Editor’s note: Cuiyu Lin’s “Broken English, Sweet Oranges” is a lyrical meditation on language, fragility, and repair, weaving Chinese porcelain mending with personal scars to reveal brokenness as both burden and beauty, and imperfection as a vessel for truth.

The tutor I booked on Cambly told me, “Your English is too broken.” What he did not know is that I have more broken things within.

There is a Chinese craft called 锔瓷 (jū cí), in which artisans mend fractured porcelain by binding the fragments together with metal staples. They do not conceal the seams; instead, they leave them in a rich golden hue—like unhealed wounds remaining as beautiful entrances for touching.

I received such a plate on my thirtieth birthday. Two shattered plates, each painted with different flowers, had been fused into one—so near, yet forever apart. When I traced the mended line, I could hear its cracks echoing from afar, retelling the story of how each lost its other half, and accepting an eternal, incomplete form. I listened to the wounds—stitched, yet never healed.

In my tender years, I fell often, leaving deep bruises upon my knees, dark and ineradicable. My grandmother would tell me, “The less you disturb the scabs, the sooner they will heal.” What she meant was to live as though the wounds were not there—as though the body were whole and unblemished.

Yet the itching on my skin was so irresistible, so unbearably alluring, that I touched, and touched again, until they became indelible scars—tattoos I can always turn to when I wish to see my old self. They are the heavy golden lines upon the map of my life.

I move with this broken body as one might carry an aged violin, hearing its gasp and creak with every step—just as I restarted learning English, falling in the search for the “right” words, over and over; my tongue tangling with itself again and again. It is a voyage whose harbour I shall never reach, but in another sense, an endless sailing of my own.

What a young and old body I have—this poor thing, this cherished being.

So do not worry. I have been shattered enough to fear no further breaking.

Perhaps the more broken my English, the more clearly you might see my heart. Just as the ugliest oranges are often the sweetest, and since there are but a few in my basket, I will press them with all my strength into juice—to let you taste my life.

Header image by Karolina Grabowska.

How to cite: Lin, Cuiyu. “Broken English, Sweet Oranges.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Aug. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/08/13/broken-english.

Cuiyu Lin is a poet and cross-genre writer from a southern Chinese island. Writing in both English and Chinese, she often engages with themes of East Asian womanhood, intergenerational trauma, and embodied experience. Her work has appeared in Fleurs des lettres 《字花》 and Poetry Lab Shanghai, and she was a recipient of the 50th Hong Kong Youth Literary Award.

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