When Language Wears Boots

A daughter who is jia 嫁 is out of the house is gone forever, water poured out of a bucket, never whole, never yours again.

Fourteen, or so. I’m in the front seat of the Subaru, with my mother, on my way to violin lessons in upstate New York. We’re talking about some man we knew who married some woman we knew, and we’re speaking in Chinglish, as usual. I said, “Yeah, and so he jia her?”—he married her?

My mother almost swerved the car, yelping back, “No! No, you can’t say that! Men qu 娶, and women jia 嫁.”

Or, to be more precise grammatically, women jia gei 嫁给 a man when they get married. Jia 嫁, meaning: to marry out of one’s home; gei 给, meaning: to give, given. Qu 娶, meaning: to take a bride. It’s insulting to say that a man jia 嫁 when he marries—it implies that he’s useless, even “effeminate,” that he’s gone to live with her.

As per patrilineal custom, she is supposed to go live with him and erase her old family as family, see only her husband’s family as true. Historically, a man might truly jia 嫁 if he were poor and marrying into a rich household, if he gave up his surname and his right as head of household.

But today, saying a man jia 嫁 is largely something pejorative, unserious, whispered behind backs and closed doors. Real only in language.

In the Shih-Ching, the ancient Book of Odes, there is a line from a Zhou era poem that leaves little room for confusion: zhi zi yu gui 之子于归. Meaning: the daughter is getting married; she is returning to her real home. For a bride to return to her birth home means that something terrible must have happened.

When my aunt married in Taiwan in the 1980s, this was still custom: My grandfather had to pour a bucket of water out onto the porch. Because that’s what a married daughter is: spilled-out water. You can never collect her all back together; never have her back as yours again. That’s what jia gei 嫁给 is. Given away. Unable to come back. 

As the car that carried my aunt and my newly minted uncle drove away, my grandmother yelled at my grandfather, “Pour it! Pour it, why haven’t you poured it yet?”

A daughter who is jia 嫁 out of the house is gone forever, water poured out of a bucket, never whole, never yours again.

There is a neutral, general verb that means “to marry” or “married”: jiehun 结婚. But jia 嫁 and qu 娶 are still what happens from a groom or a bride to the other person—rather than what happens between them. Jia 嫁 and qu 娶 are individual, active, relative to the one performing the act; jiehun 结婚 is more circumstantial, speaking to a new, communal state of being.

See here the difference between Reader, I married him and Reader, I got married to him.

When I type the Charlotte Brontë line into Google Translate, it spits back: “Reader, I jia gei 嫁给 him.” Reader, I married him. Without missing a beat, even Google knows which verb Jane Eyre would have to use.

See here the difference between Reader, I married him and Reader; I  got  married   to him.

Today, the concepts of qu 娶 and jia 嫁 are not supposed to matter, even as they are still the words we use. There is no need for a bride to give up her family of origin when she marries. There is no great discrimination against men who must marry for material stability, against those who have to leave their own homes for their wives’—today, last names can be hyphenated, allotted differently to different children, re-ordered as a couple wishes.

And still, the language mattered enough to make my mother yelp.

*

I moved from the States to Beijing, where I had never truly lived before, which I had never called home. I joined a gym, where I became friends with Wang, thirty-one, with a funny haircut that looked like a newsboy cap. He told me that he had married when he was my age, twenty-two. His wife was twenty. College sweethearts.

“That’s very young,” I informed him.

“Yeah?” he said. “When do you want to get married? After all your degrees?”

“I don’t know. Maybe never.”

“Hey, want to hear a joke?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“The Chinese say there are four types of beings in this world: men 男人, women 女人, demons 妖, and . . . ”

And what? I couldn’t catch his last words. He had a way of speaking inside his mouth.

He said it again. “. . . 有博士的女人. Women with doctorates.” He grinned; thought it was funny.

I didn’t know what to say, so I told him what I read the other day, what Joseph Brodsky once said: “You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.”

*

Jia 嫁, meaning: to marry out of one’s home; gei 给, meaning: to give, given.

