Plastic

By Xiu Wen Chong (@xwzhang_)

A letter to my grandmother

The whole world is plastic, 阿婆.

That day, you had me help you dye your hair black. "Natural," you said. You wanted your hair to return back to normal. But ageing isn't synthetic, you know. The silver staining your hair grey, faltering your appearance, represents everything organic about you. We live and we die. It's only natural.

But you wanted your hair black, pó. You wanted time travel and a mask of box dye.

With each plastic piece, you deconstruct and build your story at the same time. Stuffed in the backs of drawers and little nooks and crevices as if you're ashamed that someone would see who you are. A hoarder. A collector.

Plastic bags, plastic tupperwares, plastic cups. Styrofoam boxes and disposable chopsticks. These are your prizes, and I don't think anyone understands. The crinkled, used bags are flattened and folded to neat little triangles, just the way you like them. It's an art, pó. You make old plastic appear new again.

Where do I begin, with the fights? You, with your frail, sunken body, bellowing to be seen. Your daughter will not listen. "Ma," she pleads, in Hakka. "Please, stop holding on to things that are meant to be thrown away." You, indignant and offended, scream to be left alone.

You do this because you were never alone. There was a family of eight and mouths to feed, so you, the eldest, have grown up too quickly. I know, because you like to brag about leaving your education behind. "I was only twelve when I started working," you would say proudly. "I don't need to know how to read."

Back then, you folded with the deftness of your mother's hands. She taught you to save because there was no such thing as enough. The bags can be used to store trash, the containers to store food, just keep them until you find a use for them. So you followed, learned, and forgot how to forget. You kept the plastic close and the memory of scarcity closer.

You did this for your family, and six decades later, you continue for the same reasons. But as you grow older, your knowledge betrays you. Now you can't stop yourself from gathering the building blocks of a plastic home. There's that saying about an old dog and new tricks, except there's one thing dogs do best, and that's to protect the family. 

Do you see, pó? You're living in an artificial end, striving to recreate organic beginnings.

I try to reason with you. Unlike you, I've studied my entire life, in a language you could never understand. "The plastics, they'll make you sick. I can only explain it in English." I try, and I fail.

But you know something different from what I do. You wave me away. "It's been seventy years, and I've never gotten sick before."

How do I tell you, pó, that it's only a matter of time? How do I make you understand, like how you want me to understand? We are of the same kind, only I am wrapped in a shiny, plastic coat of another tongue. I am trying to reach you, but these layers are resilient; they've been built to stand the test of time. 

When I speak our dialect, my words crunch out, and I am choking on styrofoam, mimicking a proper tone. My Hakka develops a film of Mandarin, the learned mother tongue, and crackles with a discordant memory of English. I am all of these things, but none of them at once. I'm pretending to be real, but I am only plastic.

You know this, but you keep me all the same. "It's okay," you say. "When you're older, none of these things matter." You don't want to go back, pó. You want something even more impossible. You want to live in back then and now at the same time. 

So you'll keep your plastic till the end of your life, because I'm here. Because I will continue being here, storing up all your idiosyncrasies in an artificial container, waiting for the day I reach you. Until then, I'm writing to you with your story, packaged up in the language you can't understand, keeping it in a corner so that no one knows who I am.

Xiu Wen is currently completing a BA in English Literature and Philosophy at Nanyang Technological University. She writes to you, with a cup of chrysanthemum tea and a dream, to share the undivulged cultural narratives from her experiences in Singapore.