Preservation

My parents, tyrants toppled by teenage force of will, let me break the old curfew. My grades were the same as usual, maybe better, and much of my time with friends was spent studying; in any case, this change meant less verbal judo at home, another activity in which Jia and Ying, economic immigrants raised under Deng’s reforms, found themselves outclassed—whether in Chinese, my native laconic tongue that cut, or in English, the acquired florid speech that buried. They were born at the tail of the Cultural Revolution, and as a learned survival tactic braved not the shifting winds of power. They praised Obama and Harper lest the new world listened, Mao lest the homeland cared. And now they submitted to my linguistic rebellion, unable to compete with the words nor the wit of a Western teenager, a generation not of paid lip service but of freely given lip.