My mother had a word for it in Cantonese

My mother had a word for the feeling in Cantonese. I did not have a word for it in English. For most of my twenties I assumed this meant I was not feeling it. I was wrong about that for almost a decade. The word is hei (氣) — it does not translate cleanly. The nearest English approximation is something like 'a hot pressure in the chest that has not yet decided whether it is sadness or anger or both.' English has 'frustrated.' English has 'upset.' English does not, in the daily vocabulary available to me at twenty-five, have a word that lets you say to a coworker, with the same casualness you would say 'I'm hungry,' that you are carrying hei.

Language does not invent feelings. The feelings exist. The language tells you which ones you are allowed to have in public. I learned this from my mother, who would say she was carrying hei in Cantonese to my grandmother on the phone but who would never say she was angry to my father in English. The languages had different permissions. Cantonese had a vocabulary for the cooler middle registers of female anger. English, as I learned it growing up in Sacramento, had only the two extremes — 'fine' and 'crazy' — with very little in between for a woman to occupy.

I have been thinking about this since I started dating an American who does not speak Cantonese. The early months were difficult because my emotional vocabulary in English had been built, mostly, for keeping the peace. When I needed to express the things my mother would have expressed as hei, I did not have the language, so I cried. He thought I was sad. I was not, primarily, sad. I was carrying a precise feeling that had a precise name in a language he did not speak. I started teaching him the word. He started using it back at me when he noticed it in himself. The teaching has been one of the more useful things I have done in this relationship.

I have a daughter now. She is four. She is mostly being raised in English. I am working hard to make sure she has hei available to her, and a few other words my mother gave me that English does not have shorter versions of. The default English script for a woman expressing displeasure is the one I had to translate my mother's life into and the one I do not want my daughter forced to translate hers into. The words travel. The feelings always traveled. What I want my daughter to have is the words for the feelings before the feelings turn into something her body cannot put down.