only the body speaks

the failure of language

These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers. Only the juke box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated, synthetic laments for love.

— James Baldwin, Another Country

Photo by Federico Di Dio photography on Unsplash

the plight of a 21st-century vampire

Everyone’s on their damn phones nowadays. Everything’s seasoned with garlic. Holed up in my room, I read shit like Dracula and long for a time that never belonged to me: the golden age of vampirism, when forensics wasn’t so advanced and you could crack open the neck of a bystander when you felt like it.

Now, when I talk to you, it’s all signaling. Our shared jargon and common courtesies obscure our real meaning even as they motion at our intentions. We’re always waving through the window: small talk delivered on a spectrum from “I don’t want to talk” to “let’s get to know each other better”. Don’t get me wrong—courtesy is necessary, I’m not one of those people who bemoans the existence of small talk. A vampire must be invited in, after all. But what’s next? I stand in your foyer, forgetting the words to tip your head back and open a wound in your throat.

And with each day that goes by I feel more and more as though there are no words. Those that existed when Dracula took his victims are long wrung out, their meaning splattered on the ground. I guess substance means less to me now, even when I read. Instead I’m chasing after rhythm, which is harder to obscure. How it sounds when you look my way: some pure ringing, the pitch unimportant.

Older now, we speak through symbols, reading out runes clouding thickly over the world—at least with other native English speakers, who’ve steeped in the same conversational patterns since birth. The more fluent we are in a common language, the fuzzier we design our sentences to be. Shared iconography means we live in the same neighborhood, we chuckle at the same jokes, we enter foyers and hang up our coats; but iconography is no blade precise enough to draw blood from your throat.

Instead, over decades, we evolve ways to skirt around meaning: “I care about you”, said in every way except with those words. Innumerable devices to dull the blade enough to deny attachment, so one can bow out politely at the first sight of danger with everyone’s dignity intact. It makes sense, given the human fear of humiliation, that in our most fluent language we’re also most skilled at avoiding vulnerability.

Everything approximate, a haze around our true meaning. But you know that everyone’s secretly a vampire themselves. Invulnerable. Immortal. Hoping a pool of warm blood exists somewhere.

before immortality

I grew up speaking English at school and Chinese at home. Most people in my Colorado hometown were white; most people in the part of LA that I moved to in middle school were Hispanic. The few Chinese people at school spoke Cantonese, which I still only understand three words of.

So that was it for my exposure to the Chinese language: me and my mom and my grandparents, and the Chinese news broadcasts blaring from their cubic television. Then I came to college and took a Chinese language class, interacting for the first time with people my age who spoke the language at the same level as myself. My head spun, I clapped a hand over the gash in my neck. What does it mean to take these secret words from a language used exclusively by those who provide for you, hurt you, love you, hate you, and then trade them casually with others? How does it feel to use the language meant for you’ll catch a cold in this rain to instead ask what’s your major?

I’ll tell you: it feels like an exchange of souls. It feels like the spilling open of a jar of secrets, looking up in panic only to find that another jar lies shattered on the ground. It feels like a code only you knew being cracked by a stranger.

Hearing Chinese brings me back to childhood: fevered four-year-old me being carried on my grandfather’s back through the streets of Shenzhen to get medicine from the pharmacy; warm tofu pudding in a Styrofoam cup after school; red-tinted operatic movies played on repeat where a woman turns into a fish and back. All of these secrets laid bare by the blade of language.

Once, I learned another language’s secrets as well. In the primarily Hispanic community where I spent middle and high school, almost everyone was fluent in Spanish. Fed up with not being able to understand when my friends were making fun of me, I took AP Spanish Language in my junior year of high school, despite not having taken the prerequisite courses. Everyone in the class was already a native Spanish speaker; they were just there to learn to ace the exam. I stumbled my way through the first month, barely knowing when the teacher asked us to put our notes away for a quiz or when she called out the homework assignment.

By the end of the semester I was reading Borges, and so Spanish became a language of romance, unreality, death. In English I floundered and hid my meaning under a mask of detached amusement. In Spanish I put my heart forward in words chosen with deliberation. After all, I couldn’t afford to introduce ambiguity into my statements: my capacity for conversation was limited enough already. In Spanish I spoke with the other students in my class and felt a radiating kindness that I never found in English. They might lean over and whisper, Can I borrow your eraser? and I would feel an unending tenderness. Once or twice, maybe, I even formed a sentence with real beauty.

Then the pandemic hit; the next year, AP Spanish Literature and AP Calculus BC were offered during the same period. Bitterly, I registered for calculus, knowing the choice would mean the death of my Spanish-speaking self but also knowing that none of the colleges I was applying to would take me seriously if I decided against the math class.

I barely know Spanish anymore. All the secrets I once glimpsed the edges of have faded.

the silver bullet

Sometimes I admit defeat. In the end, I think, the only way to cut through is with sandpaper. Touch you; abrade you; so we know we are more than the runes dotting our skin. Words do a lot, but in the end, they’re symbols like the rest of us—except for our bodies, the only real thing. Sometimes I think I should just try to maximize my interactions spent not talking to people. Swim in the ocean with me or play tag with me instead, the way we got to know each other as kids.

Or, sure, talk to me—but fuck your mother tongue. Use your most guttural voice, your worst language on me. I don’t need to hear the words, just the rhythm. Then maybe we will understand each other.

Then, other times—in a pulsing pressure against my fingertips—I find the jugular. In a book, or a song, or just a really good conversation, I realize how beautiful words really are, when you make eye contact and all pretenses vanish. I’m here in your foyer for a reason; let’s not deny it. When you subvert social convention, shoot a bullet straight into the heart of the thing, we can understand each other, too.

And when I finally feel something, it comes all at once—with no idea where the bullet rips into me, the gift of friction, of my pen against rough paper, of your blood burning down my throat clear and smooth, of hands over tendon and bone, of how real everything can feel. Of flesh caught between my teeth, a reminder of fangs meant for gorging myself on the beautiful language between us.