The Language I Didn’t Inherit | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante from NPR. I’m Daniel Alarcón. 

Today’s story takes place in two places separated by over 15 thousand kilometers, but united by hundreds of families.

Nicole Chi Amén belongs to one of them. 

[Nicole Chi]: I am a filmmaker. I am Costa Rican, but I am part of the Chinese community in Costa Rica. I am third generation Chinese on both my father’s and my mother’s side of the family.

[Daniel]: All her grandparents emigrated from China to Costa Rica in the 1950s. They come from a region in the south called Enping.  

[Nicole]: Most Chinese in Costa Rica come from southern China, which is a very, very rural place, extremely rural. 

[Daniel]: Enping is one of the places where the great Chinese diaspora of the 19th century began. Nicole’s grandparents were fleeing from hunger and want. For the first half of the 20th century, China’s history was marked by famines. And the second half began with what is considered the world’s deadliest famine and the largest man-made disaster in history. An estimated 30 million people died, and there is a consensus that this was primarily due to the Communist and agrarian development policies implemented by the newly founded People’s Republic of China.

[Nicole]: The word had spread that Costa Rica was doing very well, that it was easy to immigrate there, unlike the United States, which was more complicated, and that there were opportunities to do business and to climb out of poverty and improve one’s life. Most Chinese in Costa Rica come from the same region, because word got around about the opportunities in Costa Rica.

[Daniel]: What we are going to talk about you today has to do with her maternal grandparents.

[Nicole]: My grandmother married my grandfather while she was in China, and my grandfather came with my great-grandfather, that is, with his father. My grandmother stayed in China for a period of time, and when they settled in Alajuela, my grandfather decided to bring my grandmother over.

[Daniel]: There they set up a small convenience store (what is known in Costa Rica as a pulpería) at the local market. They had children, including Nicole’s mother, and they grew old.

Nicole was born and lived her entire childhood and adolescence in that same place, Alajuela. Her grandparents’ house was nearby, about a ten-minute walk. And of course, as in many families, there was a mandatory visit every weekend. She always went with her mother. And as a child, for Nicole, those visits were… somehow strange.

[Nicole]: I felt very intimidated by my grandparents. Both my grandfather and my grandmother. He was tall; he smoked a lot. I found him very mysterious and distant; he worked a lot. The memories I have of him are when we would go visit him at the store and he would give me a Coke. I remember that I would take the Coke and run away.

My grandmother spent her days at home. She really liked to cook; she liked to take care of her grandchildren. When we arrived, she would offer me just some cookies and soda, nothing else. And that’s what she offered me, because she thought that’s what I liked.

I didn’t like being alone with my grandparents because I felt that if something happened, I really couldn’t say anything. 

[Daniel]: There was a significant barrier between Nicole and her grandparents—language. Nicole was never taught to speak any Cantonese, her grandparents’ language, and even less so the Enping dialect. And while her grandfather learned the somewhat rudimentary, almost broken Spanish he needed for his business, her grandmother spent her days at home and never spoke a word of Spanish.

Nicole’s grandfather died when she was a child, but for more than 20 years, Nicole visited her grandmother’s house every weekend. Sometimes she recorded videos, trying to portray her grandmother, the relationship with her.

[Nicole]: Father, tell grandmother it’s a video. 

[Daniel]: In this video you just heard, Nicole recorded the only direct interaction she could have with her grandmother. 

[Nicole]: Guian, jou ma?

[Daniel]: It means “How are you, grandmother?”

“I’m fine,” she replied in Enpinghua, the dialect she spoke. That, just that, over and over again. 

After her grandmother died in 2014, Nicole felt that a big part of her family’s history had gone with her. 

[Nicole Chi]: I think it hit me in the sense that I felt I had lost an opportunity. I mean, I had lost the possibility of asking her many things. I wondered how she would have liked to celebrate the new year, or her own birthday, would she have liked to go back to China at some point. I would have liked to be able to ask her how she really felt about not being able to speak Spanish, about not being able to have conversations with anyone other than her children.

[Daniel]: And there was something more urgent, more immediate—Nicole had missed the opportunity to find an answer to the question that never left her: Where do I come from?

We’ll be right back. 

