When I tell people how I learned English, I usually say that I learned it when I was six.

What I really mean is this: at age six, I didn’t know any English. I held in my pee because I didn’t know how to ask the teacher for permission to use the bathroom. I didn’t have a name. I didn’t know English at age seven either but I was already starting to learn the politics of knowing English. A friend who immigrated around the same time as me wasn’t in ESL because her parents wanted to teach her the English that they knew. I was in ESL because my mom wanted me to speak without an accent, because she wanted me to pass as second generation.

And I do. I pass as second generation Asian American. I barely have an accent if one at all.

I started to understand basic nouns and verbs when I was eight and I was capable of conversational English at nine but I had no confidence for actually having a conversation. I would walk around repeating “Hello, how are you?” and “Do you want to be my friend?” in my head. The kind of shit that FOBs say. When it came time to say words out loud to another person, I faltered. I was always afraid that I would say something they would misunderstand or that they would say something I couldn’t understand.

I remember the switch—sometime around puberty, I realized that I no longer needed to translate words from Chinese to English in my brain before speaking. I was walking through a school hallway when I realized the switch.

Back then, I had made my first non-immigrant friends—two girls who were both in my class. They fought with each other constantly. Middle school shit. I adopted the habit of reading because I wanted to avoid conflict. Reading helped me internalize English, helped me narrate my own thoughts using the language.

Still, there are certain words I say funny—strawberry, ambulance, and button. When I worked sales, my manager would mock me for the way I said those words and try to train the accent out of me. I didn’t know I said them funny because no one had ever told me. He was from Trinidad and scrutinized the way his associates came across to our customers. When I wrote essays for school, teachers would often tell me that my words make no sense. Even today, I have trouble expressing certain ideas because they do not appear to me in English.

But my adoption of English isn’t a net gain. My adoption of English is also how I scaffold my loss of language. Every year I took towards increasing my confidence with English marks a loss of my ability to speak in Chinese.

Writing is really hard because language is really hard. Language is about severing your own tongue.

I started to learn English when I was six. I couldn’t speak English when I was six. What I mean when I say that I started to learn English when I was six is that I started to lose Chinese when I was six. My Chinese is a six year old’s Chinese. Not only that, my Chinese is a six year old who was raised in the nineties’s Chinese.

I don’t speak the Chinese of my ancestors but my parents don’t either, not really. They speak Zhengzhou dialect, an urban dialect that bridges together the rural languages hidden in the mountains and plains. Their parents speak words that my parents don’t always understand. My laoye calls his dad’s mom laolao even though we use laolao to refer to the maternal grandma. He speaks Yexian hua. My nainai speaks something rural that no one knows about mixed in with Kaifeng dialect.

The cousins of my generation were all taught standard issue Mandarin. Except for my Aries cousin who deftly camouflages her background with a nebulous southern accent that no one can place. When she swears, she does so in Hangzhou dialect and when she flirts, she puts on a small Taiwanese accent the way many gay mainlander men do just for shits and giggles.

Why do people from Henan always want to leave like running water leaving its source? Sometimes my imagination becomes melodramatic. “I can barely speak.” I can speak. I can write in English. Fuck you.

I’m not great at speaking but I can listen. I can hear and understand words from several dialects. I understand what people are saying. I can understand “今个风老猛” and “乖乖，你吃了mo?”

When I lived in Iowa, I spoke in an outdated way. Social trends hit the coasts and then arrive in the plains. In the early 2000s, people in Iowa still spoke like we were in the nineties. We talked slowly, with sentences peppered with “dude” and “awesome” and “cool.” Stoner dialect. Stoner dialect has an innocent air and mixes well with the pseudo-sweet fundamentalist Christian voice that everyone puts on when they’re trying to get away with something.

After I moved to New York, I learned how to talk faster and more monotone. That’s the way I speak now, at least for now. At one point, learning how to speak felt like a gain in culture. It still does to some extent. Language is culture.

I write fanfiction because I struggle with making up characters—how should you name characters to correctly position them culturally? Should I use traditional Asian American names like Kevin and Jessica or would that be putting on a culture that isn’t really my own? Should I use common nonbinary queer names which are often related to water and plants? Writing fanfiction solves a lot of those issues. Your characters arrive already named, as anime characters or Kpop idols already understood by a global imagination.

I write in English because I don’t really have a voice. I understand that I sometimes mix up the word order of sentences or make typos that are common to me. That feels like a voice sometimes but it’s really the mark of absence. Writing is really hard because it forces you to listen to all of the voices that make up your voice, to all of the ESL classes and all of the separations. Writing forces you to recognize the voices that you don’t speak. I don’t speak any of the languages that I listen in, not really. Do you?