My mother and I are driving down M-14 in separate cars. We’re cruising in a loose formation — me in front, she behind — each in our own vehicles with our right foot on the pedal.

It’s 8:15 AM, and Ann Arbor this Sunday morning is crisp and bright, the two lane highway ringed with the granulated foliage of fall leaves. Every few seconds, I check the rearview mirror, where my mother sits in her shiny CR-V with a generous amount of following distance between us.

The highway is completely empty. We see one other car in a fifteen-minute span: a massive Prairie Farms Truck, which roars past both my mother and me. Then the plastered image of small cows under their oversaturated blue sky recedes, and we’re alone again, chugging along at a constant 60 mph.

In the original plan, my mother was not supposed to come with me. My Aunt Hua had flown in from Houston, and she and my mother would leave Sunday morning for Mackinac Island.

Still, my mother lamented not being able to accompany me. “Zǎo zhī dào, wǒ men jiù bù xuǎn zhè gè tiān le,” she told me, pawing my shoulder. If I’d known, we would’ve picked a different date. This she stated as if my capricious decision to revisit a childhood institution somehow took priority over the six days she had to spend with her sister, whom she had not seen in over two years either. It was an exchange particularly emblematic of my mother, whose love materializes in a prioritization of her children’s needs, however whimsical, over even the most pressing of her own.

Her reaction had everything to do with the location: I was headed to Ann Hua Chinese School. It was a sphere I hadn’t entered, much less thought about, since my graduation from the institution at age fourteen. By now, over seven years had passed.

At the time, I’d detested the obligation. Every Sunday, my mother would herd my sister and me into the car, and we’d chug across town to the Dow Building on University of Michigan’s North Campus. I would complain, and my mother would drown me out with grand conjectures of how grateful I’d be for this experience in the future. Then I’d sit for two hours in the stuffy lecture hall meant for college students, scratching Mandarin characters on sheets of gridded paper among twenty other Chinese American kids.

My mother and I get lost twice en route. I use the word “lost” loosely. We each take a wrong turn once, and then a series of unceremonious beeps ensue like pig snorts to redirect the bewildered individual.

It’s not entirely our fault — we’ve both entered foreign territory. The Ann Hua Chinese School I once attended has shifted locations not once, but twice, since my graduation. This new address, at the “Crane Liberal Arts & Science Building” on Washtenaw Community College’s campus, is thus strange land to both of us.

As we enter campus, the low-lying sand-toned buildings unfurling like dunes before us, I can’t help but notice how this new landscape differs from the one I remember. This is urban sprawl if I’ve ever seen it, with the buildings placed imposingly and monumentally far apart, the wide sidewalk-less road we drive on snaking between each outlying structure.

It takes three minutes to drive from the Washtenaw Community College entrance sign to the Crane Building. The building itself is indistinguishable from the others: long orthogonal masses with pristine edges. But it differs, drastically, from what I knew.

Here, everything is flat. The cascading stairs I once scampered down to get from the parking lot to the Dow Building, gone. The beloved white sculpture outside the Dow Building, too large and too abstract to gain my adolescent appreciation, gone. Neighboring buildings traded for a perimeter of soft red trees that circumscribe the whole campus.

My mother and I park next to each other in the gigantic lot. It’s creepily empty, with six other cars in what must be a two hundred-foot radius. It’s now 8:46 AM, and classes will start in fourteen minutes. We debate whether or not we’ve arrived at the wrong place.

Then we spot a young mother in the distance, carrying a hot pink backpack by its straps. Two bouncing children, their heads shiny and discernibly black, trail behind her. They’re headed for the “CRANE LIBERAL ARTS & SCIENCE BUILDING,” a title fastened on the building’s top corner in massive Serif letters.

“Lai dui le,” says my mother, before I can respond. This is the right place.

Then we walk together towards the lonely, hulking mass of the Crane Building.

When I first proposed to revisit the school, my mother’s impulsive instinct was to come with me. “Wǒ gēn nǐ yī qǐ qù bā?” She said. Why don’t I go with you?

It was two weeks before Aunt Hua would arrive, and I’d come home for the night, my computer perched on a silk tablecloth my mother had once carted back from China.

