The Death of a Native Tongue, Katherine Chong

5’ x 2'6". Laser-cut plexiglass, vellum, printed paper, dirt, spray-paint, dictionary pages, yarn, resin, gouache, mulberry silk, 2022.

1.You suppose it starts in the brain. Ever since you uprooted and arrived at this place, you think and breathe in English. Your neurons pruned and remapped into networks that facilitated this foreign tongue. Grey matter, white matter — some parts shrunk, others grew. Unconsciously, your brain reconfigured itself...an English mind sprawling over a native one.

2. Then you forgot specific things. You will never really know what they were—you can’t recall. If the ether of your mind was an endless library, these obscurities would be locked away in file cabinets, oxidizing and collecting dust.

3. You encounter a reminder of your past. You have definitely seen this before. You peruse it slowly, interpreting each character...but there’s a catch. Something sounds wrong. You realized, then, that in your head you were whispering the translation of every word in English. What you saw didn’t immediately mean anything, you could only comprehend it through an English proxy. You don’t know when it became like this, when a wall of subtitles drowned out all that you knew.

4. You grieve for this loss. A part of you has evaporated into amnesic nothingness. To recuperate, you fling yourself into past familiarities; you revisit the text that was pounded into your skull by your orthodox grandmother and stern third grade teacher. Too ambitious: you can’t even figure out the cryptic clumps of lines and loops. Withholding a puddle of hot tears tottering in your eyes, you finally concede that what is lost may never come back.

5. You fear that one day, a tongue that has survived centuries among your predecessors will end with your diluted adaptation.

Then again, is anything ever permanent?