Having to speak in this language with their audibly standardized rhythmicity was impossible for her. Their faces expressed pity each time they observed her lack of understanding their complex jargon or her inability to accommodate her own internal air from moving past her tightly wound larynx and prominently accented vocal cords so that she could force out words and broken phrases that at least sounded cogent and comfortably familiar to them.
No one here seems to understand just how difficult it was for her to express what was going with her body. She really wanted to assist them with figuring out what medical specters currently haunted her body but some words were just beyond her vocal capabilities.
It goes without saying that she’s never fluent in their language. Familiarity with words and occasionally voicing them out in released breathless beats are difficult because certain consonants required more accommodation of her mouth, some made her tongue still itself in frozen retaliation. Some words she would and could repeatedly use didn’t leave any impact to the listener but prompted more confusion and follow-up questions that required more delicate parsing between her and them.
Repetition was never a measure for valid fluency her daughter once informed her. While her body stood situated among a small pool of fluent speakers, her ears attempted to listen and memorize any words that might be useful for her and her family in the future. Regardless of how many times she forced her ears to open up their words and pronunciations, inwardly reciting in her own imagined correct enunciation of whatever the word du jour was. Wherever those internal enunciations she memorized inwardly traveled to, her mouth and tongue never worked in the correct tandem to lift those words off her chest. Those words, the many she once attempted to hoard inside her body never left; they’re now just a clutter of incorrect words that she can’t express.
Interpreters weren’t available since this medical emergency occurred on such short notice. But weren’t they all? Medical emergencies are never planned nor does anyone schedule them.
She opens that pamphlet she brought with her. A pamphlet printed in 1979 by that humanitarian organization that once helped them settle here; it was one of the many old, brown and yellow stained, dated American resources she and her husband kept buried in a pile of foxing papers since moving into their permanent house.
Not that these dated printed sources would guide her any more than what the nurse in front of her could offer, but she turned to page 27, the Health — Sức Khỏe section— rereading some of her daughter’s margin notes, annotated guides she wrote sometime in the early 1990s for her and her husband to sound out certain words in case she wasn’t around to translate or interpret for them:
Great question: how did it happen? How did anything related to their bodies happen?
More importantly, how is she able to describe medical abnormalities that deviated from a normally functioning healthy body to the nurses or the doctor, someone she’s been waiting for ever since their arrival? All the pamphlet does is serve her with simple phrases and words, a simple script that reads like uncomplicated phrases that she could try harder to say, speak, understand, and convey through speech, but lacks the comprehension and communicative skills to perfectly perform.
At this point, the pages she’s rereading, reviewing, and attempting to decode are blanketed in unreadable print. They remind her of the time she and her daughter were browsing the shelves at a Barnes and Noble. Riddled as a person who is both speechless and wordless burdened with heavy thoughts here, she entered each space, piled with shelves of books, walking around a sea of books that she couldn’t read. Her daughter would pull a book off every few shelves, concentrating on the words printed on the back. Stacks of printed words surrounded them and her body only reacted to the envious feeling she had for her daughter and the many strangers walking around the store at the moment while being ashamed of her illiteracy here.
“Can you try telling us what’s going on?” inquired one of the many nurses, their tone hesitant, paralleling her own hesitance that often formed into defeated silence. They pointed for added emphasis just in case she needed nonverbal, body signals.
She wants to respond with an “I don’t know,” a customary phrase she can perfectly speak and then supplement that unhelpful information with the word “headaches,” a word she always enunciates as hay-ache, but others hear hey-egg. In fact, she’s surprised that “I don’t know” isn’t printed in the pamphlet. She’s certain that people, mothers like her who don’t belong here simply don’t know anything medical related. But the phrase, “I don’t know,” along with a singular headache attached to form an ambivalent non-sequitur were too vague for the nurse.
Again, unable to answer, she skims, hoping to search for something and anything to help her form whatever words are necessary for them, and for her behalf:
“Mrs. — um, ma’am?” the nurse tries again. She still doesn’t know how to respond to them, can’t really respond when she doesn’t know how to.
Several years ago, probably nearly a decade ago, she had a bladder infection. Only at the time she didn’t know it was a bladder infection, didn’t even know bladders could be inflicted by an infection.
She felt an unbearable pressure in her lower abdomen but ignored it, of all the things she excelled at, it was ignoring the pain and continuing on with the expected physical labor she had to perform and complete; she’s experienced worst pain back at home when she was an unmarried woman, living to work and survive a conflict she was born into. Tears blurred her eyes each time she felt something burning when she urinated something cloudy and odorous; she didn’t know what she was supposed to feel when she spotted blood in her urine.
She told her husband she thought it was UTI, something she heard the other women at work discuss and mentioned in the changing rooms. She quenched that pain with cranberry, something her husband learned from his coworkers.
Days later, she still felt that pressure in her lower abdomen, she thought it was specifically the pelvis; she nearly cried when she still felt that burning sensation every time she urinated; she was still spotting blood; but yet, she endured and carried on, letting the pain dwell down there.
She ignored her daughter when she offered to take her to the doctor. She remembered vomiting when she tried to get up from the sofa, her face smeared with cold sweat. Her body vibrated, shocking her inner core every time a shiver reached her spine from that invisible chill. She remembered her husband holding her, forcing her to stand as she nearly fell down; she remembered her daughter holding a small plastic trash can, holding it up to her chest, wiping the putrid chunks of acid bile off her body and hurling them into the trash can.
