Foreign Language
Amid the leavings of a meal, satiated, he carefully extracts
the skinny, white paper from inside the protective, curled,
gold crust of his fortune cookie. He clears his throat.
“LEARN CHINESE” he reads, then proffers the mystery:
one simple English word dissected by linguistic dao
into two pieces, flanked by whimsical markings, English transliteration.
(As though one could learn an entire, complex language,
four-thousand characters, subtle concepts concealed in one word,
each word mastered several months apart--not to mention the
host of guttural, lunatic-sounding, but necessary noises it requires.)
Then, of course, there is the matter of self-awareness:
He struggles with the very syllables and sounds--
Where to put the accent?--with the cryptic and arcane ways
those sounds can transform, even mutate on the way
to the ears of another, where nothing is worse than being
profoundly misunderstood. He shakes his head, then reads
our lucky numbers, instead, his attention about to wane.
But I can read the other side, in quiet English plain enough:
“The major value in life is not in what you get, but in what you become.”
Tonight, amid this table-top language school, the words I need
to hear are these: relationship, care, committed, worthwhile, love--
foreign words, harder than Chinese, that also cannot fall easily from his lips.
It’s true: learning a new tongue is best done while we are young and
ready to take chances, while we can inhale languages, a woman’s scent,
as opportunity and crisis meet, unbidden, across a cup of tea.