I must’ve accumulated some apprehension over the visit, because at her words, my chest released. Then she remembered that she and Aunt Hua would leave for Mackinac Island, and the apprehension resurfaced.

It wasn’t that I was timid or mousy or somehow intimidated by the new faces of adolescent Chinese American children. But the school had clearly evolved since my graduation, having shed its recognizable features.

For one, there was the new location. The Ann Hua Chinese School I remembered was indelibly linked to its drab brick structure — the Herbert H. Dow Building — in the midst of the lithe deer and stone buildings that so define the University of Michigan’s North Campus. Years later, it’s this building that I remember with precise clarity: the monotonous brick surfaces and blackened strips of glass.

It was my mother who told me that the school moved the first time: Ann Hua had been dismissed from the University of Michigan. It was vandalism, destruction of property, just think of all the kids who trafficked through every weekend. They’d moved to Concordia, another university farther away.

I’d been shocked, even then. It was an institution I so associated with place, that to imagine it uprooted was jarring, even outrageous. But neither of us knew that the school had since moved again.

“Zhēn de?” My mother asked me, hovering behind me as I surfed the website. Really?

“It says on their website,” I pointed.

“A, nà kě néng jiù shì de. Jiù shì de,” said my mother. Oh, then it must be. It must be.

I wanted sit in on a class. It didn’t matter which class, so long as it was a class, which I thought a simple enough request. Instead, it proved difficult.

My mother and I examined the list of teachers. She squinted at the Mandarin characters as I read the English letters, until we reached the bottom without passing a single familiar name. Everyone we knew had phased out.

Connectionless, I emailed a random teacher off the Ann Hua website, completing the standardized “Contact” form in Mandarin.

Outside, the sky had darkened. The chandelier in our dining room hung too high to replace the now-feeble bulbs, so my mother had since added various other lamps to the space, which radiated yellow light. I sat at the head of our dining room table, where I always sat when I came home to work, and my mother stood behind me, massaging my words as I typed them.

For years, I had done the same thing for her. It started in high school, this inaugural responsibility: editing my mother’s emails. At first, it was a simple grammar check. I’d correct phrases like “he is also agreed” to “he agrees,” or “if it is convenience” to “if it’s convenient.” Then, as I grew older, it evolved into more of a scriptwriter role — my mother spelling out just the basic skeleton before we’d sit together, she narrating her desired message in Mandarin as I typed paraphrased English sentences, an entire process of about five minutes. Then I entered college, and my mother reverted to independent writing. But sometimes, on the weekends when I’d come home, she’d still approach me with the tentative question, ”Kāi Kāi, ké yǐ dá rǎo nǐ yī xià?” Kai Kai, can I bother you for a bit? Then she’d lead me to the kitchen, where the iPad would glow and my mother’s email would begin: “Hi Grace...”

But now, it was my mother who stood behind me as I sounded out my clumsy phrases in Mandarin — a curious reversal of positions.

“Xiang wen yi xia? Jiu xiang wen yi xia?” I bounced off her.

“A, ting hao de ma... Jiu yong ni zi ji xie de zui hao, shi ba,” said my mother, clearly hesitant to write the message for me. Yes, that sounds fine... Just your own wording is best, right?

For ten minutes, I fumbled through different wordings that my mother shyly affirmed, before nudging me in the correct direction. Then I sent the email, which yielded an automated “received” notice, but would ultimately remain unanswered, instead sitting in my inbox as an ode to my pitiful Mandarin. For despite the time I’d spent writing it, the email read pathetically short and simplistic, even childish. Somehow, I’d thought my Mandarin was much more eloquent, that I might be capable of graceful, well-worded paragraphs. Of course, my time away from Ann Hua must have contributed to that. But I hadn’t imagined that it crumbled to this level, to the point where I could not construct formal sentences without distinct, conscious effort. And even then, they were only rudimentary lines.

Hi,

My name’s Karen Duan. I’m a former graduate of Ann Hua Chinese School. I’m currently a senior at the University of Michigan. I’m currently taking an English course. We need to write an essay reminiscing about our childhood. So I thought of my time at Ann Hua Chinese School.

I wanted to ask, might I listen in on a class?

