Wo ai ni xiao hynee, she'd say as she pat our bums. I love you little bottom. Hi Blue jie. Hi Mei flower. Older sister is a bird with blue wings.
Younger sister is a blossom or a ship.
Her lips gave us homonym and rhyme, music and double meaning. Our mother never spoke that way when our father was home. Perhaps with his ear there to hear her, English was the ground on which she found rest. Each foreign syllable inside her, a mistake waiting to happen, a test to fail. Or perhaps this was her language of love and in his presence she could not make the sounds.