I Like Understanding Strangers

I do not think I learned languages because I wanted to sound impressive. That would be a cleaner story. More useful for a profile, maybe. Four languages, neat list, tidy competence. Czech, Vietnamese, English, German. A small parade of labels that makes a person sound more organized than she actually is. But language has never felt that clean to me. For me, language is less like a skill and more like a room. Sometimes I enter one because I belong there. Sometimes because somebody opened the door before I knew how to knock. Sometimes because I am trying to hear what people mean before I decide what they are. I grew up with Vietnamese at home and Czech outside. That sounds simple until you live it. At home, Vietnamese did not feel like an identity project. It was not a cultural performance. It was just the language of food, reminders, irritation, care, half-sentences, practical love, and all the things a mother can say without making them sound sentimental. Czech was the world beyond the door. School, streets, shops, buses, forms, jokes, insults, books, small talk, teachers, neighbors, the weather, the country that raised me whether it always knew what to do with my face or not. So I learned very early that language is not only about vocabulary. It is about who gets to assume you understand. It is about who slows down for you, who does not, who compliments you for speaking a language you were born into, who thinks your face arrived from somewhere else even when your sentence did not. There is a specific kind of silence that happens when somebody expects you to be foreign and then you answer in fluent Czech. I do not mean dramatic silence. No violins. No courtroom moment. Just a small pause, a little recalculation behind the eyes. I know that pause well. I used to think of it as awkward. Now I think of it as useful. It tells me something. Language is sometimes a key. Sometimes a mirror. Sometimes a warning system. And sometimes, when needed, it is a very elegant weapon. > My face makes people guess. My Czech lets me decide whether their guess deserves an answer. Vietnamese is more complicated. Not because I do not love it. I do. But love is not always fluent in a simple way. Vietnamese, for me, is tied to my mother, to food, to family, to the wider community around us, to the kind of care that does not announce itself as care. It is tied to being understood before I have fully explained myself. It is tied to being corrected, fed, watched, protected, worried about, and occasionally judged with the efficiency of a small domestic court. It is the language where affection can sound like logistics. Did you eat? Are you cold? Why are you going out like that? Take this with you. Call me when you arrive. None of that sounds like poetry until you grow older and realize that some people were writing love letters in grocery lists the whole time. Czech feels like the language I stand in. Vietnamese feels like the language I was carried in. English came later as a different kind of space. Not home exactly. Not blood. Not schoolyard. More like distance with furniture in it. A place where I could explain things without immediately being trapped inside the expectations of Czech or Vietnamese. A place where I could write about belonging without having to perform it for the people who think they own the definition. English lets me put the Czech world on the table and look at it from a little distance. It lets me write about Vietnamese-Czech life without immediately becoming a local curiosity. It gives me room to say: this is where I am from, but not all of me is available for translation. That is probably why I write here in English. Not because English is more honest. It is not. Every language lies in its own accent. But English gives me a third chair in the room. Somewhere to sit when Czech is too close, Vietnamese is too intimate, and I need a sentence that can breathe before someone asks me to explain myself again. German is different. German is the language at the edge of home. I did not grow up in Germany, but I grew up close enough to feel that borders are not abstract. They are not only lines on maps. Sometimes a border is a road, a train, a shop sign, a weekend trip, a school subject, a place people mention casually because it is not impossibly far away. When you live relatively close to a border, another country does not feel like a fantasy. It feels like something just outside your routine. German entered my life partly because it made practical sense. It was nearby. It was useful. It was one of those languages adults approve of because it sounds like a good investment in a future that nobody has clearly described. But I also liked it. I liked that it had weight. Structure. Corners. I liked that German words sometimes feel like little houses with too many rooms. I liked that the language could sound severe and tender depending on who was speaking and how tired they were. Later I realized something else: Germany also has a large Vietnamese world inside it. That mattered to me more than I expected. Because once you belong to a diaspora, you start noticing other versions of it everywhere. Not because they are the same as yours. They are not. Vietnamese life in Czechia is not Vietnamese life in Germany. Prague is not Berlin. A small Czech village is not Leipzig. Every migration story has its own weather, paperwork, food routes, family silences, and weird little local adaptations. But still, there is a recognition. A feeling of: oh, you too, but differently. German became more than a school language or a border language. It became another possible way to hear Vietnamese lives in Europe. Another corridor. Another set of doors. Another reminder that diaspora is not one story repeated in different countries. It is many people building kitchens inside languages that were not originally waiting for them. 