Thanks, Karen Duan

Such read my unanswered return debut to Ann Hua, which I muttered a vague version of to myself in the bathroom mirror for three consecutive nights. Then I didn’t worry about it at all, until it was the Saturday night before I planned to visit Ann Hua, and my mother came knocking on the bathroom door.

It was past midnight, and I stood flossing by the sink.

“Ai, Kai Kai,” my mother whispered, standing in a Looney Tunes nightgown with her face pressed up to the door.

I thought she was about to scold me into bed, as she often does. Instead, she’d arrived to make a concession: she would go with me, she wanted to go with me, it would make her feel better to go with me, lest I travel all the way there for nothing.

I said, “Oh, okay,” immediately. Then the relief gushed over me, and I said, “Oh, yeah!” once I realized that I would not have to do it alone after all.

Because I was, in fact, nervous to return to Ann Hua. It was a nervousness that had hounded me for the last week, and would hound me even as I drove down MI-14 escorted by my mother. And it wasn’t the presence of new students or the new institution that I dreaded, but the actual interaction. The few sentences of clumsy Mandarin I would have to bumble in exchange for the revisit.

To clarify: I consider myself fluent in Mandarin. I’m capable of casual conversation, of managing street signs, of texting and ordering off a menu. Since my graduation from Ann Hua, since the AP Chinese Test and SAT Subject 2 Chinese Test, since testing out of my college language requirement with Mandarin, surely, I’m fluent.

And yet, what relevance does paper-validated fluency have when I can’t speak to my mother for a full two sentences without slipping in English words? Entire chunks of English phrases? My friends who listen to my phone calls with my mother are always amused by the fragments of English, weaving in and out of the dialogue.

“It’s so interesting, which words you choose to speak in English,” my friend Ellery once told me.

In reality, it’s not a choice. If I could, I would speak completely in Mandarin. But I can’t, or it takes incredible effort to. Instead, the words I speak in English are markers of when Mandarin fails me, when the specific term or phrase I want is frustratingly beyond my knowledge or requires too much effort to recall. And so I revert to English. It’s these dropped-in English words that are not so much symbols of agency, but rather, a literal materialization of the limits of my Mandarin.

The Crane Building is incredibly quiet and empty. There’s no grand entrance, so my mother and I slip in through a side opening — a glass door wedged in the concrete, which immediately leads to stairs. Inside, there’s natural light — a lot of it — and the entire stairwell is white, already sleeker and more dignified than the crusty elevators of the Dow Building. In fact, the whole structure feels untouched.

I’ve been clinging to a room number — LA 260 — which, as it’s listed on the website, is the “Administrative team on-duty room/Parent rest area.” But when we reach the second floor, it’s clean and vacant. To be honest, it looks like the interior of every college building I’ve ever imagined — artificially lit, with an unoffensive color scheme and waiting benches outside each room, the floor sheathed in a polite array of gray and teal tiles. The only oddity is a large collection of butterfly portraits that adorn the walls in meticulous rows, the pastel backgrounds offering a desperate attempt to personalize the space.

I have no idea what this hall looks like on a weekday, when it’s perhaps overrun with college students who might congregate in languid hordes down these halls. I can’t imagine it either, given the eerie serenity of it now. The Dow Building had that funny quality about it, too. From 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM every Sunday, the Dow —known on weekdays for its Hanawalt X-ray Diffraction Lab and Electron Microscopy Room, among other intimidatingly scientific rooms — would transform into a convening point for hundreds of K-12 Chinese American children, who poured directly from their parents’ cars into university classrooms. Meanwhile, a mere six hundred feet away, the same college students who might attend weekday classes in the Dow would study in the neighboring Duderstadt Library, unaware of the intricate cultural center setting up, whirring, and then deconstructing a brief two-minute walk away from them. I like to imagine, however, that some of these students must have — at least once — wandered into the Dow Building on a Sunday afternoon, and found themselves in a swarm of screaming and scampering Chinese American kids, clutching shiny bags of snack-size Cheetos during their afternoon break.

The new Crane Building, however, is intimidatingly clean, well kept, and empty, despite the fact that it’s now 8:51 AM and class will start in nine minutes.

