Old House

By Belinda Hu

In a bedroom on the 11th floor of an apartment building in Changsha, I ask my aunt in halting Chinese what the house she grew up in was like. It was the laojia house, she says. 是老家的房子。 My mom scoffs. She doesn’t know what that was like! 那她也不知道! My aunt squints. The laojia house...what do I say? 老家的房子,怎么说呢?

My mom and her sisters grew up in a handful of small villages (广兴洲 黄公庙 石桥 殷家铺, 卢家大屋场 金盆 墩堰 高湾 联合 荣家湾) west of Dongting Lake speaking a dialect only they knew the name of translated literally as “west of the lake.”

In the northern city where she attended university, my mom picked up Mandarin and my Mandarin-speaking dad and flew across the ocean to a new country and I grew up with Mandarin and English on my tongue and sometimes I’d hear my mom on a phone call in the downstairs bedroom with her sisters and parents laughing, and this weird warped rhythm I did not know.

My mom’s family has all moved to the city now where everyone in the streets has more standard mouths and in the winter that I was 18 I went to the countryside where my mom grew up and for the first time heard so many voices, noses and lips I did not know, speaking her language and sudden bludgeon to the chest— this was what I did not have.

Months later a woman stands twenty feet below me, a sleek wood stage in Providence, Rhode Island. My land, she told all of us, sends its greetings, and she spoke of indigeneity making what is broken whole again and bringing back what has been almost all lost.

Laojia, 老家 could be translated as hometown, or literally as old house or old home or old family... but not quite. sometimes it’s where your dad’s side of the family’s from province, city, village, neighborhood as far back as memory goes or your mom’s side or a more recent generation I think it’s what feels like home or what felt like your first home where you were once whole where you were once known

I wonder if anyone was ever that whole at some deep clean beginning before the world started to shake and people with it before people started to shake and make uneven scatterings

I wonder how someone at the beginning, if there was a beginning, could ever be whole in the way that I am terrified I am not if they too did not know where the parents of their parents and their parents before them had loved and wept if they too did not know who had made the dirt beneath their feet

But I wonder if there was such a beginning if the world has always been shaking if we have always been descendants of descendants and the universe does not proceed out of nothingness and back into it

I wonder if there has always been something.

I wonder if there is always something yet to know.

I wonder if we must become whole again on the crest of each day and that is the work of any life reaching for the memory to make your own.

I ask my mom if we’ll visit the laojia house this time. No, it’s long gone. But I’ll draw you a map. I know it.