Work Text:
The problem is, Lan Jingyi thinks as he sits across from a great uncle on a street he doesn’t recognize in Suzhou, his rudimentary Mandarin skills that have gotten him through Chinese dinner parties back at home in Canada are woefully inadequate when it comes to trying to converse with people who don’t actually speak any English. He likes his great uncle, but he has no idea how to talk to his great uncle.
“Shugong,”1 Jingyi says, internally wincing at just how white his accent sounds. His tongue doesn’t curl the right way when it comes to the ong sound, and he’s only mostly sure that this is his shugong and not his bogong.
“En,” Shugong responds with a smile. “This must be very different from Canada.”
Jingyi is in China because a cousin he’s met two times over the seventeen years he’s been alive is going to be attending a university in Canada.
“The elders want to see you,” his father had said, even as he made plans in fifteen different cities to meet up with old friends and classmates along the way.
What was supposed to be a short, week-long trip to pick up said cousin turned into a two month extended vacation to parade Jingyi in front of all the relatives he’s never met.
Jingyi has spent more than his fair share of time on this trip wishing his older brother were here to commiserate with him — and to translate for him — but Sizhui is busy back at home, working in his lab and taking care of their rabbits.
“I’m surprised the peacock didn’t buy Jin Ling’s way into Columbia,” Jingyi had overheard his dad say to his father on the plane.
“They have no family in New York,” his father had responded mildly.
“And we didn’t have any family in Cambridge or Toronto when we moved,” his dad had shot back.
Now, feeling out of place even with his family, Jingyi is developing a new appreciation for what his parents must have gone through.
“There are a lot of people here,” Jingyi says to his shugong, wishing he had the vocabulary to say something less juvenile.
This conversation isn’t exactly going anywhere, but it is certainly going better than the conversation Jingyi had with his dad’s family when they were in Chengdu.2
Jingyi learned more about his parents in one fiery dinner argument than he had in his entire life. At best, he only understood half the conversation, but it’s never a good sign when your parents are greeted with a sneer and a facepalm.
~~~
“How ungrateful,” Yu-popo snaps,3 narrowing her eyes at Jingyi’s dad. Her accent is different from his parents’ accents, Jingyi notes, but he can still understand her. “Running off to America to study, only never to return. You raised an entire family and didn’t bother to pay your respects to the people who raised you until after your children are grown?! Such a thick face, to show up now for the first time after thirty years!”
“We’re Canadians, now,” his dad says, unhelpfully, while Jingyi sips his strawberry milk and pretends he isn’t here. “America didn’t want to keep us.”
“It was difficult to establish ourselves overseas,” his father adds, slightly more helpfully, as he fills everyone’s cups with chrysanthemum tea. “We needed time.”
Huffing, Yu-popo takes the most aggressive sip of tea Jingyi has ever seen in his life.
“Plane tickets are expensive!” Jingyi blurts, remembering the way his dad’s eyes bugged out when he first saw the cost of a round trip flight from Toronto to Beijing.
Unfortunately, this draws Yu-popo’s attention to him.
“Wei Ying,” Yu-popo says in a low voice, glaring at Jingyi as she addresses his dad. “Did you forget about the money and the resources we spent on you? Do you think it was easy, raising this many children? How do you think I feel, facing our old neighbours, when they all think less of me? I raised three children, but the most successful child is the one I have no relation to. Wei Ying, do you know the humiliation of raising a golden child who is someone else’s flesh and blood?”4
Yu-popo spits out golden child, as if those two words have personally offended her.
Jingyi’s dad flashes him a pained look before trying to defuse the situation. His father simply sighs and scoops a couple big spoonfuls of fried rice into Jingyi’s bowl, leaving his dad to deal with Yu-popo alone.
Jingyi decides to shovel fried rice in his mouth instead, figuring now would be a terrible time to bring up all the money his parents mailed back to China when he was still a child.
Across the table, Jiang Cheng-shushu has buried his face in his hands.