It manages to impress my mother. “Ting hao de,” she says, admiring. Pretty nice.

But when we reach LA 260, the room is empty — the door locked, the lights off. I shake the handle, and then submit to panic, blubbering to my mother.

All she says is a sanguine, “A, guan le. Zen me le?” before brushing past me, wandering down the hall. Oh, it’s closed. Why is that?

I stand, miffed, in front of LA 260.

My mother is comfortable here, strolling down the hallway in her puffy fall vest, her head tilted and peering around. She holds an air of authority, in this particular sphere, that she might’ve held her whole life had we grown up in the same country under the same language. I pad behind her, basking in her company.

As a child, my mother would often humiliate me through language. Whenever she raised her voice in public, her accent would flare and my face would flush. It didn’t matter if it was a just cause — if she’d been wronged and now rightly arched her back — I always felt angry, even betrayed, when she dared to cause a “scene.” And I never concerned myself with the exact cause of her anger. Instead, I recoiled from the anger itself, which always manifested in bulging vowels and too-sharp consonants that inevitably singled us out. If we had been the only people of color in the space before, we were now distinctly the “Others,” a status I actively detested.

It wasn’t until high school that these defensive reflexes finally began to break down. Still, I blamed my mother for her English, unable to understand her accent even as I sat in my Sunday Ann Hua Chinese School classrooms, bleating fractured Mandarin.

Whenever we left Ann Arbor, it was my sister and I who led my mother through public. We would charge through the intricately choreographed courses of metropolitan airports, yelling and pointing at signs as our mother trailed behind. In new cities, it was my sister and I who googled all our must-hit locations, printed out daily itineraries with addresses for tantalizing restaurants and museums, which we then tugged our mother along to.

My mother often jokes about this arrangement, citing it as proof of her amazing daughters. “Wo men yi chu qu, mama shen me dou bu yong gan!” Whenever we go out, mom doesn’t have to do anything! In retrospect, I wonder if she’s ever felt, just once, a bit lonely — if not helpless — as my sister and I bicker over directions in a language that’s not our mother’s, on an interface we’ve never taught her how to use.

And yet, Ann Hua Chinese School is distinctly different territory. Here, I’m the child again. Toddling, nascent, dependent on my mother to accompany me through the world.

She is, as of right now, motioning for me. My mother’s found a promising classroom down the hall, with a slim window perforating the door. When I approach, I can see the tiny heads of Chinese American children, who sit in chairs padded by bright jackets. There are parents, several of them, swarming around long tables.

“Jin qu ba?” Says my mother. Let’s go in?

But she lurks purposefully behind me, I can tell. So I twist the handle, which rotates with a click, and enter the classroom first.

All along, I’d assumed that my mother wanted to accompany me to do the negotiating, to absolve me of explaining myself in Mandarin. But when we enter, she immediately abandons me, crossing the width of the classroom to chat with a younger mother I don’t recognize, whom my mother is apparently animatedly and closely affiliated with.

The teacher leans over a projector at the head of the room, alone. The adults — all mothers — are twittering over their children, who sink into their seats with their eyes still sleep-swollen.

Maternal Mandarin buzzes around me, and even though I’m a graduate of this institution, even though I’ve attended it — consecutively — for eight years, I feel distinctly like an outsider. The room, the teacher, the building and the drive up to it are strangely new, and there’s nothing familiar here to grasp onto but my mother.

I head for the teacher. I don’t want to loiter and appear out of place, much less wait for my mother. And I must have this decisive gait to my walk because the teacher looks up before I reach her. She is short, soft, spectacled, with a sweater draped over her shoulders. She’s been hunched over the projector, waving her hand on the screen. Now she straightens: a forty-year old woman with cheeks that bounce light.

From the beginning of our interaction, I’m intent, scrambling for words. Then I open my mouth and they all come out at once.