🧭 A small note on languages: I do not want to collect them like decorations. I want to understand what room I am standing in. I want to know whether someone is joking, hurting, flirting, warning me, dismissing me, or simply asking for directions. Guessing is useful sometimes. But understanding is kinder. The more I move away from the village and toward cities, the more languages I hear. On trains. In cafés. At stations. In shops. Online. Half sentences passing by me before I can catch them. Czech, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, German, English, Slovak, Polish, Russian, sometimes something I recognize only as rhythm before I recognize it as meaning. Cities make language visible in a way villages often hide. In a village, language can feel like a rule: this is what people speak here. This is the tone. This is the acceptable amount of difference. This is how loudly you are allowed to exist before someone notices. In a city, language leaks through everything. Someone is arguing in one language and apologizing in another. A child translates for a parent. A cashier switches without ceremony. Two people share a joke that nobody else around them understands. A tourist mispronounces something with full confidence. Somebody on the tram says one word in Vietnamese and my attention turns before I can stop it. I like that. I like hearing the world before I know what it wants from me. But I like understanding it even more. There is a humility in not knowing. I believe that. I do not need to understand everything. Nobody does. There is beauty in being surrounded by languages that are not yours, in remembering that the world is not obliged to become legible for your comfort. But there is also care in learning. There is care in refusing to reduce other people to tone and body language. There is care in wanting to know the actual sentence, not just your interpretation of it. There is care in not turning everyone into a vague feeling. I do not want to only guess strangers. I want to understand them when I can. > Guessing keeps people blurry. Understanding lets them become specific. Specificity matters to me. Maybe because I have been blurred by others often enough. Asian-looking girl. Vietnamese. Czech but not really. Foreigner but not exactly. Local but with an explanation attached. Quiet one. Nice one. Complicated one. One of those people who must have a story. People love a story when it makes you easier to hold. They love the simplified version: mother, absent father, Czech village, Vietnamese face, good Czech, four languages, queer, private, observant, probably interesting in a way that can be summarized. I understand the impulse. I do it too. We all make quick maps of each other to survive the amount of information in a day. But I do not want to live permanently inside somebody else’s rough draft. This is part of why I care about language. Not because it makes me special. Because it makes people harder to flatten. If I understand your language, even a little, I am less likely to turn you into a symbol. If I understand the joke, I hear the timing. If I understand the complaint, I hear the wound. If I understand the small phrase someone uses when they are embarrassed or tired or trying to be polite, I get closer to the real temperature of the room. And if I do not understand, at least I know that I do not. That matters too. There is a difference between silence and ignorance. Between privacy and absence. Between not knowing and deciding that whatever you do not know must not matter. I have spent enough of my life watching people fill in the blanks around me. Sometimes kindly. Sometimes lazily. Sometimes with the confidence of a man explaining my own country to me after mispronouncing the town. So I try not to do that to others. Not always successfully. I am not a saint. I am just trying to become less careless. Maybe this is why I like small platforms, small rooms, small conversations. They give language a chance to stay human. Big platforms turn speech into performance very quickly. Every sentence starts dressing for an audience. Every feeling becomes content before it has finished being a feeling. Small rooms let people hesitate. I like hesitation. It is where meaning often lives before it becomes polished enough to lie. In Czech, I can be sharp. In Vietnamese, I can be somebody’s daughter. In English, I can step back and make a shape out of the noise. In German, I can stand at the edge of home and listen to another version of Europe opening its mouth. None of these languages contain me completely. That is the point. I do not think any single language should be trusted with the whole of a person. Some selves arrive only in one grammar. Some memories do not cross borders cleanly. Some jokes die in translation, and honestly, some deserved it. Some tenderness becomes awkward when moved. Some anger becomes clearer. Some shame loses power once it has to explain itself in a language that does not know its childhood name. I used to worry that living between languages meant being divided. Now I think it means having more than one way to stay intact. I do not learn languages to become impressive. I learn them because I am tired of guessing. Because I want to know when someone is being cruel and when they are only clumsy. Because I want to hear the difference between distance and danger. Because I want to understand the woman in the shop, the older man at the station, the Vietnamese family in Germany, the Czech neighbor who thinks she is being subtle, the stranger online who writes one sentence and accidentally reveals a whole weather system. Because people are not content. They are not categories. They are not subtitles waiting for me to switch them on. They are rooms. Some open. Some locked. Some loud. Some full of furniture inherited from people who left before they could explain themselves. And language, when it is at its best, is not a performance of intelligence. It is a way of knocking more gently.