~~~
“It must be quiet overseas,” Shugong says now, fanning himself with a straw fan. “Is it hard to adapt to the noise?”
Jingyi shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he responds, stopping to take a sip from his strawberry milk box. In the short time Jingyi has spent bouncing around various cities, dropping by relatives and having dinner with his parents’ old classmates, Jingyi has consumed enough strawberry milk to deem himself somewhat of a connoisseur of Chinese strawberry milk brands.
The little juice-box-shaped milk is the best. He can’t read the brand name, but he appreciates how the different strawberry milk brands come in different packaging. For regular milk, he’s overheard his parents say Mengniu is better than Jindian, but both boxes are in a similar shade of white and green, so Jingyi can’t recognize the difference.
None of it tastes like Canadian milk anyway, so Jingyi chooses to splurge the extra few cents for strawberry milk to go with his meals. Perhaps the biggest shocker is how much more generous his parents have suddenly become, now that they’re not in Canada.
Which isn’t to say his parents have suddenly become big spenders, because it’s not like they’re paying for any of their meals. In his two months of observing middle-aged Chinese parents in their natural environment, Jingyi has come to realize that class reunions are funded by whoever the richest person is (or whoever is pretending to be the richest person) and that his dad will always pretend to fight for the bill that he isn’t expected to pay. Family meals are the same, other than that one notable exception when an aunt put a down payment on their dinner before anyone could notice.
Yet, Jingyi is allowed to just go outside and buy beverages with his parents’ money now. This is very different from back at home, where the most splurging his parents ever do is going out to eat for Chinese New Year dinner. They have no other family to celebrate with in Canada, so Chinese New Year is the one day they eat out at the nearest Chinese restaurant which is...fine.5
They never order drinks; tea is free, as is ice water.
Since his parents are creatures of habit, they only go to that one Chinese restaurant that is two blocks away from their house. Their meals are fine. Jingyi never has complaints about the fried rice or the sweet and sour pork, and Sizhui dutifully eats whatever their parents order.
However, his dad always frowns at the yuxiang eggplant.6 He’s always disappointed by it, but he always orders it despite knowing that he will not enjoy it. Sizhui always says that the dish is good — the serving size is very reasonable for the price they paid, the eggplant is flavourful, and the sauce is very sweet. His dad simply smiles wistfully and says, “it’s not supposed to be sweet,” as he shakes his head and eats it anyway.
Jingyi never really understood it until three days ago, during that awkward dinner where Yu-popo had glowered at his dad the entire night.
~~~
When Jiang Cheng-shushu orders the yuxiang eggplant, Jingyi braces himself. He expects his dad to frown at the dish, take a bite, and sigh in disappointment, just as he always does.
Except that is not what happens. Instead, when the waiter walks into their private dining room with a massive platter of yuxiang eggplant, his dad looks genuinely excited and beams after his first bite, declaring that, “this is the best eggplant I’ve had in years!”
Curious, Jingyi picks a slice of eggplant for himself and promptly chokes on the first bite.
It is spicy.
So extremely spicy.
The spices are so fragrant that Jingyi can’t taste the eggplant underneath at all.
Jingyi coughs, choking on the fumes of Sichuan peppercorn.
“Jingyi.” His father eyes him with concern, pushing a cup of steaming hot water into his hand.
While Jingyi burns his tongue on the water, his dad is gleefully chirping in the background.
“Jiang Cheng, you don’t understand,” his dad says, responding to something Jingyi didn’t catch. “I haven’t had a proper yuxiang eggplant in thirty years! Don’t even get me started on mapo tofu or fuqi beef slices.7 If Guangdongers can’t make a good eggplant, there’s no point in trying the classics.”
In the back of his mind, Jingyi registers that his dad’s accent has changed. Instead of the usual accent he speaks in at home, he’s slipped into something more guttural, similar to how Yu-popo speaks.
