Setup
Welcome, Player One.
Your starter pack includes three languages, five vowels, and the assumption that you will not need all of them. You are brown-skinned, quick-tongued, and too loud in confined spaces. This is not a glitch. It will be treated as one.
You begin in a rented flat in Kuala Lumpur, where the ceiling leaks during thunderstorms and the television is always on. Your mother speaks Tamil when she’s angry, Malay when she’s in public, and English when she wants to be believed. Your father rarely speaks at all.
Your first word is paati. Your first punishment comes for shouting it——too loud, too proud——at a dinner party. You learn to use grandma instead.
You are moved to South Korea before your eleventh birthday. You start again in a new house with heated floors and neighbors who don’t wave. Your school uniform is stiff. You fold your vowels like laundry and tuck your grammar into your shoes.
You practice Korean at home, whispering annyeonghaseyo into your pillow, mouthing the r/l sound over and over. You learn not to correct your classmates when they mispronounce your name. You learn to say it their way. You learn to answer to it.
Player Two is everyone who says, “You speak so well——for someone like you.”
Player Two is your teacher, your boss, your boyfriend, your mother-in-law.
Player Two never looks like the villain. That’s part of the game.
This is not a game you meant to enter. But now you’re here, and the rules have already been whispered——behind doors, beneath smiles, inside the pauses after someone says, “Sorry, what did you say?”
You think this is temporary.
You think you will learn to play.
You do not know the game is designed to erase you by degrees.
Ready? Your move.
Objectives
Your objective is survival.
But no one is chasing you with a knife. No one is dragging you away in chains.
This is a quieter kind of survival. One that looks a lot like politeness.
You will learn the right volume, the right vowels, the right time to speak and when to smile instead.
Player One’s primary objectives:
• Speak well enough to avoid correction.
• Be agreeable, especially in your borrowed languages.
• Never sound too emotional. Emotion confuses the algorithm.
Bonus objectives (optional, but encouraged):
• Anticipate discomfort and sand it smooth.
• Translate pain into something palatable——metaphor, maybe.
• Look grateful when they say your English is good.
Player Two’s objectives are undefined. They win when:
• You correct your own accent before they do.
• You laugh when they mispronounce your name.
• You choose the easier word over the right one.
They also win when you apologize for being hard to understand.
When you rewrite your bio.
When you decline to speak at your grandfather’s funeral.
When you raise your daughter bilingual but only in the languages that pay.
Bonus points when you can pass in a crowd.
When no one asks, “Where are you from?”
When someone says, “Wow, I couldn’t even tell.”
Turns
The game is played in small, repeated losses.
Turn One:
You say amma in public.
Player Two tilts their head, says, “Oh, like mama?”
You nod. You lose three points.
Turn Two:
In Year Three, your teacher writes “incorrect sentence structure” on your essay.
You’d translated a Tamil idiom into English.
The phrase meant something like, “The moon cracked open from joy.”
Your classmates laugh.
You lose five points.
Turn Three:
A cousin from Ipoh visits and asks why your Tamil sounds strange.
You say nothing. You haven’t used it in weeks.
You forget the word for yesterday.
You lose your bonus memory token.
Turn Four:
At university, someone tells you your voice is “so soothing, like NPR.”
You say thank you. You mean to say: This is my third language. I’m smoothing over vowels to be heard. I’ve filed down my accent to survive you.
You do not say any of that. You gain a social point.
You lose something you can’t name.
Turn Five:
You try to explain kavadi to your partner. You say, “It’s like penance, but danced.”
He says, “Oh. Like cosplay?”
You laugh. You don’t know why.
You lose the round.
You lose a ritual.
You lose your turn.
Turn Six:
In a work meeting, someone cuts you off mid-sentence, says, “Sorry, can you try that again but simpler?”
You nod.
You do.
You lose nuance, agency, and ten seconds of dignity.
Turn Seven:
Your mother calls. She says something in Tamil and you freeze.
You haven’t heard that phrase in years.
You ask her to repeat it in English.
She sighs.
You both lose.
Each time you speak and are misunderstood, the burden shifts. You learn to pre-translate, to flatten, to anticipate confusion.
Sometimes Player Two doesn’t even say anything.
They just look at you——neutral, unreadable.
And that’s enough to make you start editing yourself.
Player Two gets infinite turns.
You play until there is nothing left to say.
Penalties
Some penalties apply immediately. Others take years to appear.
