“He had to see Kywing and the others. He yearned for the music of their frenzied dialects, the euphony of clicking tiles as they played games, and his mouth watered in anticipation of stews Kywing would prepare, embryonic chickens with tender bones in peppered soup, pressed duck and tiny bottomless cups of tea. He longed for vestiges of his family mirrored in the men who came, in their gesticulations and corroded faces, in the Morse code of their languages, which he didn’t even understand anymore, but anything to remind him that he wasn’t along there on that wretched island” (35).
I think that of all the novels we have red thus far, The Pagoda has required of me the most mental care and attention while I am actually reading. There is a certain complexity attached to Powell’s sentence structures and flows that really force me to read carefully. The intricacy with which she sets up each scene is unique because it contrasts so starkly with how she writes in the dialogue that happens between characters, specifically in the first scene including Kywing and Lowe.
In the passage I’ve chosen, it can be assumed that the longing described is from the perspective of Lowe. Lowe yearns to be with other Chinese people, to feel safe and at home with people who no only look like him but share the same histories and experiences. Words like “embryonic” and “vestiges” and “gesticulations” are superficially complex, when the feelings behind what Lowe wants to do are quite simple. Lowe misses home.
When Lowe and Kywing engage in conversation, using English, their talk is broken and grammatically incorrect. Lowe also notes that his Chinese is broken, that even if he were to hear the different dialects of Chinese, he wouldn’t be able to glean that much information. From this, I’m thinking about the politics of language, especially for immigrants and laborers. People like Lowe and Kywing are expected to learn the language of their new home, to learn English in order to get by. But with the lack of exposure to Chinese, Lowe loses the words that connect him to the very people he yearns to be with the most. What is the most heart-wrenching about this portion is that Lowe is at a point in his life that his loneliness and desire for a trust worthy source of comfort allows him to disregard glaring language barriers.
On top of all this, Powell chooses to express the way that Lowe is feeling in such a complex and intricate manner that it seems Lowe would never be able to do on his own, at least in Chinese. So, a question I would have is whether or not the writing style is simply a personal choice of narrative or intentional in the way it juxtaposes with the dialogue. Is there a hierarchy that Powell is intentionally implementing through the way she is choosing to write?