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3. “ A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you,” she said. . . . “A psyche-atricks will only make you hulihudu, make you see heimongmong.” Back home, I thought about what she said. . . . [These] were words I had never thought about in English terms. I suppose the closest in meaning would be “confused” and “dark fog.”But really, the words mean much more than that. Maybe they can’t be easily translated because they refer to a sensation that only Chinese people have. . . .
This quotation is from Rose Hsu Jordan’s story “Without Wood.” Rose and her mother An-mei sit in church and speak about Rose’s visits to the psychiatrist. Challenging her daughter’s adherence to what she feels is an odd Western convention, An-mei asks Rose why she feels she must tell a psychiatrist—a complete stranger—about her marital woes, when she refuses to confide in her mother about them.
Linguistic barriers between Chinese and American cultures are especially prominent in this section of the novel, “American Translation.” The passage highlights linguistic discrepancy twice. In the first instance, An-mei appears unable to pronounce “psychiatrist.” Yet her mispronunciation may also be deliberate: by calling the doctor a “psyche-atricks,” she may be deviously disparaging him as someone who plays tricks on the psyche—a quack not to be trusted. The second illustration of language barriers arises in Rose’s own meditations on the Chinese words her mother has used. She struggles to explain them and then wonders whether they can be “translated” into English at all. While one might find substitutes for them in English, she doubts whether the true feeling they connote can be felt by a non-Chinese person. The question then becomes whether these problems of translation inevitably alienate immigrant mothers from their American-born daughters, leading to the situation that An-mei complains of: a situation in which mother and daughter are unable to confide in each other or discuss their inner experiences with one another—in which they must go to strangers for help and support.
