Grid
07 Jan 2025
The professor forgot to pay the parking fee while driving out from the campus because he never needed a temporary parking card for all those years. The security guard ran out from the post, chasing the silver car, and finally caught the professor’s attention by the intersection. He saw the professor drowning in that driver’s seat, as if exhaustion, apology, and despair were flooding out every second. The professor didn’t have exact number of coins to pay and ended up passing a note to the guard. When he was to run back to the post for changes, the professor stopped him. “No rush. Keep the rest for yourself,” he said.
The guard nodded in confusion. Watching his figure in uniform pacing away from the rear-view mirror, the professor had little clue which way to go. Left would lead him home, to the empty flat that was recently occupied by piles of books retreated from his research office. Or maybe straight to the café that he usually visited at least once a week to escape from the academia. How about right? He could visit his daughter. But at the moment she would be out, working at one of the city’s corners. He was the only family member that didn’t need to work. To be precise, not until half an hour ago. He barely became jobless.
They said the country didn’t need so many universities, and the universities didn’t need so many faculties, because the number of students decreased by a half for the last three decades. Three decades ago the professor was still a post-doctoral researcher, eager to resolve the underlying mysteries within his own utterances, ignoring how this language—his mother tongue—was dying at a speed way higher than he could ever expected. What they didn’t say, he knew, was that the language became less and less universal year by year, and research on it shall by extension suspend sooner or later. Languages are after all organic. As a linguist he knows. They grow, they change. And they die.
How many languages died since he became aware of their dying? The professor couldn’t count. But he remembered telling his school-age daughter at once, “there used to be seven thousand languages.” By then fewer than six thousand remained, and now only around two thirds.
Thinking of his daughter urged him to go right as the traffic light turned green. Automatically redirecting you to Jen’s home. The driving system said. “No, I’m not going there.” The professor replied in Mandarin, since cars spoke only high-resource languages.
Certainly. Where would be your destination?
“I don’t know. Just set a random route. Maybe to somewhere farther, out of the city.”
No problem. Would you prefer the mountains or the seaside? The nearest options include…
“Mountains,” the professor interrupted it. “Somewhere around Pingxi would do.”
“The options are fundamentally overlapped,” he added after a few seconds. The professor couldn’t help correcting the driving system, as if it were but another student. “The city sits within a basin. To reach the sea you must pass through the mountains.”
You are right. Apologies for the misleading description. Would you still prefer Pingxi Train Station as the destination?
“Kind of. Please choose a random spot no more than five kilometres away from the train station.”
Starting from some point, the professor became so used to dialogue interfaces such as the driving system that he forgot building these assistants required decades of research and engineering. The first car he knew wasn’t even equipped with such technology, though he had little memory about it since his parents sold it when he was six. During college years, Uber drivers were already using voice commands for navigation. Then he travelled abroad, studying. When he returned home and got employed as an assistant professor at the university from which he graduated, the first-generation driving system had released for months and achieved so much success that it kept evolving in the professor’s first, second, and third car, which he was currently driving.
It occurred to him that the early college years may have already foreshadowed how the university would dismiss him someday. Many of his classmates pursued a career in computational linguistics, as their generation happened to meet the first wave of large language models. It was them that built these dialogue systems—speaking to his car reminded him from time to time. But math and science never shed inspirational lights to him in high school; he therefore chose a more fundamental approach in the research field, and such a forking path eventually led him to the endless analysis of sentences, words, syllables, and tones until the younger generations uttered not even a phoneme exclusive to his language. When he finally published its syntax, his colleagues were astounded because they didn’t expect any further studies on this language. From its birth, his work was destined to be neglected by the forgetful academia, as if a delicate hard-cover glossary, left unvisited on the compact shelves.
And someday the long-awaited anticipation became real: Four years ago, a paper argued that the professor’s mother tongue had in fact died out in the city a decade ago, as native speakers like him became too scattered to form any language community. After reading this, the professor spent weeks surveying other publications in attempt to prove it wrong. Refusing to admit the new identity as a linguistic orphan, he nevertheless knew that the language had already been sentenced to death. Death isn’t a moment, but a long process. The study simply marked its irreversibility.
