Over the summer, I learned that I was virtually illiterate in Chinese.

Before my junior year ended, my mother had recommended me a book about women who have forgotten their roots. Rural Chinese women in one village, the Grandma Zhangs and Auntie Yangs everyone has known for several decades, gradually forgot their given names––they remembered themselves as the names by which others called them; they remembered themselves by Grandma Zhang and Auntie Yang. I asked to buy the book, planning to read it with the detached curiosity of an ethnographer. The book was a memoir of the author’s, so the people she mentions are real but of a socioeconomic class immensely foreign to me. I asked to buy the book, remembering that the last time I had read Chinese books, I devoured the entire translated Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I asked to buy the book, and when it arrived in the mail I savoured every electric crackle of the plastic film that encased the book as I carefully tore it through, and brought the book’s pages to my nose for a whiff of that new-book smell. Sniffing book pages is a habit of mine that I’ve accepted, and I do it a little self-consciously at school, and a little shamelessly at home. I began reading on the first page. Within the line I realised that my brain could no longer glide along the page and decode every word for its meaning like it could with books written in English. In a bizarre twist of irony, I realised that I had forgotten my roots just like the women in the book that I had yet to encounter.

When I was seven or eight, my auntie invited me to try my hand at calligraphy writing. I fidgeted and squirmed as the brush pen, full of inky potential, refused to heed to my hand’s command.

“What do you think?” My auntie had asked.

“You know when you’re wearing gloves on a cold day, and your hands have this suspended feeling and feel so out of control your whole body fills with frustration and you just want to tear the gloves off?” I said, feeling violent and sweaty. I resisted the urge to fling the brush across the room, ink and all. “That’s how I feel right now.”

So I couldn’t read Chinese. Not a good half of it, at least. I weighed the reality of that on my tongue. I accepted my inability to write Chinese long ago. “Oh, but I really can’t write very well,” I would say with a sheepish smile to inquiring adults. Two months at a Chinese public school was not enough for my hand to develop the muscle memory needed to write sophisticated, upright characters, even if I developed an intuition for pin yin and the order of strokes for every character. My hand moved ever so slightly out of step with my intention, rendering my written characters as juvenile as those of a fifth grader. Minus her vocabulary, probably. I cut my losses for not being able to write very well; I cut them in middle school, then and there. But the knowledge of not being able to read Chinese books stung like a fresher wound. I still spoke Chinese well; I knew all the slang terms and how to modulate how I spoke it to sound foolish or haughty. But I couldn’t read certain road names or most books.

There’s a saying in Chinese––there’s always a saying in Chinese for everything, but I digress––“the one that picks up sesame seeds might lose an entire watermelon.” In gaining the little achievements, one could lose a big victory. The last five years I spent steadily studying French, not knowing the I was also forgetting another language and a big part of my identity. But in getting older I also learned the skills to stubbornly refuse to suck at something. Even though I could no longer read Chinese books for pleasure, I could still read Chinese to learn Chinese, much as I read French books to learn French. I sat at the kitchen table with my book day after day, pencil in hand and my phone keyboard set to the handwritten option, so I can jot down the pronunciation of foreign characters or summarise paragraphs whose syntax confused my brain until the second or third reading.

Towards the end of the book––I haven’t gotten there yet, but so my mother tells me––there is a list of the given names of the women who have forgotten them. Imagine the painstaking process the author must have gone through to track those names down. But throughout the globe, we’re all chasing parts of our history, bit by bit.