I feel so OPEN HEART

I

At our weekly Friday/Saturday night gatherings, one uncle used to take special joy in declaring loudly, in English, ‘I feel so OPEN HEART. Are you OPEN HEART??’ Each time this would send everyone within earshot – but especially us second-gen English-speaking kids – into fits of laughter; uncle’s genius rendering of the Cantonese ‘happy’ (開心  hoi1 sam1, composed of the characters 開 ‘open’ and 心 ‘heart’) in this most literal of translations. This was the same uncle who would relish saying, Wahh, so bou1 tau6 fu6, transliterating ‘beautiful’ into bou1 (煲; ‘cook’) tau6 fu6 (豆腐; ‘tofu’); the same uncle who would march up to the Maccas counter, when most other newly arrived refugee parents sent their kids instead, and loudly order a ‘si-torbellysundown’ (strawberry sundae) - as much for the laughs afterward than anything else.

II

Young kids in school, when embarking on that magical (ad)venture that is learning how to read, are often given a list of heart words – words in the English language that are frequently used but phonetically indecipherable, words such as: ‘the’, ‘one’, ‘said’. Their little five- and six-year-old brains instructed to commit these words to memory, to ‘learn them by heart’. The heart words offered here work in rather the opposite way; terms so ordinary and familiar that the native speaker might think nothing of their composition, their clues and cues hiding right there, in plain sight, absorbed into the everyday comings and goings of language. But looking at them through the distance of diaspora, perhaps something else emerges.

III

'Most important, how not to essentialize [language] loss even when loss is embodied and intimately felt, but rather to treat loss itself as…a kind of prosthetics?'-Rey Chow¹ 

IV

Carry heart, release heart, focus heart: translations such as these are referred to by linguists as literal translations, or more specifically, ‘calques’. The word ‘calque’ derives from the French verb, calquer, which means to trace, or to transfer by rubbing (as one might with carbon paper); it is to copy exactly. To trace, though, is not to draw; it is not to take in the whole – its form, its presence, its meaning – but to chase the line, to follow its contour exactingly and unyieldingly. A calque is in a sense, then, a mishearing of the word, a rigid perceiving coupled with an untuned transposing. But this is also what makes it fun/ny; to play with the literal in this way is to revel in the clunkiness inserted into the lyricism of language. 放心啦 ! (fong3 sam1 laa1) = don’t worry! = 放 release + 心 heart + 啦 [final particle] = release heart lah! 

Sometimes, it also is to hear a meaning more deeply than before: 我好擔心 (ngo5 hou2 daam1 sam1) = I’m very worried = 我好  I [am] very + 擔 carry 心 heart = I’m very carry heart. These mis-(dis?)-translations animate emotions and affective states more vividly than any standard translation ever could, such that only distortions will do; traduire, c’est trahir (to translate is to betray), but maybe also, to betray is to translate (trahir, c’est traduire).

V

'What then if emotions are not subjective - contained in us - but are somehow outside and around us, belonging to places and spaces that are essentially public, rather than to our private mind or unique bodily being? What if emotions are not only or mainly an indication of subjectivity - as is often presumed - but an expression of something extra-subjective? What if emotion is more out there than in here? What difference would that make?'-Edward S. Casey⁴

心 in Chinese, phoneticised as sam1 in Cantonese jyutping, is usually foremost translated into English as ‘heart’ – that most essential of bodily organs. But though 心 is said to pictographically depict the anatomical heart, its meaning is also more expansive than this: 心 can also mean mind, intention, core, centre.

In his meditation on the place of emotion – the where of emotion – Casey urges us to look to the heart, certainly, but also to look beyond it. Which is also to say, to look at the heart as we perhaps have not seen it before; the heart ‘not as an internal organ or psychical center…as a mere container or way-station for emotions,’ but rather, the heart as ‘the propelling force by which the human being moves beyond it[s] own internal limits.’⁵ For Casey,⁶ emotions – and the heart, as its fêted seat and symbol – don’t primarily reside within us, individuated and separated from the world. Emotional life generates in, alongside, and through the company of others and places.  

What of linguistic life: where do languages reside, where do they generate? Where do languages belong, and to whom do they belong?

VI

Intergenerational language practice in the diaspora is often explained in temporally extended and distended terms; language preservation, heritage speaker, language as our bridge to the past, it will give them an advantage in the future, they will thank you when they grow up… as if these temporal threads are needed to anchor our parenting tongues, to steady them with purpose. But what of the here and now? What if all I crave is, not a future grown child closing some international business deal, not a grown child in adult language classes advantaged with their ear for tone -- but a child, here, now, immersed in a shared linguistic present? A present where my mouth makes the same shapes as yours, lips pressing and tongues curling, tones rising and bending and cresting in song, together; here, now. A fumbling, fragmented – but coinciding – present. One where you are tickled by the thought that 開心 (happy) means ‘open’ and ‘heart’, that’s so craaaazy, mummy, one where you laugh and then start to imagine your own little chest opening upward and outward, expanding into the world, bigger and bigger; that’s actually how it feels, mum! 

With thanks to: dad, mum, uncle sweet potato, Cathy, Steve, Maia, Oscar, Mei, Nicole, and Patrick.