I start speaking and stumbling immediately. I’m almost tripping over myself, trying to push out the words I’ve been furtively reciting in the bathroom. I think I’m afraid of losing concentration and faltering, but it’s true: this is the longest string of Mandarin I’ve spoken in six months. Pure Mandarin, unbroken by any English. The last time I spoke like this we were in China, the country that’s not my country, where I’m both an outsider through language and an insider through my parents, my blood. How ironic that the language I was raised on, the language that was my first language and once my mother language — Mandarin — soon whittled into the red flag that would lock me out of my blood-line country, that would come to define me, more than any of my Western brands or preferred cuisines or cultural oddities, as a “foreign American” in China. This is the bumbling Mandarin I know: one that’s capable of exposing me, de-legitimizing me in a second.

In the end, my interaction with the teacher goes incredibly quickly. Some version of the message manages to escape, in which the words are all strung together and obviously rehearsed. She listens politely, albeit with her eyebrows raised and mouth half-open, as if waiting for a punch line that never arrives.

I never actually introduce myself by name. Instead, I’m the nameless Ann Hua graduate, just here to observe class. I’m not sure the teacher ever fully understands my motives, judging by her blank facial expression; and I don’t have the Mandarin skills to explain my exact reason for arriving in this sterile classroom, much less to articulate how a lifetime of growing up with my mother in her non-native country might have crippled the first language she taught me, to the point where I’ve lied about my motives for arriving because “reminiscing on childhood” is much easier to communicate than an idea about two generations of people straddling the periphery of two nations, and all the sacrifice, tension, and heartbreak wrapped up in that, beginning with my mother’s English accent and ending with the loss of my once-fluent Mandarin.

Plus the teacher is friendly, accepting my simple version. “A, xing ba,” she says, agreeing in a daze. Oh, okay.

I latch onto the consent, thanking her perhaps too forcefully. But I can’t help it — it’s over. The little trial of my Mandarin, passed.

As it turns out, my mother is still chatting with the younger woman. They stand at a table, the woman’s child squishing her cheek against her mother’s legs, pouting in her pink jacket. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: I’ve entered the youngest Ann Hua Chinese School class, Jida 1, for what must be six or seven year-olds.

My mother introduces me to the woman, the wife of some colleague of my father, who compliments how biao zhun – native — my Chinese sounds. My mother laughs, flattered. Then she excuses us, checks that everything went okay with me, and leaves, clutching her pale purse and waving before closing the door.

For the amount of time we’ve spent talking about this, I can’t believe I let her come all the way here for just that. It’s been thirteen minutes since we stepped out of our cars and set foot in this classroom taken over by six year-olds. Now my mother will drive thirty-five minutes back home, having overseen her maternal duty.

Alone and chastised, I hunker down in the corner of the room. No one pays me any attention, except a few children who stare and then lose interest, burrowing back into their chairs. This is fine by me.

The classroom itself contains all the markers of elementary school: strewn backpacks, boys and girls in cotton pants, the tabletops populated with tin cases that brim with pencils and plastic water bottles with plastered patterns.

Only all of these exist in a space designed for students three to four times as old as these scampering children, who are the same height sitting as they are standing. There are no posters with class rules written in bold sharpie, no sticker charts, and no shelves with board games. Instead, there are clean walls, gray carpets, and blackboards, wiped smooth and empty.

This is borrowed space, subject to a schedule and a contract. As a child, I could never understand this concept of “renting.” Whenever we arrived to the Dow for our two-hour Sunday slot, this was the only Dow I knew and the only Dow I could imagine: the dim hallways overrun with Chinese American children, the skittering of adolescent sneakers, and the Mandarin — fluid, constant. That these hallways could house, and were meant to house, an entirely different population was beyond my awareness. Even on the rare chance I saw the lone student, darting through our black-haired hordes, I assumed them the outsider.

Yet, the Dow held two distinct communities — Ann Hua Chinese School and the University of Michigan’s Chemical Engineering Department — that both came and existed on the periphery of each other’s radars, at times brushing, but never colliding, always politely scheduling aside one another. And the building I grew up defining as the Ann Hua Chinese School, was just another rented space — temporary, retractable, not ours. How different the school might have been if we had had our own destined space that was permanently Mandarin, continually Chinese, and not ebbing and flowing between two unaffiliated collectives.

My mother leaves at 8:59 AM, while the room whirrs with just-arriving students and six mothers who will stay the whole class. Kids and parents file briskly down the hallway that was ghost-empty ten minutes ago.

