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January hangs only the droplets of "doing January"[1] on my wall. January slipped away, bringing cold messages and carrying off snake wishes. Thanks for asking.[2]
"Inside the boat: five passengers, eight windows, awnings, oars, a stove, a teapot, a scroll, a string of prayer beads … 34 Chinese characters. Measuring less than an inch."
Excerpt from a Ming Dynasty essay marveling at an olive pit carved in the form of a boat.[4]
Language offers protective shelter,[5]
opens up unfathomable abyss[6] ——a space where we get safely lost
in hieroglyphic renderings of appearances.
We are (not) shop owners
(not) produce, and (not) fresh fruits straight from the forest,
interlocked with one another
through connective words, agentive forms, passive(-aggressive) verbs, and hypothetical states.[7]
We slipped out of the world through its cracks;
mother tongue puts us back into it.[8]
Held captive by the virus, week after week I stayed inside my cocoon, weaving myself into the fabric of the universe.[11]
Tracing down the silent thread of my past life, I arrived in the new land, where I gave birth to myself anew.[12]
聿+曰
a hand holding a brush: 聿
to record words from mouth: 曰
→ 書，books or writing
音+心
sound: 音 on top of heart: 心
→ 意，meaning[13]
mother tongue—in two parts: Mother[14] and Tongue[15]—is the baseline, the ambience,
and the substrate
in writing, publishing, and being at large
L e a v e [ s ] ⠇⠑⠁⠧⠑⠎
mother tongues : falling leaves;
alone you stand in your fate:
a driftwood founded in the storm
engraved with braille[16]
the Nature abstracts and disperses itself to generate graceful calligraphy
lines as placeholders for what beyond our understanding[17]
In the absence of our mother, we teach ourselves to speak through silence.[18]
Mothers of mothers of mothers... a fragmented story, with clues that appear and disappear; matrilineal erasure manifests in the letterpress pages, where the inked or uncolored, indented, and uneven characters, along with the spaces between them, tell the tale.[19]
handmade cloth slipcases
in earthy tones
built up like the dollhouse of an intangible tale[20]
Those didactic sayings—"You are a girl," "You are a daughter," chori/keti manche bhayera—cling to a free life like a tightening spell. Let's flip them, rewrite them.[21]
Mother tongue is remnants. Rearranged in a structure.[22]
"i" have a carrier bag (the one from Le Guin, you know?). One day, "i" received from Dad a container, the container, and a sequence of more containers—first was the unrecognizable "i" contained in stripes—then in photos—in pencil drawings of the photo and its dated caption lines—in typed texts—in frame...
each container an eye, each "i"/eye seen through your "i"s.[23]
and, hand {comma} held[24]
Deepseek you raised us with your silver eggs.[25]
AI needs no chopsticks.[26] However, AI is far more fluent than I am in a certain language. I tried several AI tools, comparing them like a savvy shopper, using them as mirrors to reflect the language I struggled with. It just so happens that this language is spoken by the people of my birthplace—my lost mother tongue,[27] drifting like scattered clouds.[28]
We did it: a machine that speaks our languages. But who's their master now?[29]
Who holds all the memories?
Will memories fade like smoke and ashes? Perhaps they never truly vanish or blur. Maybe they undergo multiple rounds of archiving and categorization. Maybe they are rearranged by skillful hands, adept in the Korean art of floral arrangement (cocoji, 꽃꽃이), into whimsical shapes—an octopus, a piece of cake, lanterns, a nebula…[30]
"Setting"
a. the gesture of setting a table
b. the framework element of narration in a story
Set a window to wear a dress.
Set to "set" a table, on March 30, which will be full of texts and storylines.[31]
In my familiar & forever grey, Sichuanese only uses me for curses.
Death should not be our learned dialect.
Streets and streets: my empty mouths.[32]
as quiet as night in the day,[33]
sing in the dialect of a distant hometown,
like waving to old friends,
and casting the shapes of the past and time zones into the void.[34]
Beautiful morning wishes are made for you. Contemporary art is gross.
Not as good as cats' asses. Hearts hearts hearts, Qambarkhan.
My language is poor, my music is good.[35]
Heib, mongx dios dai xid yol (Hey, who are you?)
Ait deis zas lix zas od (Why have you abandoned the fields?)[36]
Oh, I'm on my way returning to the fields with the worlds,
sowing brand new, character-like seeds.[37]
To escape.
To drink.
(The red fermented rice slowly burns onto our faces)
everywhere can be Fuzhou.[38]
བོ ད་པའི ་མེ ་ཏོ ག
my language . the inner arm. unshaved. with roses[39]
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