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[Daniel]: We’re back. Our senior editor, Luis Fernando Vargas, picks up the story. This is Luis Fernando: 

[Luis Fernando Vargas]: If there was a starting point to this whole story, it was something that happened in a preschool in Alajuela, in 1998. There, a classmate asked Nicole…

[Nicole]: She asked me point-blank why I looked the way I did, and why my eyes were like that, and whether I could see well.

[Luis Fernando]: She asked her about her Chinese features: her slanted eyes, her flat nose, her extremely straight black hair. Nicole immediately replied, “Yes, I see well,” without thinking much about it, but she understood the meaning behind the question.

[Nicole]: At that moment I thought, “Wow, I’m actually different from the rest of these kids.”

[Luis Fernando]: That doubt, basically an innocent doubt, never left her, although nothing was ever mentioned again about her features at school. And the fact is that most people knew her family. Her cousins had gone to the same institution, so she was not the first girl of Chinese descent there. It was not until high school that the subject of her appearance came up again, and this time, more forcefully: 

[Nicole]: There was not a single Chinese person in the entire school. I felt a bit foreign, because for the first time I actually felt that I was being bullied a bit, I mean, they were asking me questions, or doing this thing that they do sometimes, where they speak to you in Chinese. None of what was happening made any sense.

[Luis Fernando]: And this began to distress her. Because the children projected onto her a story that never happened. They expected her to know things she never had to learn or even had the opportunity to learn. Nicole did not even understand the language her grandmother spoke, and to a lesser extent, her mother. Much less had she ever set foot in Asia. She celebrated the Western New Year, not the Chinese New Year, which is the most important holiday in that culture. She felt distant from it. She felt the 15 thousand kilometers of distance that separate the two lands. But everyone around her assumed the opposite.

And of course, she began to have an uneasy feeling.

[Nicole]: Yes, there was a dissonance, let’s say, between what I saw in the mirror and how I felt inside.

[Luis Fernando]: In Costa Rica, particularly in the popular and middle-class neighborhoods, we tend to lump several things together under the term “El chino.” “El chino” is the local grocery store. “El chino” is also the nearest Chinese restaurant. These businesses are run by migrant families from China, and often also by their children and grandchildren, born here on Costa Rican soil. 

[Nicole]: El chino has to be the Chinese person from the restaurant. If I meet someone, the first thing they say is something like, “Which is your restaurant?” Or, “Are you the one from the pulpe?” It’s like, “No, my parents are professionals, my father is a mechanical engineer, my mother is a psychologist.”

[Luis Fernando]: “El chino” is part of the urban geography of a large part of the country. Paradoxically, because on the one hand, it is a supplier, a meeting place, and a cardinal point. An everyday place. But at the same time, it is an opaque, distant space, about which little is known and much is assumed. There are language barriers that widen this distance because in many stores, Spanish is learned on the fly, with none of the theory, just through practice, in an effort to survive and get ahead. And of course, there is also racism.

[Nicole]: There is a certain condescension. And it’s strange, because sometimes there is even a kind of admiration in these positive stereotypes that they have, such as, “They are very hard-working, they are very intelligent.” And this is good in a way, but they are still stereotypes. Not everyone is like this; there is something beyond the Chinese who can’t pronounce their R’s. 

[Luis Fernando]: The Chinese are part of the neighborhood in Costa Rica, but not always part of the community. This is true now, and it was true when Nicole’s grandparents arrived, more than 60 years ago.

Here’s a little history: The Chinese came to the Americas especially from the mid-19th century onward. They were fleeing from calamity. The situation was very hard in the empire. They had just lost the Opium War, and this was followed by a period of catastrophic floods and more famines. A certain parallel to what Nicole’s grandparents experienced.

With the discovery of gold in California and the construction of the intercontinental railroad in the United States, many Chinese saw the opportunity for a better life.

But the exodus spread to the rest of the American continent. Other large groups traveled to Cuba, Peru, and Panama to work on sugar cane plantations, in mines, guano extraction and the construction of railways that were gradually linking the region.

So it was that in 1855, the first group of Chinese migrants registered in Costa Rica arrived from Panama. There were 32 people and they came to work on the farms of two rich men. Another group of 45 people arrived at the end of that year.