Taking a closer look at the dishes, Jingyi shudders at the spice-to-food ratio. His father does most of the cooking at home, so their meals are either light vegetable dishes paired with warm soups, or whichever brand of frozen pizza or casserole was on sale that week in Superstore.8
Now, Jingyi looks at dish after dish, each plate loaded with heaps of dried red chili peppers and a spicy-looking green pepper that Jingyi thinks is haijiao.9 There is enough Sichuan peppercorn to haunt his nightmares and so much chili oil that each dish is quite literally painted bright red.
For this dinner, Jingyi sticks to his plain fried rice and the pumpkin tarts Yu-popo orders just for him, after she notices how he doesn’t touch any of the other dishes.10
~~~
“It’s really hot here,” Jingyi adds, facing Shugong. He doesn’t want to leave the conversation hanging in awkward silence, yet every Chinese word scrambles his brain a little bit more.
“En,” Shugong sits back and crosses his legs. It’s unnerving how Shugong looks so relaxed while maintaining such rigid posture. “Jiangnan summers are always this hot. Next time, come visit in the spring. Spring is our best season, when the weather is warm and the flowers blossom.”11
“Is it still...wet?” Frustrated, Jingyi racks his head for the word for humid. He knows he’s heard his dad complain about Toronto’s humidity countless times, but he can’t recall what exactly it is.
“If you want to escape the humidity” — the word rolls easily off his shugong’s tongue — “go north. But not in the spring. Beijing has terrible dust storms in the spring. Have you been to Beijing?”
Jingyi nods. “We stopped in Beijing first when we came,” he replies, taking another sip of his strawberry milk to buy himself time to think of what else to say. “We have to pick up Jin Ling from there when we leave.”
“Jin Ling?” Shugong asks. Jingyi panics, having failed to account for the fact that his dad and his father’s families are from different places, and therefore are not familiar with each other.
“He’s my…” Jingyi blinks, wracking his brain for the right word for cousin. There are eight different terms for cousin, none of which he can remember, and he desperately wishes he could whip out his phone to look up cousin in Google translate. Except, he’d have to connect to some random public wifi that may or may not try to steal his identity, connect to his VPN, then open Google, and staring at his phone for so long while sitting with Shugong feels rude.
“Take your time,” Shugong says, slowly fanning himself. When the breeze hits his face, Jingyi suddenly realizes that Shugong shifted the angle of his wrist so that he could help Jingyi cool down too.
It feels a little disrespectful to have his elderly great uncle fanning him, Jingyi thinks. But he doesn’t tell Shugong to stop, because he is drenched in sweat, and even the slightest breeze is a much needed reprieve from the relentless heat. It’s not even noon yet, but the back of his cotton t-shirt is already soaked through, not to mention the drops of sweat beading all over his skin and dripping down his face. He’s a little afraid to stand up, worried that there will be a sweaty wet patch across his butt.
Shugong, for his part, looks rather comfortable in his two layered shirts and long pants. His face is still dry.
“How is Jin Ling related to you?” Shugong prompts, finding a roundabout way for Jingyi to explain his family relations.
“Jin Ling is baba’s—” Jingyi cuts himself off, not knowing how to differentiate his parents in Chinese. In English, one is Dad while the other is Father, and it works just fine. But the only Chinese word Jingyi knows for a male parent is baba, and that is a problem. Jingyi strains his mind, trying to remember that time when he and Sizhui — mostly Sizhui — made small talk with the Chinese grandmother in the T&T parking lot a year ago.12 He’s still struggling to recall how Sizhui made the distinction between their fathers in Chinese, when Shugong pulls him out of his thoughts again.
“I don’t know Jin Ling, so he must be from Wei Ying’s side,” Shugong says smoothly, patiently, solving Jingyi’s crisis.
“Yes!” Jingyi chirps enthusiastically. “Jin Ling is my...Guma's kid? His older sister’s kid.”13
“Ah, is he going to study abroad?”
Jingyi nods as he continues sipping his strawberry milk.
For a moment, silence settles between them. Unlike earlier, it is a comfortable silence caused by a natural lull in the conversation.
