In her grandmother’s kitchen, Mei found a biscuit tin full of screws, buttons, and one cassette labelled in faded blue ink: “Spring, the old words.” The player in the hall had not been used since before Mei was born. When she finally persuaded it to turn, a woman’s voice filled the room, quick and warm and almost familiar, speaking a dialect Mei had heard only in fragments at funerals.
在祖母的厨房里，梅发现一个饼干盒，里面装满了螺丝、纽扣，还有一盘用褪色蓝墨水标着“春天，旧词”的磁带。走廊里的播放机从梅出生前就没用过。当她终于让它转起来时，一个女人的声音充满房间，又快又暖，几乎熟悉，说的是梅只在葬礼上零星听过的方言。
Her grandmother came in and stopped. “Where did you find that?” she asked, and then, before Mei could answer, “Turn it off.” Mei turned it off. For the rest of the afternoon, her grandmother talked about the weather, the price of ginger, anything except the tape. The cassette sat on the table between them like a third person who had said the wrong thing.
祖母走进来，停住了。“你在哪儿找到的？”她问，然后没等梅回答就说，“关掉。”梅关掉了。那天下午剩下的时间，祖母只谈天气、姜的价钱，什么都不谈，就是不说那盘磁带。磁带像第三个说错话的人，坐在她们之间的桌上。
The tape was damaged. Every few seconds the voice dipped, and near the end it dissolved into a hiss. Mei took it to the electronics shop, where the owner said he could clean it but not replace what was gone. He also said, casually, that the dialect was dying: fewer than a hundred people in the district still spoke it at home.
磁带坏了。每隔几秒声音就下沉，快结束时化成了嘶嘶声。梅把它拿到电器店，店主说可以清洁，但无法补回已经消失的部分。他还随口说，这种方言正在消亡：整个区在家里还说它的人不到一百个。
Mei began visiting them. She brought a notebook and asked for single words: the name of a plant, a way to say “almost,” a joke about rain. Most people laughed and said they had forgotten. Then they remembered, and corrected each other, and argued for ten minutes about a pronoun. None of them could spell the words, and all of them could say them perfectly.
梅开始拜访他们。她带着笔记本，只问单个的词：一种植物的名字，说“几乎”的方式，一个关于雨的笑话。大多数人笑着说自己忘了。然后他们想起来，互相纠正，为一个代词争上十分钟。没有人会拼写这些词，所有人都能完美地说出来。
She played the cleaned tape for her grandmother, expecting another silence. Instead, her grandmother began to speak along with it, filling the gaps without thinking, correcting the hiss. When it ended, she sat still and said, “That is my mother. She is telling the story about the ferry.” Mei had never heard the story. She turned the tape over, and they listened again.
她把清洁过的磁带放给祖母听，以为又会是一场沉默。相反，祖母不由自主地跟着念起来，填补空白，纠正嘶嘶声。结束后，她静静坐着说：“那是我母亲。她在讲渡船的故事。”梅从没听过这个故事。她把磁带翻到另一面，她们又听了一遍。
In June, the school library opened a listening corner with six headphones and a sign: “Old words, new ears.” The tape runs for eleven minutes, gaps and all. Beside it is a second recording, made in the kitchen, in which a woman explains what the gaps meant. Mei’s grandmother refused to be called a treasure. She said she was simply someone who had been in the room when the words were still ordinary.
六月，学校图书馆开设了一个聆听角，有六副耳机和一块牌子：“旧词，新耳朵。”磁带长十一分钟，包括那些空白。旁边是第二段录音，在厨房里录的，一个女人解释那些空白意味着什么。梅的祖母拒绝被称为“宝藏”。她说，她只是一个词还很平常时，恰好在场的人。