My family comes from Xichang, a city so remote and tiny that English has not yet developed a specific noun to address its language. I have once secretly planned to name it Chuandarin or Chuanese, but then decided against it. Since, unlike Guangzhou or Beijing, the two cities so grand and advanced, Xichang possesses neither elegance nor nobility to match such international names for its dialect. Thereby I would simply name it’s language Sichuan after the Sichuan province that Xichang belongs to for the following which I am about to pen. 
    

My parents moved long ago from Xichang to Guangzhou. I still appreciate their decision deeply. Guangzhou is  a larger and more international city, with its streets always busy and its skys-crapers always blazing with swarms of dizzying color. In contrast, Xichang is rather shabby and grey, with everything that Guangzhou will dispel and nothing Guangzhou takes hold of. I was born in Xichang while raised in Guangzhou, but I have always hoped to come from a Guangzhou family. 
     

In my childhood I was once deeply bothered by annoying family members who called my name out in Sichuan most sonorously at the school gate. Most of my classmates were born and raised Guangzhou kids and my grandpa’s “??? -” would penetrate a pile of Cantonese jibber-jabber of name calling, turning my friends’ necks along the way. In primary school, I was allowed to rush to my grandpa to stop him from calling again without severe notice of others. Yet things changed when I entered middle school. With the foul eagerness of making fun of others during pre-puberty, juvenile boys in my class would roar with my grandpa, imitating the Sichuan remarkably lifelike except for the howls of laughter following. I suppose that’s the official starting point of my banning for Sichuan in public. From that day on I went home alone.   
      

At home my parents will communicate in Sichuan. It is when we are at the  same dinner table that we are most distantly set apart. My parents laugh at the dialect jokes that I have never appre-ciated while I, under their wary eyes, snorted into my dish at my school mates’ jokes on we-chat. Once my father tried to include me, after a very dramatic cackle of theirs faced by a stone-look of mine, “Do you know what we were just laughing at?”
      

“??? (Sichuan for “I don’t know),” I replied in my best Sichuan. Maybe he was so touched by my willingness to finally utter my supposed dialect that my father chose to let go of correcting me and told a story that had something to do with a horse, a man and an apple and ends with ???? (A Sichuan way of expressing emotion, but in a slightly impolite way).
   

“Ha hahahaha!” My mother was wiping her tears from laughing, “Don’t you see that?”   
      

“Ha, ha, ha, of course, of course, ???? (My intention yet failure to say ????), ha ha ha, how very funny.” I lifted up the corner of my mouth. “Well…” Either my parents saw through the resemblance between my feign chuckle and that of the Joker in Batman or they were glad I “understood” the joke also, they tucked back into their dishes.
      

The truth was that I had long forgotten not only all the Sichuan idioms or slangs or witty puns but also their pronunciations, not that I have bothered to remember. I was lazy and proud. Mandarin and English, or even Cantonese are on the tip of my tongue while Sichuan had to be spoken with a desperate search in mind and a careful examination. Even when I have finally squeezed out a few quivering lines in front of the family, I have to end with a hollow and nervous giggle to admit that yes, I speak it worse than my one-year-old cousin and yes, I have never spoken it once at home since I have graduated from kindergarten, there, that’s why I sounded like a wounded dog. Crown me with the name of a “black sheep,” I am the traitor of my Sichuan family. Sichuan turns to this heavy chain that locks my tongue which has been so garrulous with other more useful and international language. So why would I bother to ask my father, “Sorry, I don’t understand your joke, would you mind explaining it to me?” when extolling and laughing at his humor with a clumsy repeat of the phrases was so much easier?
      

The other truth was that I secretly look down upon Sichuan. When a person speaks with the Beijing accent, people automatically link him with the once honorable Manchu, the glorious Qing Dynasty or the present day government officials; when a person speaks with the Shanghai accent, people shrivel back at the famous “Shanghai’s pride” left by its heroic past in the 1930’s; when a person speaks with the Guangzhou accent, people connect him to a prosperous and advanced coastal city that breeds so much wealth. But when a person speaks Sichuan accent, hmm…what does a Sichuan accent sound like again? Oh yes, I remember, I have just heard it from this short play satirizing country bumpkin’s vulgarness! Those actors speak great Sichuan to mimic some rural folks, it’s hilarious! Ha, ha, ha. Oh, where were you from again? I would normally say Guangzhou to avoid mutual embarrassment, but I don’t blame them for saying so. Sichuan is humble, it is low-born. Had it been in the ancient greco-roman times, Sichuan would have been spoken by the plebeians. It is this northern native dialect that easily evokes connotations of houses made of raw, crackled bricks and paths created by human footprints, and I don’t want to be entangled in it. Those who speak Sichuan are clumsy, hideous and rude. Mandarin and Cantonese are used in the daily lives and on movie screens while Sichuan is only a co-star in cheesy comedies. Any romantic movie, however elegant and touching, will turn immediately into a freak show the moment Sichuan steps in.
     

Yet things in my high school changed. Studying in an international high school, everybody is technically, a traitor of his/her own culture. Everybody tries to forget his culture. When I met friends from Sichuan who share the same experience with me, they either claim to have forgotten such trivial  details or urge me to study World History. Suddenly I feel detached for the first time in my life, not in the way that I am ashamed of where I come from but, on the contrary, astonished for how others forget where they came from. The students study the language of westerners and learn their thoughts, leaving the Eastern culture behind. Nobody seems to care for the five thousand years of culture as much as for their GPA. We are vying to appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare yet neglecting the glorious essence of Tang and Song poems. We are proud of our English scores yet have long forgotten the great culture of our own. My Chinese became awkward and it is only when I correct the mistakes my foreign teachers make for practicing Chinese that I feel that there is still a Chinese part in me, flowing the sense of the great Eastern culture, yet fading so swiftly and quickly that I can grasp nothing remaining. There was a time when I declared that Chinese culture is declining with the modern age. Yet it is not. It is me that is ephemeral, me that is blurring, me that is disappearing while the place that generates me remains impact and still. So who am I to judge my culture, who am I to judge the place that bore me and showers me with its air, its love, its sense, its dust? 

        It is time for me to go home.
        I hope that Xichang is still the way I have remembered it.
        I hope that my grandparents will still stand in the doorway for me to come.
        I hope that the sky there will be as blue, that the land there will still smell of mud.
        I hope that it is still not too late.
        I hope…