Again, the phone was long dead. Yet it was still sticking to my fi ngers and blocking my ear, like a wrong tape playing and replaying, trying to soothe, to smooth the air. But I failed, I simply failed.
With our fractured background and lack of communication, Mandarin seemed oddly unspeakable. And in the net of our unique home dialect, there was no right word to put into that deepening hole.
It was a sad annoyance that I could never communicate well with my parents, neither in Mandarin nor in our home dialect, neither on the phone nor in person. My parents could not speak any Mandarin until they came to work in Shenzhen more than a decade earlier. And I couldn’t speak our dialect very well since I had left our home village at thirteen. Besides, I was really never much of a talker before that. If ever I talked to my family, especially our parents, I had to speak clumsily half in Mandarin and half in dialect. It was almost impossible to express anything deep and emotional.