A personal essay about machines, Mandarin, and grandma by Tan Tuck Ming
A few years ago, I took part in a research study at an institute of parapsychology, an underground subfield of psychology that deals with psychic abilities. I was in my second year of university and did not think I was a psychic. The man who conducted the study led me into a windowless room with a hulking and unbranded pre-millennium computer. He said I would have twenty minutes to complete a series of tasks on the computer, for which I would receive $8 and a chocolate bar. He gave no other details.
The program started. I solved basic math equations, spotted animated foxes hiding behind animated trees and matched virtual shapes into virtual holes. The room seemed airless and I felt like I was being watched. Occasionally the screen would freeze, but would quickly unfreeze when I double-clicked the mouse. The whole thing took thirteen minutes.
I felt proud until the researcher told me that swift completion of the program was inversely related to my psychic ability. He explained. These psychic abilities were not conscious, he clarified, like whether my mind could enter the mainframe, but were the magnitude of my subliminal register: whether the wavelength of my anxiety, stress and frustration limit could disrupt the computer system, negative affect converted to appliance-level electrical interference. They had embedded some glitches in the program to amplify confusion, and were looking to see if my subconscious could glitch it more profoundly. He confirmed that I did not seem to have these abilities. But ever since then I’ve wondered—did I imagine the screen freezing? Was that a glitch, or some old silence in me finally making itself known?
I believe almost everything today can be described as a machine. A machine is a family, is a city, is a nation-state, is a person, is a Toyota Camry
There are other things I now pay attention to. My neck inheriting a persistent crick for many days in a row. The intermittent untraceable hum within the wall that I hear when lying down. An unnameable hunger for a rotted cucumber softened to semi-liquid state. This morning I took stale bread to the river to feed some ducks, which flew away at my approach. One of the ducks stayed at a distance, solemn and strong-eyed. Instinct told me this was my grandmother. It was probably not all of her, the way a spirit once released is not coextensive with one thing, but was perhaps the swirling memory of her knee or her questions about the Apple store. I wanted to call out: 婆婆, is that you? Why have you left your body?
*
There is a word in Mandarin for ‘glitch’ but, as most translations go, it does not neatly correspond to the English meaning of the word. Google Translate says the Mandarin equivalent is 毛刺. Whenever we go back and forth, we get to a different place. Translated into English, 毛刺 _means mechanical burr—the deformed edge of metal turned outward and askew after grinding or drilling has taken place. A glitch is similar in that it is a failure in a minor key, a moment of slippage when the code or the machine blunders and produces an unintended random output.
I believe almost everything today can be described as a machine. A machine is a family, is a city, is a nation-state, is a person, is a Toyota Camry. The structuralist account insists that language is the machine preceding all other machines, as it allows the phenomenal world to be abstracted and given a face—which is to say that language, on a cognitive level, is what makes possible the experience of phenomena. Paul de Man of the later school of deconstruction writes, ‘If it were not for novels, no one would know for certain that he is in love.’
With language, we get the idea of red that enables a chromatic impression to strike our minds; she and I are pronouns that discover personhood from a set of cognitive functions. In this sense, to be alive and conscious is to enter a machine of consecutive hallucinations put forward by words.
In one machine is my grandmother and in another is me. My grandmother lived in a small room in my auntie’s house in Singapore, and I left Singapore for New Zealand when I was five. Of the two languages she spoke, I never learned Hokkien and had only recently started to learn Mandarin. My grandmother’s capacity for English extended only to the shrapnel phrases she had picked up before dropping out of primary school. In English, she was a happy woman. Back then I was nameless, referred to simply as "Boy!" When she came to visit us in Wellington, a trip she made only once, I skirted around the edges of rooms and conversations, moving the only way possible for a gap-toothed insect of a boy who would otherwise not be spoken to.
It’s true that when I speak of machines I also mean dimensions.
*
Because I cannot make it back to Singapore for her funeral, various family members recruit me to make a video about my grandmother for the church service. I choose Teresa Teng, the only Cantonese singer I know, for the backing track.
All day I have been receiving photos, spanning the last seven decades, from unknown numbers. One is of my grandmother as a teenager, holding a chicken. I linger on the avian connection between the chicken and the lone duck by the river. Three other people in the photo also hold chickens, fingers interlaced beneath the breasts and thumbs pressing down on the spines as if squeezing air out of a ball. There is a sepia note of joy on everyone’s faces. What was the significance of the chicken?
