I had a miscarriage, but I couldn’t find the words to tell my mother
By Jessie Tu
On the morning of my mother’s birthday a few months ago, I found out from my doctor that I had miscarried at seven weeks.
I had what is medically termed a “silent” miscarriage, which means that I had exhibited none of the symptoms one would usually experience to indicate a pregnancy loss. As a fatally transparent over-sharer, I knew that I would tell my family when I saw them later that day.
On my way to the gathering, I kept thinking about how I would tell them the news: they didn’t know I’d been pregnant. I had not yet ever experienced such a loss, so I didn’t know the order to present the information: I was pregnant yesterday. Today, I am not.
Novelist and critic Jessie Tu.Credit: Sarah Wilson
I should also add at this point that the task was made more difficult by the fact that I didn’t know the word for “miscarriage” in Mandarin, and I didn’t want to look it up.
My mother’s dominant and exclusive language is Mandarin, a language for which I possess the vocabulary of a 10-year-old native speaker.
When I arrived at my parent’s house, everyone was seated and ready to eat. I looked at my mother and said in Mandarin: “I have something to tell you,” and then very quickly I said, “I was pregnant, but then today —”
I was relentless, like a shrewd geologist obsessively turning over every stone in an attempt to unearth some hidden toxin.
That’s as far as I got. I crumbled into a wailing ball of fresh grief. My sister, who was sitting beside me, gathered me in her arms. For several minutes, nobody said a thing, silently holding the space for my anguish to take a shape.
Over the following weeks, whenever I met a stranger or caught up with a friend or acquaintance, I would tell them within moments of our meeting that I had had a miscarriage. I was relentless, like a shrewd geologist obsessively turning over every stone in an attempt to unearth some hidden toxin.
I was desperate for people to know my pain — desperate to find other women who understood this pain. Very quickly, I discovered that almost every woman I told about my miscarriage would respond with the same remark — as if guided by a teleprompter: “I am sorry”, followed by “I too have had a miscarriage” — many of them, multiple.
I knew that I was telling them about my loss so that I could feel seen, less alone, so that I could convince myself that I was normal, that what I had experienced was not an indication of my body’s ability to nurture a human child.
This compulsive desperation to be seen is perhaps why I have spent the bigger part of my adult life trying to be very good at English. Which is to say I actively sought ways to make myself a devotee of the spoken English language.
At university, I became an insatiable reader, lugging around a bag that was consistently stuffed with books randomly selected from the library. I joined a college poetry society because I knew poets understood the power of a single word to distil an emotional truth.
I read Coleridge, Yeats, Shakespeare and the white male “Classics”, thinking that their words would secure me a place of respectability among cerebral elites. I took philosophy classes in the hopes of gaining self-knowledge — committed to Francis Bacon’s “knowledge is power” adage.
Jessie Tu’s latest novel is The Honeyeater.
I must have intuited English’s global dominance — for there is a linguistic power hierarchy and my adopted language is assuredly at the top. English provided a promise of upward mobility, access to places and people whose admiration and attention I sought.
I have always worn English like a jacket. It is an armour upon which I hide all my insecurities, my shame, my contradictions, and my resolve (or lack thereof).
In English lay the hope of transcending the conditions of my youth, which I had found to be mercilessly oppressive. Wearing this jacket freed me from the trauma of being invisible, allowing me access to the professional workplace —a basic liberty that was denied to my mother and all the women who came before her.
In English, I found an ostensible freedom — but as Deborah Levy said, “Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
And the cost was my connection to my own mother. As a child, I did not want to ventriloquise her conservatism and so I turned my back on her language — a language which felt so much to me like a prison. Pakistani English translator Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi once wrote, “Languages come with ideologies attached.” As a child, I couldn’t separate my mother’s values from her dialect.
By pursuing English so doggedly, I had estranged myself from my first language —my mother’s language, pursuing this fantasy of freedom in another language. I believed that by wearing English, I’d finally have control of my life.
As a child born of a culture that reveres suffering in silence (so as not to burden those you love) trying to feel seen (and understood) can be excruciating.
So too, the feeling that my Asian ethnicity would never be seen as emblematic of a universal truth.
As a non-white person, to live and love within an anglophone culture is to be in a relationship of unrequited love. It is demanded of you to empathise with white lives, white stories, white humanities — but you can never expect that same curiosity to be reciprocated.
It is the same sort of unrequited curiosity girls are expected to perform as they move through the world, reading literature that asks them to embody the psyche of a boy — while boys are not expected to perform this with the same level of care or attention or respect or sustenance to their opposite sex.
Language is political, which means it is also deeply personal. I made an active decision not to look up the term for “miscarriage” in Mandarin that day because I didn’t want to wrap my experience in a phonics that wouldn’t give weight to what I was at that moment feeling. I didn’t want to utter a term that contained no emotional verisimilitude for me.
I understand now that this decision was fuelled by an insistence on a right to rebuff any unnecessary or further discomfort — an entitlement I must have learned during a lifetime spent in a culture that centres the individual.
When I first heard the term for “miscarriage” in Mandarin, I thought it sounded so clinical and alienating — not dissimilar to the moment my doctor told me I no longer had a “viable pregnancy”.
“Miscarriage” in Chinese (directly translated) contains two characters, the first meaning “flow” and the second, “asset/property/product”.
To me, it carried none of the shame or sense of failure I felt in the English expression. It was neutral, while the English term was doused with so much affliction.
What had I lost by abandoning my Mandarin and permanently dressing myself in English? That buried, essential part of myself. Perhaps it was I, not my mother tongue, I dreaded confronting all along.
Jessie Tu’s latest novel The Honeyeater is out now via Allen & Unwin. The author thanks her sister, Helen Stenbeck (nee Tu) for assistance with Mandarin.
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