Dear B
Dear B — when I first met you, you had dark, wavy hair that fell to just above your shoulders and wide eyes the colour of coffee beans. I had never met anyone before who had hair so like mine: so thick it held the crinkled imprint of an elastic band long after we’d pulled out our ponytails. On humid days, our hair gained a frizzy outer layer that caught fluorescent lights like a halo.
Years after we lost touch, I started carrying a notebook everywhere. It was where I wrote down lists, names, fragments. I saved slips of paper and kept them folded inside the book, which was blue and A5 size, bought from a stationery shop on Guanghua Lu. Many notes are addressed to you: Dear B – the character 破, broken, is made up of skin 皮 and stone 石. I’m sure you would be able to tell me why.
We were thirteen when we met at school. We’d both grown up in several different countries and we’re both mixed, with one parent of Chinese heritage. We looked ‘ethnically ambiguous’, as our white teacher remarked one day in front of the whole class. We knew that look in strangers’ eyes when they saw our hair and our faces and our eyes and tried to guess our racial makeup.
Four notebooks chronicle the year I spent trying to re-learn and regain proficiency in Mandarin. I can still hear your perfect pronunciation, your textbook tones. The way your voice went higher each time you crossed the border between the two languages we held inside our bodies. You moved between them effortlessly, but I struggled to hold them both at once. I practiced my favourite hanzi: 混 混 混, 绿 绿 绿. Stroke by stroke, my wrist and fingers committed them to muscle memory. I drew boxes, but my characters always spilled over the edges.
For a while I still sent you emails and searched for you on social media. I eventually stopped writing, but I still write to you in my head. B, what’s the exact difference between a mandarin and a tangerine?
I remember our teenage summers and winters, but not our autumns. I can’t remember your Chinese name. I can’t remember your star sign. I remember the look of your handwriting and that you started drinking black coffee when you were thirteen.
We met up once when we were nineteen, in Beijing, where I was doing a language course. You ran across Wangfujing Jie to greet me, laughing. At Starbucks I ordered for us easily in Chinese, for the first time in my life not needing to translate in my head. We laughed so loud and for so long that people stared. Outside, milky light faded from the Beijing sky. It was beginning to snow, but we didn’t notice.
Nina Mingya Powles
Nina Mingya Powles is a writer and zine maker from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons, and the collection of essays Small Bodies of Water forthcoming in 2021. Her poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2020. In 2019 she founded the poetry pamphlet press Bitter Melon.
© Nina Mingya Powles