“Isn’t it stressful to be in a country where you don’t know the language?” asked an American girl. A Jew—a JAP to be honest—she knew enough Hebrew to haggle with taxi drivers. For an American, she was a ruthless haggler.
I didn’t answer for a moment because I was wondering why I should be stressed—aren’t language barriers just a part of traveling? True, when I first landed in a fog of sleep deprivation, I stared uncomprehendingly at signs scribbled in Hebrew. I will never again take for granted the ability to recognize an alphabet – reading a map or recognizing station names was that much harder. But most road signs here are also written in English (and Arabic and sometimes Russian), and every bus driver I’ve encountered spoke English. If anything, I found it less stressful than Germany or France, where I ostensibly spoke the languages. In fact, this was liberating. I was a foreigner and obviously a foreigner. There is no expectation that I know anything.
Perhaps that is the essential difference of being in America and being abroad. At home — and I say “home” without qualifying quotation marks even though the second half of this sentence will make them seem apt — I am forever trying to prove that despite physical appearances I belong, that I am American. This struggle is so constant that I am no longer aware of it, like a fish unaware of the water in which it swims. But when you, a human, emerge out of the water to walk across that strip of beach too shallow to swim, you become increasingly aware of how much easier it is to walk through air than trudge through water. In Israel, I am foreign and I’m not trying to convince anyone otherwise.
I once told a friend that I could never live abroad because I am much too concerned with social codes and the horror of breaking them. Hard enough in a culture I’m familiar with—impossible in one I’m not. I have unwittingly transgressed a gazillion social norms here – wearing shorts in holy places, not paying for the public restroom – but my foreignness has given me brazenness rather than timidity. It’s not that I have a license to be rude so much as I’ve become more forgiving of myself. I remember allowing a night of clubbing in Boston to be ruined by something so inconsequential yet so humiliating. Someone having a birthday party at the club had ordered bottle service, and I, thirsty and without thinking, reached for some water on their table. When someone shot me a dirty look, I initially shot a dirty one back. I spent the rest of the night more embarrassed by the fact I did not realize my transgression than the actual action. Why did I let it haunt me so much that I still remember it so vividly now?
A good deal of my mental energy was been wasted, I’m sure, dealing with the insecurities with my essential awkwardness. You want to talk about stressful? When I was a kid, ordering a sandwich was stressful. I don’t have any problems at Subway now, but I was still the type of person who’d much rather stare at my map than choose someone on the street to ask directions. But because now I’ve done these things so often and with people who barely understand me, asking for things is going to be so easy when I get back to America! Abroad, I can pass off any awkwardness as linguistic or cultural differences. Awkwardness isn’t accompanied by that flush of shame.
Communicating with language barriers is most certainly awkward. Jokes, metaphors, idioms – what gives our language color and our conversations spirit – are too often lost in translation. A joke about someone breaking a leg crumbles with misunderstanding into genuine concern that someone actually broke a leg. But it’s funny too, how words find new configurations, like how someone said sleeping pills made her feel like “frozen beef.” And I’ve realized how much we don’t need language when we have body language. I didn’t understand a word of what the lady on the bus or the guy at the café said but I knew she wanted to sit in the seat next to me and he asked if I wanted to order anything else. I could respond to them in the handful of Hebrew words I know: beseder, ken.
It’s not stressful.
