On Learning Silence from My Grandmother

She spoke four languages and chose none of them to say what mattered most. I used to think that was a tragedy. Now I think it was a kind of devotion.

My grandmother came to Taiwan from Shanghai in 1949, which is to say she arrived carrying everything and left everything behind, which is to say she arrived with nothing but the particular weight of having once had everything. She spoke Shanghainese at home, Mandarin to officials, Taiwanese to neighbours who would accept her only partially, and Japanese to my grandfather, who had learned it during the occupation and never quite unlearned it. She moved between these languages the way water moves between vessels — taking the shape of each container without ever losing its essential nature.

What she did not speak, in any language, was the thing that had happened to her family in the crossing. This was not unusual. Many people who arrived in 1949 did not speak about it. The silence was collective, which made it harder to locate — it was not her silence specifically but a silence that had distributed itself across a generation, taken up residence in kitchens and at dinner tables, and become, over time, indistinguishable from ordinary quiet.

I learned this from watching her. The way she would begin a sentence in Shanghainese and stop. The way she would pick up an object — a bowl, a photograph, a piece of cloth — and hold it for a moment longer than the task required. The way she would sometimes answer a question I hadn't asked.

After she died, I found a notebook. It was in Shanghainese, which I cannot read. My mother can read it but has not told me what it says. I have not asked. I think I understand now that some things are not mine to know — not because they are being withheld from me but because they belong to a silence that preceded me, that will outlast me, that is doing the work that language cannot do.

I am writing this in English, which was not her language. I am writing it because I want to say: I heard you. Even the parts you didn't say.