The teacher, whose name I will never learn, attempts to start class at 9:07 AM. “Hao le xiao peng you, wo men yao kai shi shang ke le,” she says, bright and belting. Okay little friends, let’s begin class!

There is no response. Even the mothers are still scuttling around the room, tending to their children. One mother’s son, much younger than all the students, dashes in big circles around the room as she frantically attempts to collect him.

Meanwhile, the two girls in front of me carry out a heated conversation in English, native English, which I latch onto immediately.

“It’s THIS one, ok? This one!” The girl in pink, agitated, jabs her finger into a workbook. Fifteen years ago, I might have understood such fervor over the correct answer for an ungraded two-hour Mandarin session. But I’m almost twenty-two now, and I can only empathize with her through English, or this shared experience in which we supplement our standard studies with specified language training, so that we might better understand our mothers, our family, and everything we left behind when we shed our mother tongues for an imperialist, alphabet-based English.

But for now, the girl is about seven, and simmers in her pink shirt with plastic spiders.

At 9:20 AM the energy settles, and class truly begins. I write, “FINALLY,” in my notebook. Today’s lesson is about pronunciation, as the class has not moved onto characters. Like the Chinese school I remember, it’s assumed that the children already understand Mandarin. Judging by the fluency of the mothers, this makes sense. There is, however, one mother who’s Mandarin doesn’t fit in. She’s stately and unexpectedly tall, in a pleated shirt with glasses. Her voice catches me at once, and then I learn to recognize it, as whenever she speaks her Mandarin there’s a stilted accent.

The teacher runs her standard exercises. She pronounces characters in extremely shrill and hyper-annunciated belts. To accommodate the tones, of which there are four, you can hear her voice inflect entire octaves. “BEEeeeEEEEEEI. BEEeeeeEEEEEI.” She asks which tone it is.

The kids respond in a disorganized, monotone chorus. They are fidgeting, twitching. One kid in the front right keeps screaming, “DI SI SHENG! DI SI SHENG!” THE FOURTH! THE FOURTH!” before the teacher snaps.

“Bu neng lao di si sheng,” she chides, a soft lash. It can’t always be the fourth. The class giggles.

This goes on, and then I get bored. By the time they move onto the projector, I’ve stopped listening, instead surveying the kids. Most prevalent is their lack of enthusiasm. Besides the one who keeps shouting, all the other kids are slumped deep into their chairs, their small mouths hanging open in monotony, their backpacks half-dangling off tabletops. When I was seven, I felt a similar drudgery about Chinese School. I thought the whole enterprise excessive, unnecessary, and though my mother spent countless hours driving my sister and me to and from the Dow Building, I couldn’t understand her attachment to this institution, to demanding that we learn to read and write when we already knew how to speak.

I bickered with my mother about the usefulness of Chinese School, constantly. I argued that it was a burden on our normal studies, until she would inevitably snap and end the discussion exasperated, unable to convince me of the utility of learning her language fully, graciously, of bridging the lingual gap between us. Then she would shut down the conversation, stating, “Ni da le jiu zhi dao le. Ni zhang da le hui xie xie ma ma.” When you’re older you’ll know. When you grow up, you’ll thank mommy.

When and how, exactly, did I fall into this exact prophecy? Where did I learn to be ashamed of my broken Mandarin, a language I once rejected the relevance of so ardently? And why is it that even after I was raised on Mandarin, even after I was born into Mandarin, and even after I once knew only Mandarin, I’m still unable to rekindle it, wholly?

At 9:51 AM, the class goes on break. Half the class screeches and darts out of the room, where the hallway already echoes with the screams of other Chinese American children. The other half dig inside their backpacks, emerging with shiny, plastic bags snack bags that rattle when they open.

I get up to thank the teacher, ready to leave. But this mother, the stately one with the accent, is talking to the teacher and keeps talking to her. At first I’m curious, wondering which generation of Chinese American could produce this peculiar, non-native accent, but the more I listen, the more uncomfortable I become.

