In the spirit of taking "HiFi to Wi-fi"

Papa, did you know the Four Corners Monument is the only point in the United States where you can stand in four different states at once? Your left foot can stand in Arizona, your right foot in Colorado, then you hunch over and place one hand on New Mexico, and the other in Utah. Despite you only having to bend your hip a little bit to place your palms on the floor, your body — at this quadripoint — technically occupies a combined 421,086 square miles of territory. What if I told you that I know how you can inhabit over ninety nine territories without moving

Language is also transformative in the sense of the corporeal. By embodying another world, it creates distance immediately. When someone speaks another language you can’t speak, it alienates you and stops you from understanding the other person. Even God knew this. Man, who once was of “one language” and “one speech,” worked together to create a tower to reach Heaven. God, angry with their hubris, scattered them across the face of the Earth and commanded, “Confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” The origin of language, according to the Bible, is to divide bodies so that they may never build a tower like that again. This is the story of the Tower of Babel, or bālal, to “jumble or confuse.” The word we now know today as babble — “to utter meaningless or unintelligible sounds” — can be traced to bālal and the story of that tower.

When I was younger and we still lived in the Philippines, I spoke two dialects: Tagalog and Visaya. It was only when I moved to America that I stopped speaking my native-tongue and began speaking and thinking in English. I was now not only spatially away from the Philippines, but linguistically away. Forgetting how to speak Tagalog is different from having never learned it. The emptiness doesn’t come from the fact it never existed, but that emptiness is instead defined by absence. It used to be there, but now it’s not. The world offered by Tagalog and Visaya were now sealed off, and there would forever be a window between my family and I. We could still see each other, but we could only make gestures through the foggy glass and hope the other would understand. My mother-tongue and I were separated; the umbilical cord had been snipped. “We’re in America now,” my papa says, “So, we have to speak English.”

When Lolo Arming and Lolo Luis died, I didn’t know how to mourn. I never got to know them, so I didn’t cry. They both had dementia, so they forgot how to speak English. I forgot how to speak Tagalog, so we all forgot each other. In fact, there were days I forgot I had grandfathers; when they died, there was no difference between their presence and their absence. How do you mourn ghosts? Could they even hear me?

A white, all-American man delivered a package to our house the other day, when you weren’t there. He said, “Mahal kita, everyone!” before he left to show that he knew our language. I wanted to tell him we don’t say I love you in our mother language. When it’s said, you say it in English, “I love you, Pia.” But mostly, it is unspoken: remittances, a sold house to fund my education, a kiss on the cheek before you leave for your work when you think I’m asleep.

The political philosopher Frantz Fanon writes, “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.” In other words, language is a world in and of itself. There are entire cities etched in the roll of an r. Speaking a language is transformative, transporting you from one world to another. There is a difference between good night and buenos noches, the firm sharpness of d and t versus the soft, buttery kisses in the o and s.

I read another article today that Filipino nurses are dying of COVID-19 at a significant rate, and I found myself bent over in prayer for you. I don’t speak. This is the language I remember from the silence of mama’s womb.

And I remember you, concerned that I didn’t believe in God anymore, said, “I want to talk to you about Catholic faith, Pia, but it’s hard because my English is not good.” For you, English is a destination — it is a means of arrival. But with every arrival, there is departure. I’m scared that one day, you’ll finally liberate yourself from the conqueror’s land and forget how to speak, babbling in your orphaned mother tongue. I can speak the world, but what does that mean if I can’t reach you? What if you forget how to say “I love you” to me? Will you understand me if I tell you “I love you?”