> small victories
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: new year, new format, big move, and small victories.
Hello friend,
Two Augusts ago, I was walking around Boston. It was very hot and I was looking for shade. While I was walking, I saw these metal tables shaded by a building, the kind where an office worker might go outside to eat lunch. Nobody was eating lunch except these birds that were eating french fries off the pavement. I sat down and watched them eat while I called J.
I didn’t really know J, but someone at work was friends with him and told me that I should call. I called him to ask about Fulbright, which I was applying for, which he had just finished, a year teaching English in Taiwan, I mean. He called from a Chinese immersion summer camp, where he was a camp counselor, and told me that if I got the chance, I should absolutely go.
After the call ended, I walked around some more and found an entire block full of water. I mean a pool of water, maybe a foot deep, in a large rectangular basin. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Later, I learned that I had found the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Plaza. There were a lot of dogs and children in strollers at the reflecting pool, or at least that’s what I remember. I sat down at the edge of the pool while I called Michael.
I know Michael from high school, and usually we call in English, but this time I asked to call in Chinese, maybe because I had just called J about living in Taiwan. Michael studied Chinese through college, meaning his is much better than mine, meaning our conversation was stuttery and awkward, not least because we usually call in English. I think the connection was poor, and the water and people were loud, so we hung up and I kept walking around the Back Bay. I found comfort wandering around a city I didn’t really know and was about to leave.
Now, in Taiwan, starting the grant that once seemed like a fantasy, I remember my self-consciousness from that day, from talking to a stranger and talking to a friend. I don’t know if many kids of Chinese immigrants feel this way, but I’ve been embarrassed of my language for a long time. Maybe I’m embarrassed because I want so badly to be better, but haven’t devoted the time to doing so.
I wanted to study Chinese in college. The summer before my freshman year, I contacted the Chinese Flagship program, asking if I could fit a Chinese minor into my biology and English degrees. The emails I sent are now cringeworthy relics of a time when I valued ambition above all else. I wanted majors in biology and English, minors in Spanish and Chinese, pre-med requirements. I loved learning, but I convinced myself that learning was not enough until I showed a form of mastery—a diploma, an acknowledgement on paper. When I called, I remember sitting on the carpet, leaning against the bed in the sun. I gave up when they told me that it would take five years, not four, to finish everything.
I devalued my Chinese, feeling that it held little worth unless I was fluent.
I haven’t been in Taiwan long, but there have already been a few embarrassing moments when I use Chinese. There was the half hour where the taxi driver talked about Taiwanese history, and I nodded along without understanding a lick of what he said. There was the time when I messed up basic characters, mistaking 木 for 大, which transformed “papaya” flavor to my invented flavor of “big melon.”
For most of college, I wanted those moments to disappear. I wanted certainty in my word choice, my handwriting. But these stumblings will always be there.
There is a delight that only comes from small moments of using another language: calling the front desk to ask a question, translating flavors of shaved ice, talking to the taxi driver about fields of sugarcane. I value these moments of learning now, the mistakes, the small victories. I want to make these moments when I teach.
I’ve been thinking about Lynda Barry’s diary entry prompts for her class, where she talks about listening to “the back of your mind”:
If you regard this practice as a not-yet-understood means of deepening your experience in this mysterious, sad, hilarious, beautiful and terrible world, one that creates increasing conditions for insight and intuition, then you may find ‘reason’ enough to convince the top of your mind to let you give it your time, even if the value of the exercise remains unclear for now.
I MISS CLASS! Not all classes, but the ones with small victories. I miss the celebration when someone makes their piece better in workshop. I miss flipping rocks over to find mayfly nymphs. I miss waiting for my favorite classmate to say something cool in discussion. I wish I could take Lynda Barry's class and I want to be the kind of teacher where learning is thoughtful play, not a chore.
And I also want to document this time, not in the "let me make a list of events" kind of way but instead in the "here is what I am trying to figure out" kind of way. When I was in Nanjing, I kept an infrequent blog, but going back to it now, it seems like it carries almost no information of importance. What did she think of the people around her? What were the smells/feels/touches? What were the images of living? And somewhere in those overlooked images are answers to bigger questions. Who did she want to be? The problem is that I don’t know what I want to remember until I’ve already forgotten.
But for today, I’m just talking about small victories. Here’s one—when I told J that I was going to Taiwan, he told me:
“It’ll be the best year of your YUNG LIFE.”
Cheers,
Tiffany