Lai Sai Acon, professor at the University of Costa Rica and founding member of the project Recovery of the Historical Memory of Chinese Migrations in Costa Rica, has been documenting the arrival of the Chinese in the country for years.

[Lai Sai Acon]: After that, in 1873, another contingent of Chinese was brought in. But this one was somewhat larger. And they came directly from China out of the port of Macao.

[Luis Fernando]: There were about 650 of them. They were hired by the company that was building the railroad to the Atlantic. It was very hard work, in the mountains, completely isolated in unexplored lands, in an extremely hot climate, with tropical diseases, living with explosives and landslides.

These workers were hired by the railroad company in conditions that were very similar to slavery. They had only 3 days off a year, a poor diet, their work shifts were 12 hours long, and they were paid less than what their contracts had stipulated. There were frequent reports to the government of Chinese escaping from the railroad camps. And when they were caught, they were punished with imprisonment, whipping, and chains.

There was an uprising in 1874 that ended with six workers dead and seven wounded. This may be one of the first labor strikes on record in the country.

Their public image was not good.

[Lai Sai]: Through the media, the newspapers of the time, we find many protests, many unfounded fears of the population. They were said to be people who ate children, who ate filthy things, unhealthy things, or who brought venereal diseases.

[Luis Fernando]: They were also pictured as opium smokers and vicious gamblers. They were even called a “degenerate race.”

And this perception is not surprising. The goal of the liberal governments of the time was to populate the territory, but by attracting white European colonizers. Groups such as the Chinese and the Afro-descendants were an inconvenience for them.

Furthermore, in 1897 a decree was enacted prohibiting the entry of Chinese migrants to Costa Rica. But immigration control in this small country was weak, and the Chinese kept arriving. There was even a black market for buying and selling false documentation. The decree was finally repealed in 1943.

Gradually, the Chinese became associated with commerce and entrepreneurship. But often in a derogatory way. They were branded as greedy and monopolistic. And they remained isolated from other ethnic groups. This is something that can still be heard in the street today.

But one thing is certain: The Chinese brought innovation. They created new services, such as laundromats, they cashed checks, they granted loans… They were resourceful.

And more importantly, they supported each other. In the first half of the 20th century, associations were founded on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts to help new immigrants.

[Lai Sai]: For example, if new Chinese people arrived, they would try to create a common fund—money was lent to that person so that they could establish themselves and climb the social and economic ladder and then pay back that money.

[Luis Fernando]: And it was that same chain of solidarity that helped Nicole’s grandparents survive and give their children a better life. 

[Leda]: Nicole knows nothing about it.

[Nicole]: I can’t see very well. Yes. Uh-huh. Yes, yes. It’s recording. All right.

[Luis Fernando]: Nicole has recorded several conversations with her mother. Her name is Leda Amén, and she was born eight years after her parents arrived from China. She is the second-to-last of six siblings.

[Leda]: Do you remember Mother’s house, that has a little wall? We used to stand outside that little wall around 6 in the evening after dinner, just watching people go by. “Hello, good night. Hello.” Mother loved to stand there and watch people go by. Poor thing, since she never went out, this was a way of being with the outside world too.

[Luis Fernando]: Her grandmother’s house had different kinds of barriers that separated it from the rest of the country. First, the language, yes, the inability to communicate with her surroundings. Then there was education; she never went to school and never learned how to read or write. Then there were gender barriers. The place of a woman, and specifically a woman of Enping in the 1960s, was in the home. Child-rearing and housework was the only world her husband allowed her.

And that house and that isolation was also a barrier for Nicole’s mother in her early years.

[Leda]: When I started school, speaking hardly any Spanish because at home we only spoke Chinese, I felt like I was the mascot of the group. All the girls wanted to hang out with me, and they asked me whether I wanted to go to the bathroom, and they showed me everything, you know? And at recess they would walk with me, arm in arm, walking here and there, and everything. But of course, everything was very new to me.

[Luis Fernando]: For her, going to school was in itself a small migration. It involved a new language, new food… And her family decided to make sure that she and her siblings could adapt as much as possible to the small town of Alajuela. They donated money to the school, and in the end they became very well-known and loved. And over the years, thanks to Leda and her siblings, Costa Rica, in a way, began to infiltrate her home and reach her mother. 

