American Spit by Vanessa Chan
Managing editor Esperanza Vargas Macias on today’s bonus story: Americans have a long history of imposing their ideas about language on people who they believe don’t speak “correctly.” Vanessa Chan’s piece beautifully captures how it feels to have tongues that do not easily—or willingly—abandon the sounds of our cultures.
American Spit
You roll your eyes at me in bed, sigh with the resignation of someone who feels the burden of civility resting on your thin shoulders.
“No, babe. It’s ‘con-TEM-pla-tive not ‘con-tem-PLAY-tive.’ You said it wrong again.”
You are Asian too, but American, and this makes all the difference. It means that you know how to use filler words like like in the right places, even if you don’t seem to like anything about me these days. It means that you inflect the correct consonants when you speak. But mostly it means that you have a right to tell me off—gently, but firmly—when I emphasize the wrong part of a word. It means that you have permission to chuckle—first fondly then as the weeks pass, derisively—at my failure to mimic the way you speak, the way you form words while pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Speaking this way makes me choke, the words caking saliva at the back of my throat. I wonder if this is why Americans spit so much when they speak, moisture clouds building on the side of their mouths, its own national identifier.
I wonder if you employ the same tired sigh with your mother, whose Hong Kong accent is stronger than my Malaysian one. Though perhaps I should remind you that everyone has an accent, including Americans, since an accent is merely a vocal inflection. But no, what I mean to say is, your mother, whose Hong Kong accent is even further away than my accent is from the American accent you have—I wonder if you tell her when she misses conjunctions, when she uses the wrong tense, when her verbs are conjugated wrongly. Perhaps this is a pleasure you reserve only for me, your too-Asian girlfriend, mouth too small for American pronunciation but just right for the width of your dick. I wonder if actually I am your mother, but a lite-version, one you can fix, make better, turn into the right kind of assimilated immigrant, the right kind of adjacent-American.
I wonder if this is how you love, American.
Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Best Small Fictions, and more. She has received scholarships to the Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and Tin House writers' conferences, and hosts Pete's Reading Series in Brooklyn.