Jià 嫁 is composed of the ideographs for “woman” 女 and “home” 家. But in Chinese, the term for “home” 家—also transliterated as jia but pronounced “jiā” rather than “jià”—means much more than just that. Xiaolu Guo, in her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, illuminates this well: “In Chinese, it is the same word 家 for ‘home’ and ‘family’ and sometimes including ‘house’ . . . ‘家’, a roof on top, then some legs and arms inside. When you write this character down, you can feel those legs and arms move around underneath the roof . . . In English, it’s different . . . It seems like that ‘family’ doesn’t mean a place.”

Qu 娶 is composed of the ideographs for “to take” and “woman.”

*

My first wedding reception in China—the marriage of two people I don’t know. Fifth floor of the Shanxi restaurant, seated “high-up” in the chain of guests, meaning close to the families of the newlyweds. The son of longtime neighbors, my aunt’s best childhood friend. I was only there because my uncle couldn’t make it.

Which made things worse when I didn’t know what to do when the groom and the bride, whom I didn’t know, came to pay their respects to me, according to custom. I learned on the spot that he had to toast a glass of wine or light a cigarette for every man in the party. She had to feed every woman a piece of candy.

Candy on the wedding day has been a Chinese custom since ancient times, meant to signify spreading sweetness and joy to everyone. But this was the first time I’d heard of manually feeding it to guests.

The bride tore open a piece of something orange-flavored and held it to my mouth and then someone took a picture of us, and then she and the groom moved on. I found out from my aunt afterwards, on the train ride home, that the groom had loved someone else, someone who had left him. But he had had no property to his name, so he married this woman instead and would go to live with her in her parents’ house. The unspoken; yellow and hanging in the air. The furrowed brows. No one had said anything. I swallowed my words: so did he qu 娶 her then, or did he . . . ?

Did it, does it, matter?

We had to spit out the candy the bride fed us because this all happened before we ate.

*

Early morning in April. The outskirts of Taipei, where the smell of yesterday’s rain was still in the air. On the platform, waiting for the train to see my grandmother, my mother’s mother, for the first time in many years. I was eating two tea-boiled eggs from the Family Mart and a bag of the little melt-in-your-mouth cookies I ate by the fistfuls as a kid, playing on my grandmother’s spare bed.

So many different ways to say grandmother, zumu 祖母, in Chinese; the same goes for wife. You’d think that with all these words, the Chinese are obsessed with women, can’t stop finding new ways to name them. The terms for grandmother are largely regionally contingent, often bound by local dialect. In mainland China, depending on whether she is paternal or maternal, my grandma is my nainai 奶奶 or my laolao 姥姥; in Hong Kong, my mahmah 嫲嫲 or my pohpoh 婆婆; in Taiwan, my mother’s mother is my waipo 外婆.

You’d think that with all these words, the Chinese are obsessed with women, can’t stop finding new ways to name them. 

But the diverse terms for wife are universal, do not vary in preference across geography. Nor is there any rhyme or reason for which to choose in any given case. She can be a laopo 老婆, qizi 妻子, xifu 媳妇, furen 夫人, taitai 太太, neiren 内人, jiannei 贱内—there are more, apparently, that I can’t think of, that I never knew. That I might never know.

*

Guo writes in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: “‘Love,’ this English word: like other English words, it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved.’ All these specific tenses mean Love is a time-limited thing. Not infinite . . . In Chinese, Love is ‘爱’ (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance.”

The house in Taiwan where my grandmother now lives is not the one she lived in when her eldest daughter married. Pulling up outside, I took in the familiar contours: the off-white exterior, the narrowness of the road, the sidewalks wet with sudden spring rain. I got out of the car.

In my mind, I assembled the skeleton of the facts that I know, clothed the bones in what little color I could conjure: Thirty-plus years ago, when my mother’s eldest sister married, my grandparents watched the car drive away down a dusty lane, away from the other house that I do not know. My grandmother is pulling at the bucket, trying to get my grandfather, whom I’ve never met, to perform the rite.

“No, no,” my grandfather says. “She’ll always be my daughter. Always. So what if she’s married?”

My grandmother eventually wrests the pail from him and scatters the water across the front yard.