“Okay, so”—Drew sat up—“how will it work?”
I smiled. He had opened the door. “We’ll just do what we did in Guatemala.” I sat down next to him again. “We’ll go somewhere that doesn’t speak a lot of English, enroll in a local school, try to only speak that language all day, really immerse ourselves in it. After a few months, we’ll be conversational, and by six months we’ll have a level of fluency.”
“Really?” Drew asked dubiously.
“Well, Spanish for sure, yes. I think in six months we can be pretty fluent. I mean, we’ll have accents, but I’m talking about being able to talk without stumbling over our words. For Arabic and Mandarin we’ll have to see, but I think being proficient in six months is a reasonable goal.”
He mulled it over again. “So six months each. China, the Middle East, and Latin America, huh?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to force my heart to slow down.
“Hmm . . .”
I grabbed my laptop and started looking up images of Beijing for Drew: the Forbidden City, Wanshou Temple, the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, Dongyue Temple.
“What’s that?” he asked, intrigued by one photo.
“It’s, um, Beihai Park, it looks like. In the winter.”
Inspired, I made a new search for images of Beijing in the winter. The images leapt off the screen. The Great Wall covered in snow, making a white line through the misty hillside. The red-tiled roof of the Summer Palace peeking out beneath a blanket of fresh snow, frozen branches of ice-covered trees framing the scene. Chinese tourists huddled outside the Forbidden City, teenagers skiing cross-country across the snow by the Olympic stadium, and families ice-skating while holding hands.
“Ooh,” Drew said as I clicked open one particularly striking image. It was from Harbin, a city north of Beijing, about eight hours away by train. It was an entire palace and forest carved in ice, built nearly to scale, three times taller than the heavily cloaked visitors in the picture. I sensed his excitement.
“We could go to Beijing in the winter,” I offered.
“I would love that. But would you?”
We had been chasing the summer for several years now. My childhood in New England had not left me enamored of the cold. The last winter we were there, before we drove cross-country, I would sit in my frozen car, violently shivering as I tried to force my keys into the ignition with stiff fingers so the car would begin to warm up while I cleared off the snow. I would drive the entire thirty minutes to work each day tensed up in my frigid car, only warming up as I arrived at the office. I had sworn to myself, “Never, ever again.”
Drew, on the other hand, remembered those winters—times of skiing, snowball fights, and hot chocolate—with fondness. Over the years, he had pitched cold-weather destinations to me, and I had evaded and dodged as best I could. I kept promising him a winter season, eventually. If he was willing to follow me around the world on this crazy project, I could stand a few months of winter for him.
“It’s okay, I’ll just bundle up. It’ll be great. Think of how beautiful Beijing will be!” I leaned against him, giving him a better view of the computer.
He looked again at the ice castles and squeezed my shoulders. “It looks great.”
We were doing this.
Two
We soon ran out of time on our thirty-day Egyptian visas, so I booked a cheap direct flight to Thailand, where, with Drew’s tacit approval, I began seriously planning for our project. Thailand was the perfect place to stop traveling for a few months, because we could rent a furnished apartment easily, the Internet was fast, the food was delicious, and the people were friendly.
This morning, I was on a mission. We needed supplies. I needed a whiteboard, textbooks, an Internet connection, contacts who’d lived in Beijing, and much more. But first, we had to get a motorbike and helmets.
In Thailand, even the kids rode motorbikes. Unlike other places where the Vespa was the cool bike to own, in Chiang Mai it was the Scoopy, 110 cc of pure, adorable, motoring cuteness. We rented the latest model from the repair shop down the street. It was powder pink, with a large decal of a cartoon skull that had a pink bow perched on its head. It looked like something a teenage girl would love, but Thais of both genders loved the color pink—in fact, pink was the official royal color of the king.
We found a sprawling helmet shop just north of Tha Phae Gate. Hundreds of helmets lined the store shelves—helmets with panda ears, helmets with ladybug decals, helmets depicting cartoons like Pokémon. It was easier to find one for Cole (yellow with the creature from the 1988 Japanese animated film My Neighbor Totoro) than it was for us. Our giant melons were too big for most of them, and we ended up leaving with too-small blue helmets that sat atop our heads like mushroom caps.
Thus awkwardly outfitted, we could navigate the city on wheels and pick up all the things that would let me start planning what I was calling our “fluency experiment.”
Chiang Mai is arranged around a central moat that is one mile long and makes a square around the old city. If you missed your exit from the main highway, you had to circle painfully around the city again to make your way back, or try to navigate some winding soi, or lane, and hope you could loop around. It was something of a joy to get lost, at least to me anyway, and on this day, we had predictably missed the shopping center that had the whiteboards, markers, Post-it notes, index cards, and other supplies I needed to turn our $150-a-month studio apartment into Language Learning HQ. Drew was driving. I sat behind him, Cole strapped to my chest in his baby carrier, his Totoro helmet banging against my chin when we went over bumps.