• You forget the smell of the incense used at your grandfather’s wake, but remember how your Korean classmates gagged when you said you liked turmeric.
• You hesitate before saying appa, even in your head.
• You can no longer pray in any language that feels like yours.
Each time you bite your tongue, the silence grows roots. It spreads into your throat, your chest, your sleep. You dream in unfinished sentences.
You attend a funeral and can’t recall the full mourner’s chant. You mumble syllables, hoping no one notices.
You go to temple and don’t know when to bow.
You once knew the word for grace in Tamil. Now you only remember the shape of it——curved, soft-edged, beginning with a.
You search for it online and find nothing that feels right.
These are the penalties for playing well:
• You become easy to work with.
• You stop correcting mispronunciations.
• You laugh when you’re confused.
• You master the shrug that means, “It’s okay, I don’t mind.”
You do.
You do.
But the game does not reward honesty.
At church, you sing hymns in English and feel nothing.
At temple, you mouth chants and feel like an impostor.
The better you play, the quieter you become.
Your grammar is perfect now.
But your first language sits behind your teeth like a ghost with no door.
You’re fluent in English.
Articulate in apology.
Mute in mourning.
Glitches
No game is perfectly coded.
Sometimes the old languages surface.
A spoonful of rasam——peppery tamarind broth——at a bus stop in Penang, and suddenly your tongue remembers rhythm.
You say milagu (pepper), thanni (water), suda suda (steaming hot), before you even think.
A stranger looks. You hesitate. You switch to English.
At night, you dream in Tamil. Your grandmother stands by a doorway saying a word you no longer understand.
You wake up crying.
You hear your daughter babble nonsense and realize she’s echoing a word your paati used to say.
You freeze.
You want to ask her to say it again, but she’s already moved on.
The moment passes like steam.
Your Korean mother-in-law says, “You should teach your daughter your language.”
You nod, ashamed.
Which one?
You wonder if silence is hereditary.
One day, you say your own name aloud——first name, full accent, as it was meant to sound.
Your colleague pauses and says, “Oh! I’ve been saying it wrong all this time.”
You say, “It’s okay.”
The room pixelates for a second.
The script stutters.
You open an old prayer book and can’t read half the text, but one word stands out:
மௌனம்——mouna——silence.
Your eyes burn.
A child at the playground calls someone thambi.
You haven’t heard that word in years.
It catches in your chest——like temple bells in the distance, almost drowned out by traffic.
You almost say va da——come here——but stop yourself.
You’re not sure you remember how to say it right.
How to Stop Playing
There is no official QUIT GAME button.
You won’t find an escape hatch hidden in the code.
There is no final boss, no bell to signal the end.
But if you’re very careful——or very reckless——you might find a crack.
Begin by saying one word wrong on purpose.
Your accent, not theirs.
Your rhythm, not theirs.
Let it land uncorrected. Let it echo.
Say appa instead of dad. Say thangachi, not little sister.
Say rasam without explaining that it’s not soup.
Watch how the sentence shimmers around it, incomplete but alive.
Write a name the old way. Not anglicized. Not softened.
Tell someone what it means.
Let it taste like something.
Call your child amma (mother), sayang (dear/love), chella kutti (little darling)——and do not translate it, even when they ask. Let the word stay whole. Let them learn it with their mouth, not their mind.
Let them carry the sound of you in their bones.
Say your own name in the original key.
Say it with your full chest.
Say it like you’ve survived something.
Light a joss stick and forget how to pray.
Stand there anyway.
Let the smoke speak.
It remembers what you’ve forgotten.
Go back to the language you buried and ask it, gently, if it will have you.
It may come in pieces.
A word you thought you never learned.
A lullaby barely remembered.
A sentence your body knows but your mouth doesn’t.
Keep a notebook of all the things you almost said.
Let it grow fat with ghosts.
Call your mother and ask her how to say grace again.
Let her spell it out slowly. Let her voice shake.
Let yours shake back.
Forgive yourself for the forgetting.
Forgive yourself for the mimicry, the flattening, the cheerful smile when they butchered your name.
You did what you had to do to be understood.
Now you get to choose something else.
This doesn’t end the game.
The rules don’t disappear overnight.
But if you speak one true thing a day——just one——the silence loosens.
It only shifts the board slightly, so the next player starts from a softer place.
The voice you buried begins to stir again.
It won’t be smooth.
It won’t be fluent.
But it will be yours.
