K-MING CHANG

Mandarin Speakers

When the aliens come, they will speak Chinese. Abu says it's because 1 in 5 people speak Chinese. It's strategic for us to pray in Mandarin, maximizing the number of ghosts and/or gods who will deliver us justice. 1 in 5 dead people are Chinese, most likely. Abu loves statistics and reads them aloud to me every morning before her job at the button factory: for example, the average American generates nearly 4.5 pounds of trash each day. Unintentional drowning is the third leading cause of injury death, according to 2016. What about intentional drowning? I ask this, but Abu says don't talk about that. Americans are so wasteful, Abu says. I was born 4.5 pounds, the same size as an average American's one-day waste. When I was born, my spine lifted itself through the skin like a mast-pole, and Abu had to stitch it flat. I was so small, my aunts cradled me inside a rice bowl. I slept with the dishes and didn't outgrow a fork til I was a year old. My diaper was made of flypaper. After reading the statistic about American garbage, Abu doesn't let us throw away anything – no flushing toilet paper because our pipes are weak as the neighbor's throat, which stalls unless it's singing. She sings every night when the Sichuan Opera's on TV, her face painted thick as a scab. Paper towels are sinful: only towels and old t-shirts can eat our stains. Even the hair our pillows are hoarding can be used for something: Abu makes dolls out of the hair we coax from the drain-throat and harvest from our beds, dolls with faces like dog bites. The fish-bones we don't throw away either, reusing them instead as transparent toothpicks, plucking up cubes of papaya that look like they're levitating from our fingers.

Abu says we will reject American wastefulness, but she keeps a collection of tapes with Teresa Teng's faded face on them, and she keeps my baby teeth strung on a necklace, and she keeps a leather-banded watch that doesn't work anymore, the first thing she ever bought with her factory money, and she keeps the syringes used to inject Ama's insulin even though Ama is ash now and I never knew her, and in heaven Ama will definitely not understand our prayers in Mandarin because she only ever spoke Taiwanese, shao yin na, you crazy crab girl is what she would have called me, and Taiwanese is toneless, overhead like bad weather, nothing like the way Mandarin sounds on TV when the actresses speak it, like a tongue totaled by lightning, teeth electrified into a fence. Abu says she's learning Mandarin, staying up all night watching soap operas where all the actresses get hit by cars and develop amnesia, unable to remember the men they love, and I ask her if that's why baba's not here, because she got hit by a car and forgot him. Abu sucks on red melon seeds, spits the shells into the conch of my palm. No, Abu says, I remember everything. That's worse.

My problem, besides being born 4.5 pounds, is that I still throw things away. When Abu is away at the factory, when my aunts are asleep or tailoring jeans in the living room with the ceiling constellated with leaks or when they're meeting men with mouths like guillotines, severing every sentence that is spoken to them, I scratch Teresa Teng's face off the tapes with my thumbnails, blow the flakes onto the street. I seduce the ants into tissues soaked in sugarwater and then throw them into the dumpster behind the dimsum restaurant. I poke the insulin needles into my thigh and inject breath into my arteries, then toss them spent into the gutters. I tug the neighbor's voice in through the window and ball it in my fists, discarding it out another window. We only have two windows, but they dislike each other. Whatever weather the the bedroom window shows, the other window in the living room has to contradict it. If it's raining in one window, the other window is sun-buzzed. If it's morning in this one, the night is mooning us in the other window. I live between the two, waiting for Abu to come home, and when she does, she asks me if I've made any waste today. No, I say, and then as proof I save all my used toilet paper in a plastic bag she will burn in the backyard when it's night and no one can call the cops on us for committing arson on the contents of our own bodies. Abu says burning something is not the same as throwing it away: it's not the same as a landfill, not like sending something away to be forgotten. Fire is a form of memory, she says: smoke is what survives after loss, what is inhaled by the sky and recycled into night.

Memory loss must be a symptom of Mandarin. That's what I learned from TV and all the women with amnesia, all the women who walk onto streets without looking. Does that count as intentional death, I say, and Abu says no one is hurt on TV. It's all pretend, like when the neighbor cries on the phone for her husband to come home: she's performing for us, mimicking all the operas she loves, or how all the cars that drive onto our dead-end street turn around and rev away like we don't deserve the windows we're seen through, even though we recognize some of their faces through the windshield, all the daughters fluent in U-turn, looping their own lives, rhyming their futures with forgetting.

Someday, I say to Abu, I will pray for you. Pray in Mandarin, Abu says, and I'll learn to understand you. But I hoard the Hokkien words she says unintentionally, always unintentionally, like when her thumb grazes the stove and she says jia sai, or when the TV actress who forgets her family name is taken home from the hospital in a Lamborghini and Abu says that's hoyalang for you, or when I'm asleep at night and she leans above me, broad as the ceiling, and says don't forget me, don't forget me, aeh khee, aeh khee, aeh khee.

One time, Abu comes home with a plastic bottle full of buttons. She keeps all our plastic bottles and rinses and reuses them so many times that the plastic is thin as skin and flinches when you touch it. She says this is an instrument, and shakes the bottleful of buttons while she shimmies through the kitchen, flicking a chopstick against the refrigerator door, the edge of the sink, my forehead, a rhythm I remember to. The buttons are every color of the weather, blues and grays and blacks, and I want to arrange them on the ceiling in constellations. I want to unbutton the stars with my fingers and forget them inside my fist, stamp them out with my heels. That's what stars must look like when they're not on fire, buttons sewn flat against the sky, waiting to be undone or worn like earrings. I arrange the buttons on my mattress and flick them into the air, teaching them to UFO. I bring them to the sink full of dishwater and drown them one by one, but some of them are hollow and gold and bob up when I drop them, and so I tally their survival rate and invent my own statistic: drowning is the number one cause of floating. Abu sees me playing and says she hates buttons because she has to make them. I ask her if she hates me because she had to make me. No, she says, and laughs at the buttons I suck shiny, the way I toss them over my shoulder like coins and make a wish before they land: for the aliens to land on our roof and say we've been listening to your prayers without needing subtitles, we've been fluent in you forever. I lay the buttons on my cheekbones, each as warm as a mole on Abu's face, and I will never throw them away. Abu says buttons are for doing and undoing, but she will never undo me, though once she considered it, considered unmaking me because she was husbandless and motherless, considered ripping me out like a stitch, but that was a long time ago, before I accumulated inside her like 4.5 pounds of an average American's waste, before I taught her the Mandarin word for pray, for god, for give, forgive the weight I became in her palms that day, every day she didn't throw me away.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and the winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize in poetry. Her debut novel Bestiary is forthcoming from One World/Random House in September 2020.