[Leda]: I taught my mother how to make queque tico, because my mother knew how to make Chinese-style queque, which is steamed. Oh, my mother loved the dry queque, and then she could make it on her own.

[Luis Fernando]: Queque, by the way, is cake. 

[Nicole]: She really enjoyed food, and she liked to eat gallo pinto, she liked to eat Western food—hamburgers, pizzas, tacos. So she kind of appropriated it in whatever way she could, but always with the language barrier that she couldn’t overcome.

[Leda]: (Chinese)

[Nicole’s Grandmother]: (Chinese)

[Luis Fernando]: Lai Mi. That was Nicole’s grandmother’s name. And what you just heard is from the few video recordings that exist of her. On that occasion, Leda was translating the interaction between grandmother and granddaughter. By that time, Nicole’s grandmother was having serious breathing problems, but she was still talking.

[Leda]: (Chinese)

[Nicole’s Grandmother]: (Chinese)

[Luis Fernando]: Between questions and Leda’s prompting, she manages to answer: “My name is Lai Mi, I am 80 years old, and I was born in China.” Then she looks down.

Lai Mi was also called María Fung Kong. Nicole’s grandfather was called Bernardo Amén León. Not by his own decision, but by decision of the employees of the National Registry of Costa Rica, their names were replaced by Western ones. It was a failure of communication, laziness, perhaps contempt. The surname Amén that Nicole and Leda have is a product of all that. 

Lai Mi, María Fung. For Nicole she is “Guian” that is, grandmother.

[Nicole]: She loved to joke. Very funny. Even though I couldn’t talk to her, we were always laughing. My mother always told me, “If she could speak Spanish, she’d be chatting with you all day.” She really loved to talk.

[Leda]: My mother had her friends who were from the same town where they lived, but they were older ladies, so they would go visit her and talk and everything, but as time went on, those women died off, and grandmother no longer had contact with anyone, so she was left alone.

[Luis Fernando]: Nicole’s grandfather died when she was 7 and Guian was 71. And without her husband around, she changed. 

[Leda]: Mother said, “I’m free now.” Because with father, the meal had to be ready at 12 and then at six in the afternoon. Saturday and Sunday too. Then mother said, “Ah! Now I can eat whatever I want; I can go out and everything.” So we would go for walks in the park, we would go for a walk, we would go shopping. Mother loved to go shopping with us.

[Nicole]: She would walk with us through the center of Alajuela and people would offer her free fruits and vegetables because she was Bernardo Amen’s wife. So it was a very nice thing to see that she was loved, but she couldn’t really communicate with others.

I would sit with her in the afternoons and we would watch soap operas and spend a lot of time together in silence, or laughing… or laughing at things that happened on TV, and I would wonder what she really imagined was happening.

[Luis Fernando]: Leda went out on walks with her almost every day in Alajuela until Guian died in 2014, at the age of 86. It was December 31st. And for Nicole’s family, this was always a strange date, because they celebrated the new year on that day, but not the official Chinese one. These are the peculiarities of families that belong to two cultures at the same time.

But the new year is a fundamental date for Nicole’s family. It is a time of family reunion and celebration. It is full of rituals and mythologies. It is a space of beginnings and endings, and a time to remember the ancestors.

Unfortunately, Nicole was never able to enjoy that celebration with her grandmother. By tradition, it is celebrated with the husband’s family. Nicole and Guian never got together except on January 1st, when Nicole visited her and Guian gave her a thousand-colon bill. A red bill, the color of good luck.

Her death was hard on everyone. 

[Nicole]: I would go to her house every weekend, every weekend. I would stay at her house and spend time with her and we would eat together, and that part of my routine came to an end.

[Luis Fernando]: But at the same time, she felt anger. A passive, latent anger because she was never given the opportunity to learn the language, to get closer to her culture. Learning to write her name in Chinese, for example.

[Nicole]: Why didn’t they talk to us only in that dialect throughout our childhood, to see whether some of it would stick?

[Luis Fernando]: Perhaps with those tools she could have gotten closer to those answers, to her grandmother, to a complete story that had been eluding her.

