I come across the phrase 杂忆 when I read the title of a memoir essay examining a Chinese life told through blood-soaked big-character posters. Trauma is recounted in fragments because recounting it all at once is too painful. The Chinese dictionary I use to aid my translation informs me that 杂忆, záyì, is not a phrase, but two separate characters, two separate fragments: 杂, zá meaning miscellaneous, various; 忆, yì meaning to recollect, to remember. But my mother, my Chinese language confirmer, texts me back to say that 杂忆 is a connected phrase describing the fragmented structure of memoir essays, used primarily in a literary sense—a list of various recollections. I trust my mother more than the dictionary. My mother speaks in wholes while her daughter thinks in fragments. And I believe her because I desperately want 杂忆 to be a full phrase, for how I adore this literary distinction of how memory is replayed and re-lived in paragraphs, sentences, letters, characters—fragments—for the reader to put together. What else is a memoir written but fragments pulled, from the writer’s aching tender fingers? When I think of my 杂忆, my fragments of memory, I think of my grandfather’s face. I think of newly eroded wrinkles cracking his cheeks into more and more fragments, wrinkles I neither ask for nor remember, yet nonetheless appear, as if punishing me for my inability to see him more often than once a year or every two years—we are separated by oceans, by paid time off, by jet lag, by pandemics, by wars fought before I was born. When I think of my 杂忆, my fragments of memory, I think of my grandfather’s hands, waving at me from his fifth floor apartment window as I drag my luggage to the taxi, heading to the airport yet again, going back to New York after two weeks in Beijing: a granddaughter and grandfather relationship built and destroyed by fragments of time, by fragments of my wallet and airline miles collected for months until constructed into one round trip ticket. When I think of my 杂忆, my fragments of memory, I think of my grandfather’s fingers, the joints split into swollen and bumpy fragments due to his Kashin Beck disease from contaminated crops and water, a suspected byproduct of Japanese settler and ecological colonialism affecting northeastern China “back then”—back then is an English phrase my mother uses to describe yet another fragment of time that cracks open my family’s tree, bodies, selves, memories. I clutch my 杂忆 but the fragments slip past my uncalloused palms; I tread on my languages and swim through my tears.
Jade Song is a queer Chinese American writer, art director, and artist. Her essays and short fiction have received support from Tin House, been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology, and have appeared/are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Hobart, The Offing, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Find her at jadessong.com.
