Back in primary school, when the family still lived in Taipei, English had been Vicente's worst subject.
His grammar had been all right, his writing scraped by. He didn't understand English sentences half as well as he did Chinese ones, but he'd managed to get eighties in spelling and grammar tests every year.
But his listening and speaking skills had been atrocious. Just the results from his listening tests had dropped his subject average to the low seventies, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that his skills in speaking were just as terrible. Vicente had once received a review sheet of his oral presentation, graded an unthinkable 17/50. The only reason his parents never knew of his one and only failing mark was because they'd never asked him about it.
English was difficult, but after moving to Arlingdale, Vicente came to learn that French was even worse.
At least English only had "the", instead of "la" and "le". English only had "a", French had "un" and "une". Then there were those little strokes or hat-looking arrow things on top of the e-s, the squiggles under the c-s and somehow a combination of "o" and "e". All those looked a little like the shēng diào of Mandarin, but were pronounced so strangely Vicente wondered how actual French people could speak the language without their mouths hurting.
Since he had to learn French in preparation for middle school, and Yao, who was already in middle school, had to suffer through his own French lessons, they often ended up doing their homework together.
It never went very well.
"Je suise un garkon," Vicente repeated one day while doing his homework.
Yao looked up from his worksheets. "You don't pronounce the 's', I think."
"Je ui un garkon," he tried again.
"You pronounce the first 's', but not the second one. That's how my teacher pronounces it."
"Je suis un garkon."
"Garçon."
"Je suis un garçon." Vicente stared at his piece of paper. "But that's a 'c'."
"Yes, but it has the squiggle under it, so you pronounce it like an 's'." Yao gripped his pencil so tightly his fingertips turned white. "Yes, I know it's stupid."
"It's really stupid." He moved on to scrutinising the next sentence he had to practice. "Mandarin is way easier."
"You mean, like that time you mixed up kàn and kǎn, and the zookeeper thought you going to kill the giraffe?"
The pronunciations for "see" and "cut" in Mandarin shouldn't be that similar, that was for sure. "It's still not as bad as — as — " Vicente pointed at his French worksheet. "This." He read out the next sentence. "Comment ça va?"
"That's how you say 'comment' in English. In French it's…" Yao had to think about it for a moment. "'Comment', or something similar."
"Those sound exactly the same."
"They're a little different."
"Bon soir." Then Vicente remembered what his teacher had said in class the other day; to pronounce the "oi" as "wah". "Bon soir." It still didn't sound perfectly accurate, but it was close enough. He moved on to his list of vocabulary. "L'homme, la femme, le garçon, la fille, le chat, le chien, le cheval…" he looked at the next word for a moment. "L'oiseau?"
Yao looked up again. "L'oiseau."
"That's what I'm saying," Vicente insisted, getting frustrated. "L'oiseau."
"No, l'oiseau."
Vicente rubbed his ears. "What?" When Yao repeated it, he asked, "how do you do that with your mouth?" He tried again. It sounded weird. He tried a second time, realised it was still wrong, and gave up. He moved on to the next phrase. "Très bien." He pronounced his r-s the way his teacher did, or he tried to.
Leon sniggered at him while doing his math homework. "You sound like you're coughing something up."
He pretended not to hear.
"Eurgh!" Leon made a hideous gagging noise like a cat hacking up a hairball. "You sound like that."
He continued playing deaf to his little brother's teasing and finished the fill-in-the-blank questions on the back of the worksheet. He never got all the questions correct, always putting in the wrong articles somehow, and Vicente knew he'd give anything to get his Chinese lessons back, even if it wasn't his best subject.
Next to him, Yao dropped his pencil and roughly shoved his French homework back into his homework folder, complaining, "I should've picked German." He yanked out a science workbook. "Or Spanish, or just not French." Yao flipped the workbook open with more force than was necessary. "Why isn't Chinese a choice? Or even Japanese or Korean. Those are similar to Chinese."
Half their school already consisted of Chinese or Japanese or Korean kids, and Arlingdale itself had so many Asian families that things like rice, dumplings and steamed buns (or at least poor imitations of those) weren't too difficult to find. There was even an Asian market just half an hour away from the town. "If we could learn Chinese, we'd be the best at it and that wouldn't be fair to everyone else, maybe," Vicente suggested.