[Nicole]: When I look at the family album at home, I wonder, “Who are all these people?” I have no idea who they are, and my parents don’t know who they are either. So I thought, “How can this be?”

[Luis Fernando]: She began to feel it as a void that needed to be filled.

And since she could not ask, Nicole decided to follow the path that her grandparents had taken 60 years ago, to see whether she could find something of herself in those origins.

[Daniel]: We’ll be back. 

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Luis Fernando Vargas continues the story. 

[Luis Fernando]: The death of Nicole’s grandmother and her questions coincided with a political event in Costa Rica: the diplomatic rapprochement with China. The Asian country was seeking to increase its influence in the region. A few years earlier, the Chinese government even gave Costa Rica the design and construction of a National Stadium, and for a soccer-loving country like this, it is a significant gift.

I am telling you this to emphasize China’s desire to open up, to connect, to make the relationship between countries be more than just the flow of migrants. But mostly I’m telling you this so that you understand why it was easy for Nicole to get a scholarship to go study Mandarin.

[Nicole]: Yes, I wanted to learn the language, and I wanted to go on that adventure to discover myself.

[Luis Fernando]: Mandarin, of course, is not Cantonese. They are different dialects. But it was an approximation, a first step. And she had something more concrete in mind:

[Nicole]: But the concrete goal was to be able to go to that town.

[Luis Fernando]: The village of Enping, where her grandparents were from. She didn’t know exactly how she would get there, or what she would do if she did, but she felt it was the best chance she would ever have.

Nicole arrived in Beijing, in the north of the country, on August 26, 2016.

[Nicole]: I was so naïve when I went to China, I think, because I went thinking everything was going to be okay. I know how the language sounds a little, I know it’s a little different, but I’m sure, I don’t know, but I thought that something… something had stayed with me by osmosis, let’s say, because of my family, and it was going to be easier for me to assimilate in China. And when I arrived and made the trip it was like, ding! Nope.

I really had no idea how different this whole country was, this whole culture, especially because I arrived in the northernmost region and my family is from the southernmost one, so they are like different countries.

And I was like, “What is this food? I’ve never eaten anything like that, I don’t understand,” and it was a very hard blow for me. So when I came to China, I realized that Cantonese and Mandarin are totally different. The tones are totally different; nothing is the same. It was very frustrating.

[Luis Fernando]: Nicole spent a year studying in Beijing. It was challenging: She had to learn the written symbols of China, the dynamics of a metropolis, and most of all, she had to deal with something that felt like the need to justify her existence.

[Nicole]: In China, people looked at me very strangely. It was like, “You look very Chinese, but where are you from?” And I was from Costa Rica. Costa Rica. “What is that? Where? What is that country?” The first phrases that I memorized were: “No, I am descended from Chinese, and I am from Costa Rica, and Costa Rica is in Central America. No, not in South America, in Central America.” I mean, it was the phrases that I learned so that I could explain my existence in China.

[Luis Fernando]: That first winter, as the Chinese New Year approached, she realized that some Chinese-Costa Rican friends she had met in Beijing were going to visit their family in the south of the country. It was a 2,000-kilometer trip, like going from California to Chicago. Nicole saw this trip as a golden opportunity. She would never be able to get so close to her grandmother’s land.

Guangzhou, the city where they arrived, is ancient. It was a trading hub between Europe and Asia, and today it is a megalopolis of 14 million people. There, Nicole’s grandmother’s brother, who also migrated to Costa Rica, put her in touch with some distant cousins in the rural region. With a little translation from a Costa Rican friend who was living nearby, and studying the language, she was able to communicate.

[Nicole]: So they tell me, “Well, when you get to such and such a stop, you call me, and then I will talk to the taxi driver; you have to stop a taxi so that the taxi driver can take you to the town where the house I left behind is, and in that house another person will be waiting for you who in turn will drive you to your grandmother’s town.”

[Luis Fernando]: And so, on February 5, 2018, Nicole embarked on the train journey from Guangzhou to rural China with her Costa Rican friend who would serve as her translator.

[Nicole]: I saw how the skyscrapers from the city of Guangdong were being left behind and everything became just mountains, mountains, rice fields, rice fields, and I stopped hearing Mandarin altogether.

[Luis Fernando]: Until they reached the village, which was not yet her grandmother’s.

