Victoria Chang

In our house, loud language was everywhere—bundles of Mandarin from Mother’s mouth, Father’s nearly perfect English but Taiwanese-accented Mandarin. Then our Chinglish. But in our house, silence arranged itself like furniture. I was always bumping into it. When unrelated aunties and uncles came over for dinner parties, I envied the laughing as they drank Riunite wine, ate steaming fish and tofu. When they left, they took all the words. What was left after their laughter was always my grief.

I’m reminded of what Donald Barthelme said: The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.iii

Recently, during a reading, the poet Valzhyna Mort said, Lacking language is the beginning of a poem to me. This is what writing feels like to me too. In some ways we are coming out of silence to make a new language. This making comes out of a deep desire to understand something that is invisible and voiceless.

Do you know that Jeanette Winterson cast this generative uncertainty of creative practice in terms of time in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery:

Writing feels like being within you, silence, and then emerging, bronzed. Somehow, writing feels more related to beginnings than endings. Writing feels outside of time. In a windowless room. Not in a room at all. In a state of being half-awake and half-possessed. In an endless snowstorm, ploughed under. Alone. As I reach for memory that has become extinct.