There might be hope outside the city. He told himself, looking for ways out, only to find how little he knew about the rest of the nation. The campus occupied too many square kilometres; the department buildings composed a labyrinth in the jungle forest, as though implying how easy it appeared to get lost in research. From time to time the professor wondered whether the labyrinth gave the school an endless look, or it was the vast area that essentially made the entire labyrinth possible. Even so, the campus had a boundary by definition; however vague they may appear, the university and the city do not belong to each other, and the labyrinth therefore featured at least one exit. Such belief gave the professor hope of reviving his mother tongue beyond the city boarder. However vague it may appear, the study only took the city into account.
The thought—as simple as it seemed—introduced the professor to places where he never set foot throughout the decades living in the city: miles of paddy field veiled from the view on the viaducts, an unmarked burial site cutting through a group of peaks, abandoned train station unreachable by car but only on foot. These places unfamiliarised him with his knowledge, and even memory; those past segments shaping his understanding of his hometown left too few gaps in which the newly learned facts could possibly stay. Astounded by such novelty, he optimistically considered his assumptions to be correct until the day he received, from the university, the termination of his employment.
“I failed,” he told the driving system. “Everyone I met, men and women, young and old, spoke only Mandarin. I wasted so much time on overturning something unchangeable. I knew they were right. Always. My own belief blinded me.”
I’m sorry. The record indicates that you visited Shimen frequently last winter, where it rained every day throughout December.
“Indeed. Windy and cold.” The professor sighed.
Use the right lane to exit the expressway, the driving system reminded him.
Beyond the interchange, the provincial way was a long and winding road along a stream in a narrow valley. The deeper into the mountains, the more buildings had turned into ruins. For decades, the population had emigrated under the declining birth rate, leaving the old houses empty. The wastelands introduced an illusion of the city growing less dense, even though traffic jams still took place every morning on the professor’s way to campus. The university happened to locate at the most valuable area of the entire city, as if a tower lighting the path towards the highest of knowledge. It was simply that the professor had been banished. Banished from the ivory tower that trapped him for most of his life.
Viewing from the driver’s seat, the professor couldn’t tell from the surrounding view whether he was still in the city. By administrative definition, the provincial way would cross the city border, then return, and finally enter the county once and for all. It didn’t really matter for passers-by to move between the two regions, and no one could really notify the nuances since there were no signs. But the professor was a faithful believer of definition—or he must become one as a professor—which indicated that he had to find significance out of the grids framed out by those imagined, dotted lines only visible on maps. He could still recall how much he cared about the differentiation in pursuit of language vitality, whereas the definition had lost its significance at the moment.
Shortly after crossing the city border, the driving system guided him to a lush wood where sunlight found no way through the canopy. The provincial way had been mostly winding, but here it went straight, elongating as if a tunnel. Without fieldwork, unknown destination served little purpose. At the end of the green tunnel, woods would remain woods, peaks would remain peaks. And the road would remain but another piece of ground. The professor realised that he wouldn’t discover anything because he didn’t achieve any breakthrough by simply passing those trees. The woods didn’t change colours, and he remained in the same mountain, heading towards a tea plantation which the driving system had randomly chosen out of thousands of possible locations. Keep driving for one kilometre, and the destination is on your right-hand side. The driving system reminded him. Then he found himself already deep in the mountains after the one-hour-long drive. The day was still young. The sky nevertheless grew gloomy as any other typical summer afternoon would do.
After three more curves, the professor encountered the forking path indicated by the driving system. A worn-out sign stood beside the faded asphalt covered by dust. About two hundred metres ahead located a rusty tin house. Its door drowned in an ocean of weeds. The professor tried to depict a view of how this place once appeared before being totally abandoned. In the picture in his mind, there were potted seedlings, chimney smoke, dogs, and good men.
The legacies of his imagination were ruthlessly engulfed by nature. The raging weeds reminded him of a kind of vine which grows so quickly that people name it mile-a-minute. When he first heard of this, he wondered why the earth hadn’t been covered by such plant. The explanation clarified that there were boundaries it could never cross. Deserts. Snow. Sea. Vines were meant to grow as vines; however exuberant they grow, they are limited in the nature of themselves.
