Retard.
I use the word more often than one would expect considering my personal sensitivities. Each time I say the word, it’s a game of chicken with a piece of verbal expression, a stigma–I dare it to have any emotional pull on the strings that tie to my rage and pain. Because it doesn’t mean anything. REtard–a mispronounciation. Retarded–underdeveloped. Somehow, the process was halted by external forces. But at least it was on its way.
The Mandarin phrase for the word “retard” translated to English is “Wastedly fed.” The two words are “wasted/pointless” and “eat.” The phrase is quite morbidly poetic–if your child is retarded, why bother diverting resources to feed and nurture it when it will only grow up to be a non-factor in human civilization? What’s the point of feeding an idiot child who will never contribute to the collective, the phrase asks. A retard is a bad investment. With a normal kid, you’re playing the lottery. You take shares of your resources that are necessary for your survival and you divert it towards your children, hoping that when they become fully matured and able-bodied, these investments will bring returns in the form of income for the family or caretakers for the parents. If your kid becomes a wealth business man, that’s a great investment. If your kid goes towards a life of crime and you spend his adult life paying his legal fees, that’s a terrible investment. And then there’s the retarded kid, where you know right off the bat your returns will always be in the red. So why feed a monster that only bleeds your resources and brings no quantifiable returns?
When I really started to think about what this phrase, this label meant today, it made me think about families who were really poor, about families who are struggling to survive. Did they have a kid who was mentally disabled and refuse to feed him because the logical survivalistic decision was to feed the able-bodied kids who could develop and work the fields and bring back something to help the family? Did they kill them right away once they realized what kind of kid they had because it was pointless to nurture something that was already flawed from the start?
I realized today, that Asians have quite a way with language. With two Chinese characters, they could sum up a person in such a tight, cruel little box, that it’s almost too logical not to make complete sense, and yet it doesn’t. Whenever I walk into stores, the first thing I think is if they look at my brother and think, “bai tzi.” In Asia, we don’t walk around with our shame pinned to our chests. We leave our shame at home, in a dark backroom somewhere, or shipped off to a distant relative we’ve never met. And we don’t get to decide what is deemed shameful and obscene. Others will do so for you. You most certainly do not walk into a retail store in a busy commercial area, trying to pass off damaged goods as a human being. And if these people who see him and recognize him as being categorized by the only label the language provides for this “type,” if they sat down and analyzed their spite for this lesser man’s existence, would they discover that they can see why the source of this label is a fairly logical argument, that it’s pointless to nurture a human being who just feeds off resources without giving any positive contributions? Do they realize that with one label, they’ve deemed my brother not just worthless and a non-human, but a parasite?
I hate that phrase with everything in me. I hear, say, read the word “retard” in English and it doesn’t mean anything to me. Friends ask, “Do you get offended when I say the word retarded?” No. Because the more it gets used for random things, for anecdotal nonsensical actions, for satirical slander, for a throwaway moniker, the more that word loses its power. It no longer shreds at my love for my baby brother by nailing him to his flaws because it is an impotent piece of slang, and I can laugh at it the way I can laugh at a bully caught with his pants down.
But there is only one way to describe people like my brother in Chinese; we do not mince words or ideas with political correctness. No, Asians are far too efficient. They can cut him down with the only label available within their language, innocently enough, but with a malice that is so deeply embedded into the character of the words, that people don’t even realize how awful of an idea it is to pin on any human being. They don’t realize that the label, in one fell judgment, asks disdainfully, “Why is this person still allowed to live?” Our empire was built upon sacrificing our humanity in favor of efficiency, oh Chinese brothers and sisters. Let us not forget that aspect.
I’m known for fighting vehemently for causes and for becoming enraged by injustices far and wide just because there’s no sense or balance within injustice. But today, I realized how rageful I am with one phrase, and I realized how often it is that I walk into a place and I brace myself for the rage I feel when I watch a salesperson size up my brother and wonder if that word has flickered into that person’s consciousness. It is not the salesperson that I am angry towards, for whatever judgments he or she may or may not make; it is anger at the sheer fact that two Chinese characters, two short syllables, can strip away all the goodness and holiness that exists in my brother and frame him as a quantifiable production negative, and that it is implied that others can judge whether or not he’s worthy to be allowed to live.
If people were actually conscious about what they were saying, this phrase should not be in the vocabulary anymore.