Greetings, true believers!

Certain parties have asked me to submit writings to Octopus Army. I was planning to compose this short story, "The Dead Language," for this month's "Ancient Civilizations"-themed issue. Unfortunately, I felt very lazy this weekend, so I only wrote the first part. I should probably write the rest, but I figure, "Ah, who cares?" Anyway, here it is. Hope you find it to be a laugh riot!

Excelsior!

"The Dead Language:"

Jiang Ho was only five years old when he arrived in Rhode Island on a boat with his parents. Ho’s parents had emigrated from a small province in northern China, where they had been shopkeepers. They had had money. But everyone in their small village, especially Ho’s parents, knew what the Cultural Revolution meant: It meant the Communist government was going to seize their shop. It meant Ho’s parents were going to lose their money. So they escaped to America rather than stay and lose everything.

Ho’s parents smuggled gold out of northern China through a family friend whom they had known all their lives. The friend arrived in America on a ship before them, then disappeared with all the gold he had been entrusted with. Ho’s parents were able to smuggle a little gold by themselves. The gold paid for passage to the nearest large city, a small shop, and an apartment. Ho’s parents chose to settle in New York—Chinatown, specifically—out of hope they would find others from their small village. They encountered no one they could recognize. Yet they stayed, mainly because there was no money left to travel elsewhere.

Father Ho made shoes in the shop he purchased. It had been his profession in the old country; it remained his profession in the new one. He barely made enough money to keep his family from being tossed into the streets. So when his son, Jiang Ho, was about eight years old, he was already working seven nights a week as a kitchen helper in a neighborhood restaurant. He earned fifty cents a night.

The profession of shoemaker would have been Jiang Ho’s profession, as it was traditionally passed down from father to son. Along with the craft of shoemaking, also passed down to Jiang Ho was the written and spoken language of his parents’ native village. It had been very particular to that small province, this dialect called Moyungese. It was so regional, in fact, that outside the tiny village from which Ho’s parents originated, no other peoples in China spoke or wrote Moyungese. When the

Cultural Revolution swept across China in 19__, the few teachers who taught Moyungese were imprisoned and executed. All the villagers who had learned the dialect had to either unlearn it, or die in work camps. Very quickly, Moyungese, for all extensive purposes, died out and was forgotten. Yet Jiang Ho’s parents persisted in teaching him this “dead language,” even though no one in the new land appeared to understand it.

While still young, Jiang Ho tried to attend American schools. But his English was always poor, even worse than the other immigrants. He was unable to excel and rarely did any of his homework. Also, he worked his job until late, and when he would arrive home, his parents were unconcerned about his performance in American schools. They were more concerned with sitting him down at the kitchen table, putting ink and paper before him and a brush in his hand, and spending hours watching him inscribe characters in Moyungese. Or they would make him recite a multitude of words, exploring all six of the different Moyungese tones and whacking his hand with a hairbrush if his pitch was slightly off. This routine would go on well past midnight, until two or three in the morning at times. How carefully they would watch his hand! How they would scold him or hit him if he drew east-to-west when he should have drawn west-to-east.

And yet, wasn’t Moyungese now a dead language? Even at its most prolific, no more than a few thousand people were versed in it. But from the point of view of Jiang Ho’s parents, the demise of Moyungese in its native land made it all the more important that it live on in their son. Their motivation for passing it down was no different from their motivation for having a son: it was all about maintaining a line through the generations. As long as the language continued to live, in someone, it could never truly be a dead language. To them, the prospect of perpetuity rationalized everything.

Jiang Ho went on to inherit his father’s small shop. He became a shoemaker, maintaining that line another generation as well. Unfortunately, Jiang Ho was not a very good shoemaker. Shortly after Father Ho died, which, in turn, occurred a few short years after Mother Ho died, Ho sold the shop, and used the money to rent a slightly nicer apartment in the same part of Chinatown. He kept his childhood job at the neighborhood restaurant. The tasks there, though menial, provided for his living

While the fine art of shoemaking may have eluded Ho, the lifelong apprenticeship at the hands of Father Ho had other lasting effects. Too much isolation in a world of long hours, dull and difficult work, and the daily bombardment of Moyungese, left him permanently ruined for the English language. His brain could never quite grasp it, and it was only with much concentration that he could express a few trite English phrases: “Hello.” “Goodbye.” “Small coffee, cream and sugar.”

Nor was Jiang Ho’s skill with other Chinese dialects much better. While the most common Sino-dialects seem to share the same written alphabet, much depends on geographical distance. And even discounting distance, written dialects vary. It was common, after mainland China opened itself up for trade with the western world, for new symbols to be introduced very quickly into the dialect of port cities, and only gradually make their way into dialects further inland. In the case of Moyungese, the province in which it originated was isolated in the mountains—deeply inland. As a result, it evolved—or did not evolved—into the most backwards of all the progeny dialects spawned from the ancient Chinese father language.

In short, not only did Jiang Ho fail to comprehend English, he did not speak or write the common Chinese languages, either. Living in Chinatown, Ho was surrounded by speech and symbols that were alien to him. He grew into the most isolated of men, though to look at him, one would think: “Here is where he belongs.” It was very difficult for him to make friends, so he had none. Nor did he ever marry, for whom could he make appeals of marriage to and be understood? The years passed after his parents’ deaths, and still Ho worked in the restaurant. He was often tempted to go look for another job, or to return to school (He had dropped out at age 11.) But he could not apply for a better job, nor reply to return to school, since the applications were printed in languages he could not understand. By the time Jiang Ho began to feel wistful for the life that had been wasted, he was middle-aged and tired. His brain had become a dry stone that water could no longer seep into.

When Ho turned fifty, his parents had been dead for some time. Yes, he was still a master of Moyungese, and spent hours every day, more out of habit than desire, drawing diligently with brush and ink. Was there any point to the writing anymore? Ho knew no one in the modern world who could read Moyungese. Yet a lifetime had been spent perfecting the art of this code. The cost of this tiny scrap of knowledge was any chance of a life in the larger world. Ho would not dare travel beyond the ten square blocks that were familiar to him, fearing that if he did, he might never find his way back. And so his life became a pitiable one, the burden of his loneliness causing his chest to cave and shoulders to slump. He was not even approaching old age, not really, yet there was a stoop in his step wherever he happened to walk.