"The French kids are getting an unfair advantage here."
"But there are no French kids in my class. I don't know any French kids at all."
"Mm, whatever." Yao went back to his math homework, and the siblings spent the rest of the afternoon doing their work in silence.
When the apartment door swung open at six o'clock, Vicente expected their father to be there, despite him usually not getting home until eight, but instead their mother stepped through, which was even more bizarre — on most nights, she wouldn't be home until all four siblings were in bed.
But he swallowed his shock and mumbled, "hello, Mother."
She ignored him (well, that wasn't new) and went to the kitchen, muttering something under her breath as she did. Vicente went back to his homework. But then he heard the sound of a knife slicing something against a chopping board. He leaned across the kitchen table, whispering to Yao, "is Mother cooking dinner for us?"
Yao listened to the sound of chopping, then that of something being whisked in a bowl. "It sounds like it." He sighed in relief. "Since I don't have to cook tonight, I can finally study for that history test I have on Thursday, and maybe I won't have to sleep that late…"
Vicente noticed the dark circles under his brother's eyes. He'd been staying up later and later, juggling schoolwork and taking care of him, Leon and Ling, and while that wasn't anything new, it couldn't be the ideal recovery method for someone who'd been bedridden with pneumonia just a week ago. "Let me cook next time you have a test coming up," he urged.
He shrugged. "We'll see about that."
Their mother switched the stove on, and the room began to heat up. In the March crispness, when warmth had yet to return, the heat wasn't unwelcome. Something bubbled in a pot, the scrape of sauce into a dish sounded and steam began to erupt from a pot.
Once he'd finished his homework, and double-checked that he didn't have any tests during the week, Vicente turned his chair around to watch his mother cook. She didn't notice him, as she sliced lotus roots, checked the pot on the stove and brought their meal together. Once the steaming dish was taken off the heat and carried to be kept warm in the oven, their mother poured a bowl of small white grains into a saucepan of water and heated that up in its place.
He wondered what those white grains were. It couldn't be rice, since those would be cooked in the rice cooker and there was no way that'd be enough for the entire family. Was it barley? Millet? Soy beans? After a while, his mother took the saucepan away and to the counter, where he couldn't see what she was doing, and his guessing game was over.
Then she took out their frying pan and heated it up, cooking the sliced lotus roots. They were stuffed with the white grains. He watched her cook the lotus roots, flipping them over once they were done on one side, and covering them with the frying-pan lid to steam.
The last time he'd gotten to cook with his mother, before everything went wrong, was during his second year living in Taipei. He and Yao had helped her make spring rolls, wrapping chopped shrimps and mushrooms in delicate rice wrappers, then deep-frying them until they were golden-brown and crispy. Their father had burned his tongue on one, and they'd all went out to get ice cream after that.
He was snapped out of his memories when the doorbell rang, and, at the same time, their mother called, "dinner's ready!"
Ling beat him to the door and let their father in, while Vicente cleared his folder and stationery to set the table. Yao put his history notes back in his school-bag and Leon emerged from his bedroom, clearly shocked from the sumptuous meal on the kitchen table.
Apart from the lotus roots, there was a dish of spare ribs steamed with black bean paste, sauteed sprouts and button mushrooms, and a soup (oh, when was the last time they'd had soup?) of coriander and tofu.
Their father interrupted the siblings' gawking at the food. "Well, are you going to look at the food, or eat it?"
A bite of the lotus roots told Vicente that they'd been stuffed with glutinous rice, and were so filling he could barely finish three of them. Leon grabbed another sparerib, Yao filled himself his second bowl of soup, and Ling reached over their mother to take a slice of lotus root.
Once everything was cleared up, and the dishes were all cleaned, they went off to their rooms. Vicente felt fuller than he'd been in a while, and he was sure his siblings felt the same way. For once, they were acting like an actual family without arguments, and though it surely wouldn't be the same tomorrow, he didn't care. It was a day of peace, and that was good enough.