend my French with such zeal and paranoia. It’s the fervent hope I can gift both French and English, and Hebrew and a californio’s smattering of Spanish, to my daughter. It’s the judgement I pass on my forefathers for losing their own French, generation on generation.
Because that is a wealth. An inheritance, une héritage. And it can be won or lost.
In Gillian, I see my father and his father. In the language exchange, I see all those classrooms, gwailo bars, taxicabs, teahouses. In the language casino, I see the predatory creep of English and Spanish, of the mindset that strips them of all character with so much socioeconomic turpentine and renders them “good investments” rather than subjects of their own, home of poets, worthy in their own right.
And callously discards any languages, any vocabulary, that are not “good investments.”
I see the forces that brought me to China, that gave me a job and an apartment there, that allowed me to make my living and go to university.
When I heard about it, I compared this story to Ken Liu’s seminal “Paper Menagerie.” “Paper Menagerie” is a focused story, a clear story, clear as crystal, of the son of immigrants turning toward the all-encompassing American culture and then back again to that of his parents once he realizes its inherent worth. It is ultimately joyful. “Give Me English” is how we sell notre héritage, our vocabulary and our tongues, in dribs and drabs…even, ultimately, bartering off “home” and “mama” before we cannibalize the first things we sold out for in order to keep the lights on.
That’s what scared me. That’s what I wanted to forget. How terribly real it is, this parceling out of our intellectual souls, our dialects and accents. And how hard it is to get it back.
It can be got back.
The Silent woman’s name is K—–. She knows what it is, thanks to Gillian, but neither we nor Gillian ever do.
Ultimately, “Give Me English” is a joyful story, too. Even in this world, language is not always a zero-sum game, even as in our own, language exchange is not always positive-sum.
I am not certain if it will win the Nebula it deserves. It may be too reliant on the uneasy, unquiet feelings of multilinguals and third-culture kids, the in-between feelings that have no names in any tongue. On the acrid smoke and sweat of the gwailo bar when you hear “hey, we could language exchange, Mandarin/English?” and the mold of New York tenement basements where immigrant stories start. But it damn well deserves the nomination, because it i———– so much cloudy a———– in the same realities that “Paper Menagerie” made so clear.
This time, I will remember. I have to. Je me souviens.
Such an interesting story!