Year 9 Narrative Sample: The Interpreter

My grandmother has been speaking to me in Vietnamese for seventeen years. I have been smiling and nodding for seventeen years. Between us, we have constructed an entire relationship out of the space where language should have been.

I did not realise the construction was mine alone until the afternoon she fell. I was in the kitchen when I heard her voice — high, sharp, urgent — and I ran to her bedroom doorway and saw her sitting on the floor by the wardrobe. She was holding her wrist and talking fast in the way she talked when she wanted me to understand something immediately.

I did what I always did. I nodded. I said, "It's okay, Ba noi. It's okay." I assumed she had tripped. I assumed she needed only reassurance. I assumed — and this is the part I have not forgiven myself for — that I knew what was happening in a language I could not speak.

My mother arrived forty minutes later. When she walked into the bedroom and saw Ba noi still on the floor, she turned to me with an expression I had never seen on her face before. It was not anger. It was the face she made when something was broken beyond simple repair.

"She was asking you to call an ambulance," my mother said. Her wrist was fractured in two places.

The hospital was clean and quiet and smelled like the future — antiseptic and fluorescence, a world of clearly-labelled things. Ba noi lay in the bed with her arm in a cast, and I sat beside her feeling the full weight of seventeen years of nodding. She reached out with her uninjured hand and held mine. She said something — several sentences, slowly — and looked at me the way she always did: with complete expectation.

This time I did not nod. I said, in the clumsy, childlike Vietnamese I had been avoiding my whole life: "Tôi không hiểu. I do not understand." Three words, in the wrong order. But she heard them.

She laughed. It was not a kind laugh or an unkind one. It was the laugh of someone who has waited a long time for the obvious thing to finally happen.