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English Language Glossary for a Daughter of Refugees
How to find the right words in another tongue
The first lies I told were in Cantonese. Like when I hit my brother and said I didn’t. Or when I peed my pants at naptime and quietly slipped off the queen-sized mattress our entire family shared. I stuffed my soiled bottoms into the middle of the hamper and put on dirty underwear and pants I fished out of the same pile. I pretended to sleep waiting for my mom to wake me up so I could bargain my obedient napping to watch more TV. I lied again when I first learned about April Fools’ day in kindergarten. My uncle walked me home after school on that April 1st. I innocently pointed to his back and told him a spider had crawled onto his shirt when his shirt was fine. I must have screamed April Fools! in the middle of the Chinatown sidewalk, so full of glee I could admit to a lie in English.
The English language was ahistorical when I was a child. I learned history in English, but English itself had no history. In English, I could name dinosaurs, spelled brontosaurus, tyrannosaurus rex, wooly mammoth. I learned George Washington could never tell a lie. His little kid arms wielded an axe, chopped into his father’s cherry tree, and admitted it. I knew who lived in idyllic barns and on farms in nursery rhymes about a cat, dog, cow, pig, chicken, horse, mouse. But…