“Drew, turn there!” I shouted over his shoulder, pointing at the wat—temple—on our right. Drew swerved the bike a little, then kept driving.
“What are you—”
“Er—hold on,” he said, and kept driving straight.
“Okay, take that one!” I said to him, pointing over his shoulder again at the next soi. He ignored me.
I had long learned to expect this when driving with Drew. He had adult ADHD, which I had come to understand as not an inability to focus, but an inability to not focus on everything. He explained it to me as a lack of a filter. Everything that came into his purview demanded his complete attention, and he had no way to dampen down some of the signals and focus on others. In Thailand, this was doubly challenging. Driving around the old city meant the distraction of a crowded visual landscape. The ornate temples and gardens were pushed up next to guesthouses and open-air restaurants. Rows of motorbikes lined the sides of buildings, tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws—a motorbike with a half carriage attached) roamed the streets, and tourists walked the broken sidewalks, stepping over potholes and cracked cement. In the sky was a rat’s nest of telephone wires. Billboards and flashing signs were mounted everywhere. I was used to it. Half the time, I didn’t even register the madness before me. But for Drew, driving in the city was sensory overload, and my suggestion that he take a right turn was impossible. He was already juggling a dozen other demands on his attention.
I could have done the driving, of course, but instead I insisted that he drive us everywhere. Years before, I’d gotten in the habit of doing all our driving, and then one time when Drew had to take the car through Boston, he was so overwhelmed by the city he nearly had a panic attack trying to simply drive to our new apartment and park the car. From that moment forward, I refused to drive when we were together, convinced that he could simply learn to do it through practice. I was right and wrong. He will always have ADHD; his attention will always be grabbed by whatever crosses his path, without fail, which means we’ll get lost, miss turns, and sometimes get into fender-benders. But he did get better. Familiarity took some of the edge off, and over time he relaxed and drove around Boston like a pro.
We weren’t quite there yet in Thailand.
“Drew!” I said as he kept driving straight, missing every
opportunity to turn.
“I know!” he said with regret. He was powering through.
I sighed. It would take us ten minutes to loop around to make a second pass at the right turn. I forced myself to release my momentary annoyance that he didn’t just listen to me and enjoy the ride. It was quite nice on the motorbike: the wind, the gentle motion, getting to see the city as you putter by at ten miles per hour.
Still, these little pressure points with Drew, the times when I’d try to steer and he’d reel the opposite way, the chafing that it caused, was something we’d had to learn to handle in our marriage. It meant I did all the planning. Drew and I used to share it. We tried. The last time was in Greece when he offered to handle booking our flights. We showed up at the airport in Athens and discovered that our flight was scheduled for two weeks later. Drew had neglected to change the default date on the search form, so hyperfocused on the task of booking the flight that he zoomed right past that part. He was beyond mortified. I was mad. But in that moment, with a cranky baby on my hip, all of our luggage in hand, and no flight, I had to make a decision. I could decide either to have a really big fight, or to not have a really big fight. It was that simple. So I chose to skip it. We’d gone through that fight before. And Drew had never once yelled at me in our entire relationship. He raised the bar so high for being a patient spouse that I had no choice but to try to meet it. So we laughed. Drew handed me the credit card and I got a refund minus fees for our flight, looked at the departure monitor, picked a new destination, and scheduled us to fly to Santorini later that afternoon. What could have been a disaster turned into one of the most beautiful trips we’ve ever taken, on a gorgeous island we might not have otherwise seen.
However, that marked the end of Drew’s planning days for good. Now he was in charge of odd jobs like driving, carrying the luggage, killing spiders, waiting in line to get paperwork, changing diapers, and running to the grocery store. His ADHD makes him a great traveler—social, friendly, easygoing. But one thing was absolutely clear: If we were going to learn three languages, travel to three countries, set up a home in each one, and somehow immerse ourselves in the culture and become fluent . . . well then, it was all going to rest on my shoulders. That wasn’t just the deal we made; that was the result of years of trial and error, of marital negotiation and relationship rigging. The system was there for a reason, and I knew it was best to not mess with it.
We rounded the final corner, flanked by other motorbikes, and Drew put on his signal and made the turn. We made it. We had traveled to the opposite end of the world and navigated Thai traffic, on a motorbike, with a baby, all to arrive at a mecca of sorts: Office Depot. I was in planning-preparation heaven.
I passed Cole to Drew as he was taking off his helmet and headed inside. It was just like the Office Depots in the States, except imagine cramming an entire store in about a quarter as much space. On the far end, they had given up on any semblance of aisles or stacking things and just left the office furniture in random piles.
I ran over to the whiteboard section, and involuntarily grinned. For about $10 USD I could get a five-foot-wide whiteboard. I pulled out two and brought them to the front. Drew was just walking in with Cole.
“Drew!” I said as I buzzed past him toward the markers. “Everything is so cheap here!” Markers, notebooks, planners, and pens sailed into my basket. In the end I wound up with an impressively high bill and more things than I could possibly carry.
