You expect your mother to scold you, to tell you about the importance of your heritage and language—she’s always been proud of who she is, where she’s from; she’s always been the first to teach you about your own culture—but instead her expression softens, and she puts a hand over yours, her wrinkled skin warm against your skin.

“哎，嘉嘉，没有别的办法吗?”

Another story about memory and identity, and a story about immigrants and culture. I teach a university course on language in science fiction, and this is one of the stories I teach. Jiawen Liu is considering selling her entire linguistic competence in her native language of Mandarin, in order to raise the money to send her daughter to college. Linguistic identity can form an important component of a person’s total identity, and this story beautifully and sympathetically asks how to value that contribution, and how to put it into words.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2018. Collected in The New Voices of Science Fiction, 2019. Read online here at Clarkesworld Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine