People We Have Yet To Dine With

Written by Yueyan Zhang from Iolani School, Hawaii, USA

The smell of water spinach floats in the kitchen. Grandma squats by the concrete counter, picking vegetables, bits of her native dialect slipping softly from her lips. It is a language passed down for generations in the mountain valley, and few people beyond that patch of land understand it.

I sit at the dining table scrolling through my phone, where the comment section boils with arguments. A public incident has split people into two opposing camps, every word sharp with hostility. Everyone labels those on the other side as unreasonable outsiders. As my finger swipes through lines of bitter remarks, the soft dialect in my ears feels like it belongs to a completely different world.

I threw a huge fit about her accent back in junior high. She braved the rain to bring me an umbrella, and called my childhood nickname in dialect at the school gate. The boys sitting behind me mimicked her all the way back to class. I clutched my schoolbag strap and ran home, yelling at her never to speak that way in public again—it was embarrassing. She stood in the hallway holding the wet umbrella handle, mud on the toes of her shoes, her lips twitching but no rebuttal coming out. After that, whenever she came to school, she forced out stiff Mandarin, word by word, like a child just learning to speak.

I always thought that old dialect was rustic and unrefined. I especially couldn’t understand her favorite saying. Whenever neighbors quarreled, or when disputes between regions played on TV, she would sigh and say, “They’re just people we haven’t eaten with yet.”

Back then, I dismissed it as the confused rambling of an old woman. Textbooks made it clear: strangers are strangers, opponents are opponents, with clear lines between them. How could they be lumped together?

I truly understood those words one night while flipping through an old photo album. Grandma, wearing her reading glasses, pointed at a yellowed group photo. A wooden table sat in the courtyard, with two families standing around it, rice wine stains on the bowl rims. The family on the left had fought with mine over the boundary of half an acre of land for three whole years. The two families would turn their faces away when they met, and adults told their kids not to play with the other family's children, as if an invisible river separated them.

Then a mountain flood swept through the valley. A falling rock crushed the man’s leg, and no one dared to carry him miles down the mountain path in the rain at midnight. My grandfather grabbed a lantern, knocked on their door, and led a few young men to carry him on his back through the mud to the township clinic.

The next day, his wife brought over a freshly killed chicken and cooked a full table of dishes. The two families sat down to a meal together and drank half a pot of rice wine. Three years of pent-up resentment melted away with the food.

Grandma ran her finger over the porcelain bowl in the photo and said slowly, “In our old dialect, there was never a word for ‘enemy.’ Even the closest friendship grows distant if you never share a meal. Even the tensest relationship softens when you sit down together for a bowl of hot food. There are no born rivals—just people who haven’t sat at the same table yet.”

I stared at the album for a long time that night. It turned out that this dying language holds a whole different way of seeing the world. It never divides people into ranks, nor does it draw early lines between us and them. It groups everyone on the opposite side into one single category: people we have yet to share a meal with. There is no permanent opposition—only connections that haven’t been made yet.

I suddenly thought of the sharp, conflicting words on my phone screen. We are so good at labeling people, so quick to push others to the opposite side over a single sentence or a different stance. Prejudice and hostility, like creatures flying out of Pandora’s Box, creep everywhere, widening the cracks between people.

We always say peace is too far away—something like ceasefire agreements on the news, handshakes at negotiation tables: matters only for powerful people to decide. But that day, it struck me that peace has never been some grand concept. It hides in how we speak and how we look at others.

Not calling someone an enemy too easily, leaving room for strangers, holding back harsh words in an argument, and listening to the other side when you disagree—these small, unremarkable moments are all acts of peace. Peace does not mean erasing all differences, or forcing everyone to share the same opinion. It means admitting that cracks exist, but choosing to fill them not with hatred, but with small acts of kindness, little by little.

This summer, I started learning the old dialect from Grandma. I always fumble with the pronunciation, and she laughs and pats the back of my hand. I’m learning slowly, but that core saying has stuck with me firmly. A few days ago, I came across a comment with an opinion completely opposite of mine. In the past, I would have typed out a long rebuttal right away. But that day, I deleted and rewrote again and again, and finally only sent: “It’s normal to think differently. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.”

Half an hour later, they replied: “First time I haven’t gotten into an argument online. Kind of surprised. Thanks for being civil too.”

It’s that simple.

At dinner, I tried to ask Grandma for more soup in my broken dialect. Her spoon paused mid-air, then she broke into a smile, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes folding like delicate little flowers. The kitchen light glowed warm yellow, and the porcelain bowl tapped softly against the table.

Pandora’s Box has been opened, and suffering and hostility have spread across the world. But the hope left at the bottom of the box has never been some earth-shaking power. It might just be a gentle word, an extra pair of chopsticks and a bowl, or an old saying that refuses to see others as enemies.

Some things don’t need to be shouted loudly.

Soft and quiet is enough.