[Nicole]: How many hours was it? I would say it was like a day and a half including the taxi and all that. And it is an area where there are many old people and many children but nobody in between. All the people are in the city working. So, of course, the children are there because the grandparents are the ones who take care of them, so it was more difficult because I could only speak a very, very basic level of Mandarin with the little children, and the old people spoke only the dialects. Very few spoke Mandarin, and it was hard to understand their Mandarin, very complicated.

[Luis Fernando]: There she stayed with a woman whose name she never understood and whom she called Taiku, which roughly means older sister. She was the person who looked after the house of Nicole’s distant cousins.

[Nicole]: An older lady who reminded me a lot of my grandmother because she smiled a lot and was very warm in that sense. And she smoked; she smoked a lot all the time, always.

[Luis Fernando]: The woman’s daughter lived in the city but was visiting the village, and she spoke a Mandarin that was clearer to them. It was a broken communication, somewhat chaotic. And without warning, without planning, one day while she was eating a Chinese tamal, the women told Nicole to get ready because they were going to visit her grandmother’s village. It was a short trip, about 40 minutes, but it felt, again, a world apart. 

[Nicole]: Very rural. I mean, that place doesn’t even have a market or shops. It’s a very remote place, where there are only a few houses; that’s all there is.

You don’t see buses here, you don’t see trains anymore. Here you just have to walk or someone who has a car gives you a ride.

[Luis Fernando]: Nicole felt it as a place suspended in time because of the shapes and materials of the houses, because of their textures… It felt so remote that even the fact that there was electricity surprised her.

[Arrival in the village, conversation with the locals]

[Luis Fernando]: That conversation you just heard is Nicole’s guides asking the locals about Maria Fung Kong’s house. Or rather, Lai Mi’s. After a while they started talking about Limón, the Caribbean province of Costa Rica. That’s how many of them know Costa Rica, because many of their relatives went to that port.

[Nicole]: And then it was like, “Oh, where did they go?” “They went to Limón, after so many years,” I don’t know. “Acón, Amén,” this and that. Then it seemed like one of them finally understood and they took us right away.

[Luis Fernando]: It was a town with few houses, where everyone shared a surname, where everyone was family.

And that man who guided them was the caretaker of the house.

[Nicole]: And the man had the key; he opened it and the thing was…

[Luis Fernando]: Dirt floor, stone walls and a wooden roof. Everything felt like it was from a bygone era. The little house was very small, about six square meters. There was nothing. It was in ruins. There was only stored firewood. They used it as a storage room. That’s when Nicole called her parents.

The people who were with her started talking to Nicole’s mother.

[Nicole]: Did you understand anything they said? I don’t understand what’s going on.

[Luis Fernando]: But Leda understood little. And even though the first language she learned was her mother’s, their Enpinghua dialect is not exactly the same as the one that is spoken there now. Nicole’s parents described it as if they spoke an ancient Spanish, as if they were characters from Don Quixote de la Mancha. Their dialect is from the 1950s, learned informally, also modified by a lifetime of living on another continent.

[Leda]: Oh, no, that house is very old, mom. That house is more than 100 years old, but it is in very bad condition… 

[Nicole]: Everyone was saying I was family, everyone was my family, we all took pictures and everything, and it was a very, very nice thing, very warm, you know?

But for me, this thing that I had been waiting for so long, suddenly happened, but that night I felt very empty. And then I asked myself, “Well, what did I expect? What was I expecting, my grandmother to appear in this space?” Something like that, what was it? 

[Luis Fernando]: But back in the village where she was staying, Nicole understood what was truly significant about the trip. Chinese New Year was just a few days away. And she thought that celebrating it there, near her grandmother’s land, held a certain symbolism. 

[Nicole]: It was like experiencing the New Year that I had never experienced with my grandmother. Cooking meant getting the goose and killing it, and removing the guts, blood, and everything with the women. People I didn’t know but who reminded me so much of her. All the women in the village, in one way or another, reminded me of my grandmother. 

[Luis Fernando]: They also performed a sacred ritual: cooking, walking to an altar in the village and offering the food.

And then you go and all the families are giving that food as an offering to the ancestors.