Such explanation somewhat comforted him, ensuring that his home wouldn’t be invaded and overtaken by a plant in midnight. The concrete walls formed a boundary, or perhaps the city itself could become one. The professor learned that the seemingly savage wilderness in fact follows uncountable natural laws, as if a civilisation must depend on rules to prosper. However broad a concept might appear, it must be somehow limited. Continent ends at water. Ocean ends at lands. Power ends at free will. Freedom ends at law. That’s how the world, whether known or unknown, shall proceed in every single day.
What’s the boundary of language? Since then, the professor often questioned himself.
A breeze came. Then the rubbing sound of leaves and grass. Also chirps. The aged metal roof made vibrating noises, followed by scattered raindrops.
Speech ends at silence. Peace ends at thoughts.
As the professor recalled his latest response to the prompt, he rushed back to the car, knowing a rain was to fall. Storms in tropical area tend to arrive sooner than they can be noticed. Right after the door got closed, the raindrops landed on the windshield and surged into a curtain covering the surface. All of a sudden the surrounding became a waterfall, and the car a shelter that kept him dry and safe. The silhouette of the houses vanished into the green background, which also blurred in the cloudburst. Rain was the only sound he could hear. The volume was high, but the texture as pure as silence.
“Let’s leave the mountain area.” He commanded gently.
The driving system didn’t respond. The storm drowned out his voice.
He turned the key and started the engine, as if back in half a century ago. Pressing the gas pedal introduced a forward motion. It had been quite a while since he last drove completely on his own, but fortunately he didn’t feel too unfamiliar. Instead there was a sense of achievement within coordinating between the gas, the break, and the steering wheel, a sense that everything was in his control. Of course the unceasing storm wasn’t at his command—yet he had the car, and the car was more than enough. It was mobile, swift, and safe, as if an unbreakable bubble crossing through eddies and currents, heading to one and another shore. He almost got lost in enjoying the isolation from the surroundings, as the lack of disturbance weakened the sense of time.
Driving once again became a task that required concentration, in which his mind remained his only companion. Rain turned into drizzle and fog, and he thereby an explorer in the misty unknown. Little clue revealed how far the way ahead elongated. The only sure thing was that the road would eventually reach the city and lead the professor back to where he had departed. Perhaps in such state of unknown he couldn’t even be sure of this; he had to believe, or at least hope it to be true, as though in every piece of his previous works. All of them were but attempts for justifying his understanding of the world, whether they corresponded to facts, whether they brought him closer to the reality.
When the professor finally thought of calling the driving system, he already arrived the foot of the mountain, the edge of the city. Next to a row of desolated cottages was an electric station. He parked in one of the parking grids and renewed the battery. Then the phone rang. It was his wife.
“Is everything alright?” Speaking in their common native language, she sounded tender. “I thought you’d be home earlier than me.”
“I’m fine. Simply wandered around a bit.”
“Will you be home for dinner? I bought you a bento.”
“Of course. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
“Great, see you then.”
“See you.”
He hung up the phone and heard traffic clattering distantly. The clouds had already dispersed, revealing the dusk behind. Sunlight shed on the skyscrapers, which appeared damp after the storm. Another typical summer day, he thought. At that moment he felt inconceivably safe, inside this car, at this parking grid, for everything he saw, smelt, and sensed was calling him back to some kind of known, experienced segment which was locatable in memory. He had absolute control of everything: The view flowed through as ordinary in the passing time. No more rain in the remaining day. Dinner awaited him. Maybe traffic would appear higher at rush hour, but that wasn’t the concern now. Inside this grid, everything went on as usual in harmony and security.
He kept staring at the skyline for another while. In the parking grid he was no longer the professor. He no longer belonged to the university. Not even the city. It was quiet in the vehicle, as the boundaries parted him and the outer world—and yet he could still hear those noises: With silence vibrating in his ears, he could still hear the last whispers of dying languages throughout times, as if, with windshield’s reflections reaching in his eyes, he could see through the skyscrapers—see through the golden skyline of the city shimmering in sunset and strenuously uttering the lost tongues into an aphasic mourn of desolation.