‘She’s not back yet,’ my daughter, Nico, says with brows that furrow deeper day by day.
‘There are no planes to get her back,’ I reply. ‘You need to SORT this out,’ she retorts. My mission is clear. I’ve been tasked by my five-year-old to bring my mother, her ‘por por’ (grandma), home. The proximity of a willing grandparent is something I’ve taken for granted shamelessly since I gave birth. Until now, that is.
It’s been nearly six months since my parents left London for Hong Kong, initially for a post-pandemic catch-up, but which has now dragged on as Omicron has taken hold. While we once again return to smelling each other’s breath mints and deodorant on the Tube, Hong Kong, in line with China, is attempting to maintain a zero-Covid policy. Back in November, my mum was smugly sending us videos of legit Cantonese feasts on WhatsApp. Now I have to check whether they are able to buy enough food from the panic-ridden supermarkets amid rumours of a severe lockdown.
Every day that goes by, I can feel the trickles of Cantonese embedded in Nico since birth by my mum ebbing away. I’ve resorted to prattling on in rapid-fire Canto, under the assumption that ‘kids are like sponges’ and she’ll simply absorb my words, much like when mums-to-be play Beethoven to their bellies. The stares she shoots back have become increasingly blank. She can still just about respond to ‘Hurry up!’ and ‘It’s rice time!’ but who doesn’t come running when there’s complex carbohydrates involved?
With every FaceTime call to my parents, Nico becomes increasingly agitated by the pixelated image of por por and an inability to understand my mother’s Cantonese questions about school. And with no tangible presence, my mother tongue has become an irritant and an impediment for her. She skulks off from my phone and goes into an emo hole, with only the Encanto soundtrack to placate her.
I recently rewatched the beautiful 2014 film Lilting, directed by Hong Khaou. It’s a bittersweet tale about a Chinese-Cambodian mother stuck in an English retirement home who is rocked by the untimely passing of her son. She begins a lost-in-translation prickly exchange with Ben Whishaw’s character who, unbeknown to her, was her son’s lover. They somehow find common ground in the act of frying bacon with chopsticks, without understanding one another’s speech. That will be Nico and my mother some day, the quicker the nuggets of Cantonese slip away.
And so it’s time to confront the dreaded subject of enforced language schooling as I panic that one day the only line of communication between grandparents and granddaughter will be through a forced exchange of bowls of rice. For those with another tongue in their family, there’s a whole microcosm of Saturday/Sunday language schools that many second/third generation immigrant kids will know well. In a church hall, a community centre or a library there are kids loathing their parents for imposing *insert any language* on them when they would much rather be slothing around at home watching YouTube. In my case, I literally had to be taken by force every Saturday while Live & Kicking was on TV.
At 14, I may have declared dramatically that this was a blatant infringement on my human rights. Two decades later I’m considering subjecting Nico to the same ordeal. The stand-off between her and me won’t be pretty.