[Luis Fernando]: They pray, and then come the fireworks…

There is no shortage of karaoke, in which the whole town participates. Children, adults, and the elderly, of course.

And there, in front of all those people, so far away and yet so close, Nicole felt it: 

[Nicole]: The fact I can say I had a relationship with my grandmother became tangible, because I always felt that not being able to speak with her meant that I didn’t really have a relationship with her, but these experiences in her village made me feel like, no, the truth is that I did, I did have—and still have—a relationship with Guian, despite the fact we couldn’t speak the same language, even though I couldn’t have a conversation with her in words, but I created another way to have a conversation with her.

[Luis Fernando]: One where, without her being present, she was able to describe to Nicole, more or less, with some imperfections created by time, what her life was like in China, what her home was like, how a 15-thousand-kilometer trip in harsh conditions changed her life.

[Nicole]: I was able to make this trip with a lot of comfort. And with a lot of certainty, let’s say, that nothing bad was going to happen to me. And I feel that she surely didn’t have that certainty. And I greatly admire that she very bravely joined that space so different from the one she knew.

[Luis Fernando]: Recently, some of Nicole’s cousins migrated to Costa Rica. They speak Cantonese and Mandarin, and being able to chat with them, even in a minimal way, makes her feel closer to a culture she felt she had no rights to.

[Nicole]: Being able to write my name. Being able to read some of the characters. That made me feel closer to my grandmother. It has been like a process of empowerment, and also of accepting that there are things I can’t know, but that doesn’t make me any less Chinese, either.

[Luis Fernando]: And with what Nicole said, I think of my own maternal family. Because my great-grandfather, Asan Li Young, came in the 1920s from Canton, not too far from where Nicole’s family came years later. He came to the Pacific coast and settled in Puntarenas.

My great-grandfather is Chinese, but I don’t carry his genes. He married my great-grandmother, who is Costa Rican, when my grandmother was a baby and they were fleeing from her genetic father. Asan Li Young raised her in his hardware store, eating soups, rice, fried foods, and Chinese cakes. And he gave her his surname. My grandmother’s name is Sonia Li Fallas. Later, Asan had more children with my great-grandmother and they did carry the genes from both parts of the world.

So Li is my mother’s second surname. Ana Vega Li. She, her four sisters, and a brother always sparked curiosity at school. White girls with green or honey-colored eyes, several blondes with a surname that is known to be Chinese. “Why don’t you look Chinese?” they were asked. In a nice way, of course. Not with the implicit racism that many Chinese hear in Costa Rica.

What my grandmother and my mother did not inherit was the language. Asan refused to teach them Cantonese. Not a word. He wanted assimilation. They tell me that my grandmother also had a difficult relationship with her siblings because she was not “really Chinese,” whatever that means.

But one thing is certain. I am not Chinese. I am not Chinese at all. I have lost my surname. There is nothing in me but tremendous respect. My mother is not sure whether she feels, even in part, Chinese. And among my aunts, it varies. But something that I think we all share is that it always felt like a borrowed surname, like we had no right to that cultural heritage. That is why we can say that this story has a special meaning for me. Because thanks to an immigrant from southern China, my mother had a life, with limitations, with struggles, but a beautiful life, after all.

Unlike Nicole’s grandmother, when Asan was old, he decided to leave his wife in Costa Rica and go to die in China, his homeland. He had another family there. He always stayed in contact with them, I understand. That final trip of my great-grandfather was always in the back of my head as I listened to the story of Guian, Nicole’s grandmother. I wonder whether she would have liked to do the same as my great-grandfather, whether she also felt tied to that land all her life.

[Daniel]: In 2023, Nicole premiered Guian, a documentary about her grandmother’s story. It has been screened at festivals in Costa Rica, China, the United States, and other countries.

Nicole Chi Amén is a Costa Rican film director and producer, and Luis Fernando Vargas is a senior editor at Radio Ambulante. Both live in Costa Rica. This story was edited by Camila Segura. Bruno Scelza did the fact checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri and Rémy Lozano, with original music by Rémy.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Lisette Arévalo, Pablo Argüelles, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Selene Mazón, Juan David Naranjo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, Ana Tuirán, Elsa Liliana Ulloa and Desireé Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.

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Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.