My sister calls me the day after the funeral and tells me there has been a problem. After the funeral the casket holding my grandmother’s body was taken to the crematorium. My family was directed down a series of corridors to the Ash Collection Centre where they entered a door with a sign, PLEASE COLLECT HERE. Once inside, a man appeared with a clear plastic bin about twice the size of a shoebox, which he set down on a piece of cloth.
The man produces a white jar. He tells my family to put my grandmother into the jar, piece by piece. Not the facial bones, he says
There is an irregular assortment of white fragments in the box: bones, some ground to the size of rice grains but most of them larger, scaled approximately to cherry leaves, and the clacking of calcium gives the impression of building blocks. The man is nonchalant and produces a white jar. He tells my family to put my grandmother into the jar, piece by piece. Not the facial bones, he says, selecting a few delicate shards that are noticeably thinner than the rest. These are meant to go at the top of the pile in an order that follows the alignment of the body.
No one is prepared for this. A few bones are yellowed, and someone murmurs that it’s the quantity of tea that she drank in her lifetime. My auntie puts her hand into the box, withdraws a piece of my grandmother’s femur and places it in the jar. My sister picks a piece of the pelvis and places it in the jar. The man takes a long metal utensil and presses down heavily, because my fragmented grandmother, loosely arranged, is spilling out of the jar. Her cheekbone, or maybe her forehead, is pushed below the lip of the container, compacting the space between parts of her body that have never touched before.
There is dust on the cloth. Isn’t that my grandmother? my sister asks. Yes, the man says, and shakes the dust into the jar.
I end up calling the crematorium, at midnight because of the time difference, and reach a customer service operator at the National Environmental Agency. He is surprisingly amiable when I mention the bone fragments, the plastic box, the non-pulverised remains. ‘Oh, I see—you were expecting a powder? I’m sorry.’ He transfers me to another switchboard where another guy tells me that the crematory machine can only break things down to minor parts. Any further processing needs to be done manually.
I think about this as an equation: what goes in and what comes out and the transfiguration between the two ends. A kind of release. But it bothers me: what happened to the smoke? I start the habit of leaving my window open at night.
*
When my grandmother was alive, most of the stories I heard about her were negative, tales of a woman alternatingly stubborn, severe, irrational and helpless. She was a single mother who beat her children, sometimes with a chain. To avoid the humiliation of a divorce she told everyone her husband had died. She washed vegetables on a seat next to the toilet. She hoarded everything—trinkets, newspapers, fabric—and stashed the bounty in broom closets in her daughters’ houses. She carried plastic bags of groceries in the rain because no one offered help. She kept things to herself. She was alone a lot.
*
I saw my grandmother once every few years, and after I started learning Mandarin we called each other once every few weeks. I could sense a thin wire being established under an ocean. But the problem with learning from a textbook is that the discourses available to you are limited by subject chapters, which tend to be narrow, almost surgically specific. Chapter three was about an automobile accident where no one has insurance. Chapter nine was about the president having a scandalous affair. My Mandarin developed an uneven topography, ad-hoc glossaries from which I could express a crude ethical position. I learned to say things like, Single-use cutlery is a cheaper option for street vendors but excessive usage will damage our global future. Or, I believe that people who illegally download music are essentially thieves.
Learning Mandarin is similar to most language classes––endless repetition... Across the page, I’ve written: 阳光 _阳光 _阳光 _阳光. Or: sunlight, sunlight, sunlight, sunlight
Then there are the words I learned only when my grandmother used them: sunlight, press, password, knee, appetite, pain, gushing, river carp. I can’t remember the exact situation each word referred to or when it came up. That they are listed in my notebook means they have acquired a second skin. Even now, I’m surprised that I took so long to notice the clear and buoyant kinship between these objects and feelings.
The popular pedagogy for learning Mandarin is similar to most language classes––endless repetition, as if only by brute force can a new word be branded into the eye and the ear. I spent enough days copying out characters over and over again for this to become a ritual indistinguishable from knowing. Across the page, I’ve written: 阳光 _阳光 _阳光 _阳光. Or: sunlight, sunlight, sunlight, sunlight.
