When words aren’t necessary
By Samantha Bong

Bian kong. I thought I understood this phrase. I only heard it a few million times throughout my childhood. But it took the events of September 11th, and the way my family reacted, for me to really understand this Chinese phrase.

I grew up in an excruciatingly traditional Chinese household. I had seven aunts, seven uncles, one grandmama (also known as "The Matriarch"), 16 cousins, two siblings, and my mother. We were, to put it politely, a very vocal family. Put more bluntly, we were noisy, raucous, and boisterous. Everyone had an opinion about everything, and, more often than not, each of us held different views. My grandmama used to say that in the Tan family, you had to learn to argue before you could talk.

So growing up, I learned how to talk, and what to talk about. More importantly, I learned what not to talk about. In a household as noisy as ours, uncomfortable silences were rare, but all the more powerful. We didn’t talk about money, because it was vulgar. We didn’t talk about Uncle Adrian, my mother’s cousin, and his boyfriend, because they were gay and thus not reproductive, an almost unforgivable sin in Chinese culture. Above all, we didn’t talk about feelings. Every single member of the Tan family is an expert at avoiding emotional discourse of any kind. Bian kong, a Chinese phrase that, literally translated, means "don’t talk about it," was always my mom’s answer to teenage heartbreak and adolescent insecurities.

In the aftermath of the September 11th disaster, I learned what bian kong really meant. When I heard that two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers, I immediately knew my mother would be deathly worried about me. Unfortunately, it took the next two hours to get through on the phone to Singapore. When I made the connection, my mother’s teary voice answered after a single ring. "Mommy, I’m okay," I said. "I wasn’t anywhere near there." She sobbed once, then took a deep breath, and asked me if I had eaten breakfast that morning. I answered absent-mindedly, then began to apologize for making her worry. She softly interrupted me. "Bian kong." Confused, I followed her lead, and made small talk for a few minutes before hanging up to watch the news.

Over the next 24 hours, I heard from every member of my family, including my two-year-old cousin Lynnette, who just babbled happily. Each conversation would begin the same way. My relatives would say, Oh, I just called to say hi. Then we’d talk about everyday things for a while. When I tried to bring up my fears, my worries, my longing to be with them, they inevitably responded bian kong.

Since school was cancelled for the next few days, my boyfriend and I stayed home most of the time, only leaving to run the occasional errand. The phone calls from my family, abnormal in their normalcy, continued to come in at an unusual rate. After one particularly frustrating conversation with my grandmamma, I poured out my exasperation to my boyfriend as we sat, smoking cigarettes on our front stoop. "It’s as if they don’t care about me at all," I concluded..

"Why are they calling so often, if they really don’t care?" he asked. Stumped, I remained silent as he took a long drag on his cigarette. "Maybe you should listen harder," he suggested

From then on, I listened more intently to the words that my family said to me. I paid special attention to that phrase, bian kong. After a bit, the simple words took on a new meaning. When my cousin Darren said it, he meant, "Don’t dwell on this too much, it will depress you." When my grandmamma said it, she meant, "You don’t have to talk about this if it hurts." When my mother said it, she meant, "I love you, and I know you. You don’t need to say these things; I already understand."

My family loves to talk, and so do I. They taught me to talk about a lot of things, but for the most important things, I had to learn to listen. It only took me 20 months to learn to talk; learning to listen has taken a little longer. After 20 years, I’ve learned that when I listen, I don’t need always to talk. Bian kong. Sometimes it’s enough to just listen, and understand.

 

Samantha Bong is an undergraduate journalism major at NYU.