“How are we going to get this home?” I wondered aloud. Drew gave me a look as we dragged full bags of office supplies out to the bike.
Luckily there was a tuk-tuk nearby, with a driver sitting sleepily at the helm, who was willing to drive us across town for $4. We piled the tuk-tuk full of our stuff, I climbed in with Cole, and straddling two giant whiteboards, we made our way back to the apartment. From the back window I flashed a huge smile at Drew as he trailed us in the pink, bubbly scooter.
• • •
BACK IN THE APARTMENT, I got to work. Drew took Cole down to the swimming pool, and I set up my planning headquarters. I printed out Bialystok’s interview from the New York Times and taped it to the whiteboard. She was the starting point, and everything emanated out from there. Her research had found that bilinguals gained a four-year reprieve from the symptoms of dementia, while trilinguals gained five years. She didn’t study people who spoke more than three languages, or “higher-order polyglots,” but I had to assume it would be higher.
I wrote the three languages across the whiteboards: Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin. I had settled on these three because they represented huge populations of the earth. Besides Hindi and English, they were the three most spoken languages on the planet. As a traveler, the idea of being able to speak to 40 percent of the world’s population in their native tongue wasn’t just appealing, it was intoxicating.
Under each language I wrote the major hurdles. The Foreign Service Institute, the branch of the U.S. government that trains diplomats in many things, including foreign languages, rates Arabic as a level 5 language on a scale of 1 to 5—in other words, one of the hardest for a native English speaker to learn.
Arabic uses a different script than English, and it is written right to left. So I’d have to learn how to write it from right to left, in a cursive script that at first blush looked elegant and complicated. Arabic also has spoken versions of the language that are completely different from official Modern Standard Arabic, which is relegated to newspapers and the speeches of politicians. There is also a third version of the language, classical Arabic, which is nearly identical to the Arabic of the Qur’an and is understood by Muslims around the world but is essentially a third version of Arabic and would be something entirely separate for me to master.
What’s more, not only would I have to learn a new alphabet plus master writing in the opposite direction, but spoken Arabic itself was splintered by dialects that were very different from one another. And that’s not to mention the challenging grammar and pronunciation that pops up in most every Arabic dialect.
That should have been enough to stop me in my tracks, but it didn’t. Perhaps it was just my ego, but I figured: People learn Arabic every day. Of course it sounded daunting, but it was ultimately just a series of individual steps. On day one I had to learn the first letter of the alphabet. On day X I would be fluent.
Mastering a language would be like any other long-term project, I reasoned with myself. After all, Drew and I had filmed and edited an hour-long documentary. We didn’t wake up one day knowing how to do that. We started at the beginning: We had an idea. We researched. We learned. We bought some camera gear. We raised funds. Sometimes it felt like I was getting my own personal MFA in documentary filmmaking: how much it costs, how to record sound properly, the correct way to set up shots for interviews, and a rapid immersion in the world of editing, color correction, and more. Now I felt like I could tackle a film with ease. And the experience taught me something else: The cool and interesting things that other people are doing or have done, the big daunting projects, are really just composed of a series of small steps. From the outset, they didn’t necessarily know what would happen in step fifty-seven or how many steps it would take total. They just made the decision. They took the first step, then the next. And soon, wonderful things happened.
So that was what I was going to do.
I moved on to Spanish. It was a level 1 on the Foreign Service Institute scale: easy. I had studied Spanish on several occasions—first in school, then via audiotapes, then in a short but amazing immersion program in Guatemala, where I’d lived with a host family and spoken no English for a full month. At that point, my Spanish had gotten pretty good, but I’d since forgotten what felt like all my vocabulary. I had lost my Spanish from a lack of use. It would be interesting to see if I could retrieve it.
The real challenge with Spanish would be picking where to learn it. The language is largely the sam
e everywhere, but accents and word usage change by region. Someone from Spain speaks Castilian Spanish. People from Mexico, Central America, and South America all speak Latin American Spanish, but there’s a big difference in the way Spanish sounds coming from the mouth of a Cuban versus a Guatemalan (I tested this theory by visiting Cuba after studying Spanish in Guatemala and spending most of my time asking people to repeat themselves “un poco más despacio”—a little more slowly).
I wrote in big letters, Latin America or Spain?
Finally: Mandarin. Mandarin is considered by many to be the hardest language in the world for an English native speaker to learn (others say Japanese). Mainland China itself is still undergoing a transition to Mandarin from the many different Chinese languages and dialects spoken in provinces around the country, like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and more. The official Mandarin originates from Beijing, so pretty much everyone in Beijing speaks it, but for many Chinese people elsewhere in the country it’s a second language. And for people outside the capital who do speak Mandarin, the accent changes quickly as you leave Beijing. The Beijinger accent, spoken quickly with an extra r sound added to many words, is considered desirable.
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