Edmund from OT is friendly young fellow from Hong Kong, and I think Jon enjoys working with him. He reminds me of one of his favorite cousins, Fong. One of the advantages of being in LA is being surrounded by myriad cultures and people from all over the world, many of whom converge in some way through large universities like USC. So it shouldn't be too much of a surprise to run into members of Jon's team who happen to be, and speak, Chinese.
Edmund: Do you know me?
Jon: Yes, you're a doctor.
Edmund: My mother would be happy to hear that! Do you know your name? Can you write it down for me?
Me: Ah may ah, May Man.
(Jon writes his name in characters.)
Me: Is that right?
Edmond: Ho May Man?
Me: Yes! That's his Chinese name.
We often hear that bilingualism wires the brain early on, opens neural pathways that is different from monolingual brains. I'm hoping this offers an advantage in Jon's healing process, as he is fluent in both Cantonese and English. In any case, it must bring up memories of some kind, a multi-sensory trigger (visual/aural) that hopefully brings up happy memories. His mother's no-nonsense voice, his father's dismissive complaining, family dinners and drunken weddings, summers working in Chinese restaurants.
For me, listening to Korean takes me to a different zone. "Code switching" between cultures draws up different aspects of my personality, and American me is suppressed in Korea, and Korean me is suppressed in America. Maybe these different aspects of my own personality also reside in different parts of my brain. (FYI, I'm happy to donate my brain to science, in case anyone is interested--you have this in writing.) My Korean also improves the longer I am speaking only in Korean, and wanes when I'm in day to day life in the U.S.
Korean me cries often and heartily. (Sorry Laura and Jen, you know I love you passionately when I call you crying!) There is a reason Koreans love melodramas, and have a specific word for an impenetrable grief, a sorrow intrinsic to the Korean soul as an ethnic birthright, the concept of Han. This version of me berates my children constantly for not being good and studious, worries about old age and female vanities, stuffs food into everyone I meet. American me loves to be independent, and forthright, and decisive, loves amuse Bouche, and believes there's no crying in baseball. Someday I'll introduce the two to each other.
Jon has always been more successful at integrating both halves of his cultural selves, maybe from his social service background, maybe from growing up going to a Catholic school in Chinatown. Whatever the case, he's been completely happy to be who he is, playing his Cantopop music while driving through the Deep South, thinking to himself, "come and get me, I'm a Chinaman driving around a state with Confederate flags!"
The left brain is involved with sequences, order, and time. So his injury may be causing him to "time travel" to a certain degree. When he first arrived on the therapy floor, he said that he was 19, and that it was the 1980s (that timing wouldn't exactly be accurate, BTW). He also forgets who's been there and when. So maybe that makes me the time traveler's wife, so to speak.
And if the reintroduction of Chinese in addition to English stirs older memories, I hope they are the happiest ones.
Sweet dreams, honey, I'll see you when you wake up.
Love,
Min
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