to know

May 26, 2025

There are two ways to know in Cantonese: to 識 (sik1) and to 知道 (zi1dou3).

識 is the distance I keep between my mom and the other kids during elementary school afternoon pick-up. It's the drilling of math equations until "Pop Goes the Weasel" gets almost physically drilled into my cranium or the tune I hum to myself when I type in my mom's library card number to place holds my favorite fairy books. The Monday Fairy. The Halloween Fairy. The Tennis Fairy. And I wonder if any of the fairies with black hair are as Asian as I am or if being a fairy means it defaults to not being like me. It's whether I recognize another name or face in my small college and admitting I actually don't know that many people. Or revealing how few Chinese students attend my school to my unsociable parents and suddenly the distance of 識, this action of recognition, widens inexplicably like the way an emotional distance can be widened with mere silence. 識 is a home I am forced to recognize as a home because fate of my ancestry and all the choices my parents made put me here, there, wherever it may be, where familiarity exists in the form of an old cracked concrete street that the city has yet to repave.

知道 is the distance between me and anyone I've chosen to know, because it is impossible to semantically 知道 a person in her entirety, rather only a fraction of a fraction, like a secret or a location of a mole, and one can 知道 all of these things separately but never collectively because to 知道 a person diminishes the meaning down to recognition on the most superficial of levels. 知道 is all the facts that make me up but never really me; it is all my diseases and neuroses and tics and hobbies and characteristics and demographics and national identities knowing it is impossible to formulate a person from mere factual information. I cannot really know someone; I can only know what I think is most of someone and what they hold dear to their life.

And yet I suspect that every action one takes in life is close the distance of such knowledge, an action "understood" as a word cannot truly summarize; I can only hope to feel like one can 知道 me in an imaginary, deeper sense, so that it refuses to overlap with 識.