*
If we believe Nietzsche then there is no truth, and we are just repeating worn-out figures of speech that are themselves cold and remote distillations of an impossible original. His suspicion of language comes from his suspicion of truth, which he suspects to be an illusion of language. Everything that is spoken and can be spoken consists of ‘metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’, figurative terms we have used to nominate the unnameable, that we have mistaken for the real and fixed. All we have is language and we cannot get beyond it.
The problem with the machine as a metaphor is that it is claustrophobic: all that passes through and out of it is accounted for by a precise and unrelenting algebra. It will keep giving the same thing out, over and over again. It means that if I begin this way, I will always be out of time with something else.
It’s true that I often find myself caught in the temptation to fix things into code, an insistent force that resides in me to form glottal noise into interpretable meaning. But I want more to linger on the ecstatic surface where my senses betray me astonishingly, to vanish into the skew of mishearing, misreading, doubled vision, the half-step.
Rosa Menkman, the inaugural glitch theorist, proposes an art form of corrupted images and aesthetic disturbance. ‘The glitch,’ she writes, ‘is a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse … But once I named it, the momentum—the glitch—is no more.’ For Menkman, the glitch cannot be described because then it ceases to be what it claims: it is a lack, a break in the pattern of meaning that forces its own opening.
My grandmother called her smartphone ‘the small machine’, the small machine that is inside all my memories of her
I’ve come to develop a certain tenderness for the glitch, the riddled dysfunctional thing that evades the conditions of what might be expected and what might be known, rupturing unfamiliar territories, or maybe offering a glimpse into a second reality you realise you have been living all along. I see the deer swallowed by thick black tarmac. I listen to the tap drip out a lament. I wake up in darkness to sounds, angular and weightless, like words sketched out of lost feeling coming out of myself. It’s a bit like dreaming, which is always a bit like remembering.
*
My grandmother called her smartphone ‘the small machine’, the small machine that is inside all my memories of her. Even the older models outstripped her understanding of the technological world. To her, the phone was a sullen elusive thing, always withholding answers; the normal flow of the machine and its algorithms exceeded her analogue sensibilities. If she had problems with her phone she would call me, because everyone else had grown tired of her repetitive questions. Whenever we saw each other she insisted on convening in small cold rooms in order to study her phone—long soft afternoons spent trying to decipher her questions as she relayed between the bathroom and the television. Is it sent? How to throw away? Done?
Once when we met in Hong Kong she was locked out of all of her social media accounts because she had forgotten the passwords. I began to piece together an oblique organisation of profiles, a circle of mirrors bearing her English name, Shirley, created as each previous profile was sealed off by her faulty memory. One showed her gazing upwards at a multi-storey Christmas tree, a photo I had taken. Another was so zoomed-in her face took up most of the square. Online I was only connected with one of the Shirleys, the profile I created for her.
She peered into the screen and scribbled intently in her little blue notebook. I noticed she was not writing words but drawing miniature pictographs, sketching images of the buttons she should press. She said she was a poor student. When she practised and forgot which button to press she would frown, then laugh and look at me, her eyes querying.
I downloaded a translation app for her, which she treasured for the way it ingested her words and returned a script that she could not understand but others could. As she learned the combination of buttons to make this work, anything began to seem possible and everything communicable. She started using this as a second mouth, with a garbled joyful lyric. Glancing about furiously in the middle of the street, she would whisper into the phone, the small machine, then grip my arm tightly, her fingers making a bruise, and hold up the English translation for me to read: Boy, do you eat yummy things and do you not swell? Do you know that we had eaten too much the other day and she spit and I now have to be careful but smiling? I don’t remember much but I will remember for a long time. Everyone is happy and happy.
*
We were walking along the waterfront with a family friend who spoke only English. Our friend asked my grandmother why, if not spurred by religious belief or vegetarianism, she chose not to eat beef. I had never thought to ask her a question so personal. My grandmother blinked, surprised. "When I’m young, I see the cow work in the field every day," she said. "Working very hard, all the time. Still cow gets eaten."
When my family is going through my grandmother’s belongings they come across a stack of letters she received from her father, who was living in Malaysia. I want to read them but can’t decipher the cursive script. Some friends try to help me translate them, but due to the antiquated syntax they can only make out some phrases: Sometimes, I secretly cry for you. In another letter: Any other woman would have killed herself. I hope God takes pity on you. At the end: Life is just a dream. No one finds any letters from her that prompted these responses from her father.
