Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

London – lovely, ugly, sprawling, cramped, belching, sniffing, virtuous, hypocritical, silver-gilded London – was near to a reckoning, for the day would come when it either devoured itself from inside or cast outwards for new delicacies, labour, capital, and culture on which to feed.

They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men.

Why had they refused to see the myriad ways they could hurt each other? Why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side?

‘But language,’ said Professor Lovell, ‘is not like a commercial good, like tea or silks, to be bought and paid for. Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’

This feelz wrong

‘For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘She was only just a woman.’

Was this the righteous indignation that Griffin spoke of? But what he felt was not as simple as revolutionary flame. What he felt in his heart was not conviction so much as doubt, resentment, and a deep confusion.

Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them. A family.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Something had gone terribly wrong, a taboo had been breached, but they were all too afraid to probe at precisely what.

Something had seemed to break between them all – no, break was perhaps too strong a word, for they still clung to each other with the force of people who had no one else. But their bond had twisted in a decidedly hurtful direction. They still spent nearly all their waking moments together, but they dreaded each other’s company.

That this tower – this place where they had for the first time found belonging – treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn’t, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke.

Professor Lovell’s promised future of progress and enlightenment seemed only to have wrought poverty and suffering; the new jobs he thought the displaced workers should take up never materialized.

It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.

‘Survival’s not that difficult, Birdie.’ Ramy’s eyes were very hard. ‘But you’ve got to maintain some dignity while you’re at it.’

‘A curious defence,’ said Ramy, ‘to justify a vice with virtue.’

‘It just doesn’t feel . . .’ Robin took a deep breath. ‘It doesn’t feel like we have the right to be alive.’ Ramy sounded very calm. ‘Do you mean that?’

Compromise required some acknowledgment that the other party deserved equal moral standing. But to the British, he’d learned, the Chinese were like animals.

But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage.

Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

Robin stared at him, alarmed. In Chinese, the phrase huǒyàowèi* meant literally ‘the taste of gunpowder’; figuratively, ‘belligerence, combativeness’. His brother smelled of gunpowder. He reeked of violence.

Robin saw no point in arguing further. It had been foolish to play along at all. Sterling Jones was just the same as Letty, except without the shallow sympathy of purported friendship. They both thought this was a matter of individual fortunes instead of systematic oppression, and neither could see outside the perspective of people who looked and spoke just like them.

Of course she could support lobbying for change, as long as it was peaceful, respectable, civilized.

‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

But he’d waited for death to come before. He remembered this now - he knew death. Not so abruptly, no, not so violently. But the memory of waiting to fade was still locked in his bones; memories of a stale, hot room, of paralysis, of dreaming about the end. He remembered the stillness. The peace. As the windows smashed in, Robin shut his eyes and imagined his mother’s face. She smiles. She says his name.

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.