Once, in China, my aunt and I were watching a Mandarin competition on TV, where obviously foreign contestants came to display their lingual prowess. There was one contestant, a blonde woman, who went over her one-minute slot, babbling. I thought she carried a clumsy accent, a rather poor articulation of tones, until my aunt turned to me and said, “You dian xiang kai kai shuo de zhong wen ba?” It feels a little like Kai Kai’s Mandarin, right?

I don’t want to listen to the mother anymore. Instead, I focus on the girls at the table next to me, meowing and waving their fingers as they chomp on what appear to be gummies. On impulse, I bend down.

“What are those?” I ask them in English. As it stands, there are two alliances in this room: those who speak default English, and those who speak default Mandarin, and I have just willingly, clearly aligned myself with English.

The girl in the spider shirt answers immediately. “Gummies. From Costco.” Like all the kids I’ve ever worked with, she’s accepting, unquestioning of my strange presence in this classroom.

I ask her if they’re good, and she says that they’re sticky.

At this, a shrill voice cuts across the room. “HEY, WE CAN’T EAT INSIDE.” It’s a boy, with soft buzzed hair, bent over a table on the other side of the room.

We look him, but don’t answer. There’s a moment of silence, before he scurries down and rummages around his backpack, chastised.

Then the stately mother turns, presumably at the sound of her son’s voice, just in time to see him emerge with a Rice Krispie, the package glinting in fluorescent light. “Kevin,” she says, sharply. “No food in the classroom, remember? Only water.” Her English is terse, native.

“But everyone else is eating!” Kevin whines.

It’s true. The girls next to me stare down at their pile of gummies, suddenly hesitant.

The mother bristles, flustered, “I know — I —” Then she pauses, a beat, before launching into a string of Mandarin.

“Zhang lao shi shou le. But neng zai jiao shi li mian chi dong shi! Ni ji de ma, shang ci Zhang Lao Shi de fang jian mei shou shi hao, dai le hen duo fan nao!” Teacher Zhang already said. No eating in the classroom! Do you remember the last time Teacher Zhang’s class was dirtied it brought so many troubles!

I recognize the gait of her speech immediately.

It’s part of an awkward, struggling Mandarin. I can feel it in the irregular halts and bursts of her speech, and the way she suddenly catapults from English into Mandarin, as if correcting a bad habit. There’s impatience in the way she talks, too: this desire to push all the words out at once, such that when they don’t arrive, there’s an uneasy pause.

The teacher nods, complaining of cleaning up after the kids. The two girls, heads lowered in shame, duck outside, along with others who’ve been munching. I give the teacher a curt thanks, before I leave as well, entering the now raucous hallway.

When I step out, there are kids everywhere. There are adults, too. Grandpa figures with deep-set faces, burrowed into plush seats. Kids with their shiny black hair bouncing as they skitter down the hall, crashing into doors while brandishing their packaged snacks. An hour ago, this floor was barren. Now, it’s vivacious, almost too animated. I leave as quickly as I can, dashing down the stairs.

But the community has spilled out of the Crane Building and onto its perimeter. Outside, under a brisk but sunny sky, stand a cluster of Chinese parents, equipped in bright athletic gear. One woman blocks the sidewalk, wielding her iPhone. As I dart around her, I see she’s recording a group of oncoming runners, slowly shuffling in pink visors and stretchy blue shirts, staggered in small groups as they round the corner.

In another world, one of these runners might be my mother. But for now, I just want to go. I can’t shake the image of that other mother, stuttering as she makes her shift from English to Mandarin, forcing out each syllable underneath the brightly lit Ann Hua classroom, which is actually the Crane Building’s classroom and not any of ours at all.

Shivering, I cross the mega parking lot, which is now populated with an impressive scattering of cars. The car that’s parked next to me is silver, and somewhat in need of a wash. But I know, for sure, that the owner is Chinese because they’ve hung this red tassel on the rearview mirror. It’s a symbol of fortune, beautifully knotted in the middle. When I was younger, these things — clearly Chinese — used to humiliate me. Now, I covet them, collecting them in a wall in my bedroom.

I text my mother to let her know everything went okay. By now, she should be well on her way. Then I drive alone back to the University of Michigan campus, past the Crane Building with its smattering of brilliantly sheathed Chinese American parents, and back to the landscapes I know, where I won’t have to speak any Mandarin at all.