Grief can also feel relentless, like brutally efficient automation, something you cannot get out of until it is done with you and you are not what you were when you entered. At times I’ve tried to go in reverse: to take the thread and go backwards. Instead of thinking of the mouth as a machine, love as a machine, distance as a machine, loss as a machine, I think of the machine as a mouth, distance, love, loss—that is, all at once and the same thing. If you pass what you already know through the words you are learning, it may be possible to end up elsewhere.
*
Of dis-identification, poet and critic Fred Moten writes: "The way you put yourself together every day is the way that you take yourself apart every day." He is talking in an interview with artist Wu Tsang about the ritual of identity, where putting oneself together is synonymous with tearing oneself apart. There is a tendency to seek wholeness and continuity as conditions of a narrative, like a mountain only witnessed from a distance; but Moten is convinced of the value in small and wondrous acts of separation, how they may surface wayward objects and moments that do not connect, fugitive pieces that can be claimed into the self.
Wu Tsang replies: "What limbs can we sever, or momentarily conjure, to constitute our place in this world?"
I am starting to see the sparseness as a condition of its largeness; that what appears as the limit, the approximations and the grasping quietness, was in fact its own tender opening. The last time I saw her she had three smartphones, someone’s misguided ploy to solve her technological bewilderment with sheer volume. We were in a hotel that offered free Skittles, which she liked to heap on a plate and suck on one at a time. Outside I could see the sky heaving like a long white belly, a dismal overhang, a shimmer of umbrellas rippling upward, then rain.
When she said they had died, it was like they were on holiday
She wanted to tidy up her shipwrecked contact list and asked me to go through them individually: Ah-Ching was dead, as was Cheng-Lo. Helen, He ren and HeLen T were the same person, also deceased. When she said they had died, it was like they were on holiday. She had forgotten how to use the translation app. I noticed she was sketching on the page opposite to her sketch of the same icon last year. She laughed when the mechanical voice translated the word for grandmother as old wife, like it did last time, and I laughed too, an infinite loop in which we were caught.
I told her I liked her chili sauce, a new word I had learned, and this made her happy. When I read the word now, I’m struck by a stray part of the rightmost character—又, a radical for which there is no direct translation but which, depending on context, can indicate the repeated continuation of an action or the coexistence of multiple situations and properties. Somehow, when stitched with other parts, this becomes the word for chili pepper.
*
Night, like a net, collected the calls I missed due to time difference. Each one brought with it a question or revelation. Other times, malfunctions. I’d wake up beached, my body stirring, sand tracking in me. My cousin told me how my grandmother had live-streamed by accident, warping around on one of her new phones. A fifteen-minute portrait of a frowning elderly woman scrolling down her newsfeed in still silence.
I called her back later in the morning, her night. She said yes, there was a lump in her neck, but because it was soft and not hard, she had heard it was not dangerous. She didn’t want me to worry. Instead, she had called to talk to me about her phone, which she said was too big and defective. None of the drawings in her notebook matched any of the apps on her phone. She said her WhatsApp account had been deleted. After I hung up I noticed that in the past week she had called me three times on WhatsApp and left me several voice messages.
It occurred to me that maybe she understood more than she was letting on.
After she died I rebooted my old phone to look at the things I’d stored there. Once it was switched on, the old phone synchronised with the frequency of the present, a shell reanimated. Everything that had been sent to me in the past six months was regurgitated, an open drain turned inside-out onto the street, a bloated flotsam mass of photos, messages, missed calls.
Hnng, hnng, hnng the old phone vibrated for half a day, jerking suddenly every few minutes to re-enact the conversations of the recent past, struck thunderously by the return of another memory. My mother fighting with me on our holiday in Japan. Friends complimenting my new turtleneck. I had the feeling of being a ghost because of the way people appeared to be responding as if I was answering in real time, even though I was sitting in my bedroom in the future, motionless and silent. When your eyes are closed, the movement of the wind around an object can describe its shape.
Over and over again my dead grandmother messaged me about her new phone. The machine’s broken. A week later, I think the machine’s broken, and then, Maybe machine’s broken. And I saw that, by some strange glitch, the old phone was showing my grandmother’s status as active now. When I saw this, I stopped worrying.
Tan Tuck Ming's essay "My Grandmother Glitches the Machine" is published in the newly published anthology Strong Words 2: The best of the Landfall essay competition edited by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $35), available in bookstores nationwide.