Then Shugong continues. “You should practice your Chinese with your tang-ge,” he says, casually slipping the correct Chinese term for cousin into their conversation.14 “It’s a shame that Lan Zhan doesn’t converse in Chinese with you.”
“We speak Chinese at home,” Jingyi is quick to defend, even though the eclectic mixture of Chinglish they use at home is most definitely not what Shugong means by “speaking Chinese.”
Pouting, Jingyi sips his strawberry milk until the loud slurping signals that he has finished this carton. He frowns at it, briefly shaking the box just to be sure, when he feels movement beside him.
“Still thirsty?” Shugong asks, continuing to fan himself as he stands. “There’s a shop over there. Come.”
Shugong turns and walks away, leaving Jingyi to scramble to his feet and chase after him. For a man in his seventies, Shugong is surprisingly fast and walks with a back held straighter than even Jingyi’s father.
Jingyi follows Shugong on autopilot, vaguely aware that he throws away his empty milk box into one of the bins on the street. He hopes the red bin was the correct choice for his milk box.15
However, he does notice how Shugong’s intonation changes when he speaks to the shopkeeper. Before, Shugong sounded just like Father, but now his voice has become very soft and gentle, matching the shopkeeper’s tone. Shugong says something that Jingyi feels like he understands, except he can’t interpret the sounds at all. He stands there awkwardly, nodding with a polite smile as Shugong exchanges quick pleasantries with the shopkeeper.
As they walk out of the shop, a new box of strawberry milk in hand, Jingyi gives his shugong a questioning look. “Your voice changed just now, with that person,” Jingyi gestures vaguely towards the shop as he speaks, not knowing what a shopkeeper or a cashier is in Chinese.
“Suzhou dialect is different from Standard Mandarin.” Shugong keeps a leisurely pace so Jingyi can comfortably keep up. “That’s what the store’s laoban” — once again, Shugong smoothly slips the right word into his speech — “and I were speaking in.”
As they stop at an intersection, Jingyi watches with wide, mildly terrified eyes. They stop for barely half a second before Shugong is already stepping into the street, changing pace into his usual long, brisk strides. The light is still red, but there’s a brief lapse in traffic. Jingyi scurries behind his shugong, convinced that they are going to get run over by an oncoming car but also not wanting to be left stranded on the other side of the road. He waits until both his feet are safely on the sidewalk before asking, “Does every city have a dialect?”
“En.” Shugong takes a side path, leading into a park greener than anything Jingyi has ever seen in Toronto.
“Do all dialects sound like you’re fighting?” Jingyi asks, thinking back to the clipped tones Yu-popo, Jiang Cheng-shushu, and his dad spoke to each other in.
Looking over his shoulder to give Jingyi an amused look, Shugong strokes his beard as he says something in the same soft tone as earlier with the shopkeeper — laoban. Jingyi can’t make out what his shugong is saying, but he can tell that Shugong is poking a little fun at him.
“Has Yu Ziyuan not settled her debts with Wei Ying?” The words are phrased like a question, but Shugong’s tone indicates that he does not expect a response.
Which is for the best, because Jingyi doesn’t know how to answer it either. He’s not even entirely sure if Yu Ziyuan is supposed to be Yu-popo or Yu-nainai,16 nor does he understand how his dad is related to Yu-popo. It’s not like his parents have ever told him; Chinese dads don’t communicate with their children.
Regardless, even though Jingyi doesn’t understand the words, he does understand the point his shugong is making. The sounds in Suzhou dialect are rounder than those in Chengdu dialect, and Shugong’s voice is only made softer by the fact he is not yelling the way Yu-popo was.
It isn’t until Jingyi pokes the straw into his strawberry milk box that his brain fully catches up to him and he realizes that he’s forgotten his manners.
“Thank you, Shugong!” Jingyi says, doing an awkward little half hop, half jog to keep up with Shugong’s punishing pace.
Shugong’s eyes soften as he looks over at Jingyi and slows down his pace. “No need to speak so many extra words. Just practice your Chinese and come visit this old man, that’s all the thanks I need.”