Two days before Christmas, her daughter drove her to the ER without asking her.
When she was finally called into a room, her daughter followed and spoke to the nurses. Then, she still wasn’t capable of speaking more than incoherent words that she attempted to assemble into fragmented sentences, which wasn’t anything different now. When the doctor asked her daughter if she experienced pain anywhere else besides her lower half, her daughter repeated the question in their language.
Alone, she just couldn’t adapt and correctly explain her symptoms in their language without pointing, sometimes dramatically because theatrics always reacted to her anxiety, confusion, and fear. Even with her daughter present, she wasn’t necessarily seen nor did she have a voice in the same shared space. All she could do was close her eyes and dramatically use both hands to painfully hold her throbbing head and gently shake it.
Her red face must have contorted into a theatrical comedic mask because she heard the doctor struggling to not laugh at her and respond to her bodily response with “okay.” She didn’t hear her daughter laugh but after a few weeks in recovery, her daughter admitted that she was struggling not to laugh, opting to cover her face with the book she brought with her while her shoulders trembled uncontrollably due to the amount of hard breathing she had to inhale to avoid releasing her fit of giggles. At least her daughter had the decency to not laugh at her in public.
Was it language that was unkind to people like her or was it the people who spoke and responded in exasperation to people like her who were unkind and unsympathetic to her linguistic plight?
She returns to page 31 and reviews the printed list again, not that returning back to it would help her in her current predicament:
As the list hinted, whichever lower body part was causing her pain, it certainly wasn’t included on the list, bladder wasn’t included in the printed list of common body parts. As usual, what’s printed and used as a resource, as well intentioned as it was intended to be, was incomplete. Her daughter’s margin notes were inconsistent and she wasn’t sure about several words as well, particularly the temples, which she herself had trouble spelling the word out phonetically to her daughter.
One of her coworkers, one of the many who kindly conversed with her without any hints of sublingual glands salivating at the prospect of patronizing a nonspeaker such as herself, described bọng đái as a “body bag that keeps water inside the belly.” That’s how she learned that bladder was the English equivalent of bọng đái, a term her daughter didn’t learn until she was diagnosed with a bladder infection. If her daughter didn’t know she was suffering from a bladder infection, how would she know?
The only difference separating them was her daughter had the ability to describe the pain to the doctor, in their language, and possibly discuss the symptoms with them. She couldn’t even dissect her own pain in their words.
Words, or language as a whole, could only offer so much when dependent on assistance, necessity, and survival. Her body might be hers and yet others possessed the linguistic knowledge to procure or withdraw complete information about her very own body.
If she doesn’t acquire the necessary linguistic knowledge to understand the changes, occurrences, and scientific mysteries occupying her body, then how does she consent? Does she only maintain half ownership of her body as well?
Not that information was going to be further extracted since it’s been useless for years now, but she still had that nervous habit of needing to flip through the pamphlet:
Now, she realizes just how the medical world consciously constructs and centers everything around men and their bodies and their illnesses, even in imagined hypothetical situations. The reader is assumed to be a man; the son is the one in pain, not the daughter. Of course, she could substitute each word with what she perceives as the correct term but it’s still jarring to see and read when women aren’t seen as a medical priority.
As both a woman and mother, how can she voice her own concerns and additional inquiries about her body when she can only describe them in her language? And especially when women and others stuck in a similar linguistic plight are undervalued and unseen in the public’s eyes?
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I know it’s hard, but if you can’t tell us what’s going on, it’s harder for us,” the nurse attempts again, frustration clearly evident in their tone.
She wants to apologize but even the word “sorry” is meaningless at this point. She can convey to them the many words of her language enveloping and traveling around her mind but how does that help when there’s still a distance between her and them? Almost similarly constructed bodies but language deconstructs everything, all of them.
Distance can be navigable if both the mind and body, inseparable as they are when weighed down by trauma that feels deathless, allows time to languidly pass through the allotted nanoscopic space without any tangible contentious strife.
And yet she can’t even express this perceived strife she or her family might feel or experience. Just like this current moment; she’s afraid and repeats it to herself like a mantra; she can tell the nurse that she’s simply scared in their language because she’s able to extract two separate words into a singular statement.
***
She finally looks at the nurse with her tired, red, and swollen eyes and points to her daughter, her body lying on the hospital cot since their arrival.
She wants to tell the nurse she’s equally frustrated like them and scared since she can’t tell them why her daughter could speak to her for several minutes and seconds later, her daughter fell down, her body spread out onto the wooden floors like an unmovable mat, lying down there, unresponsive.
Not once has she ever acted as her daughter’s interpreter. What can she say to assist the nurse standing near here since being called into this private room when she can’t speak their specific language where medical specificities are essential to saving her daughter? Those six pages from the condensed health section, brief but never concise, did not include a guide for pronunciations.
She returns to the front cover of the pamphlet, one that has relocated with her family and attempted to guide them on many failed occasions.
In a total of 64 sparingly written pages, wasn’t this pamphlet too paper thin to fully convey the new American life she was expected to subscribe to then and in the current present?
Kathy Nguyen received her doctorate in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies from Texas Woman’s University. She is a community faculty of Ethnic and Gender Studies at Metro State University. Her first chapbook, Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues, is forthcoming.
