Written, the Dutch language is Seussian. Rife with double vowels bookended by horrifically paired consonants, road signs announce the arrival of towns named Hoofddorp and Heerhugowaard. There, you will stop at restaurants and order food from menus that resemble horizontal eye charts — bitterballen, frikandellen and a green pea soup called snert.
Excise the menace from Eastern European languages, add the chirp of French, and you have spoken Dutch. Compared to tonal languages — the Chinese dialects, Thai — which are so unfamiliar as to become white noise, washing over the foreigner's ear in the liquid rush of highway traffic, Dutch, with words like "koffie" for "coffee", is familiar enough to keep the ears perked.
Christmas marked my girlfriend Tessa's first visit to Holland in a year and a half. Her family was excited to see her, and everyone gathered at her parents' place, a small yet cosy house in the tiny village of Wognum, just northeast of Amsterdam. Wognum is a village in the fairy tale sense. With a population of about 4,000, everyone knows everyone's face, if not their preferred brand of shampoo. Sheep and longhair cattle dapple verdant fields. The streets are cobbled. There is a butcher and a florist. All that's missing are thatched roofs and a blacksmith.
Besides her immediate family — her mother, father and two sisters — Tessa's relatives do not speak much English. You couldn't blame them for their hesitation, then, toward the stranger in their midst. Not only was I American, I was an American who lived in Bangkok, a fact that only served to widen the cultural chasm between us. They approached me with the tentative curiosity they might have possessed had an exotic bird been perched atop a chair at the kitchen table, a creature capable of parroting particular words and phrases, but one just as liable to peck out their eyes.
"Lekker?" they'd ask, dangling dainty finger sandwiches between finger and thumb.
"Super lekker," I'd respond, widening my eyes and rubbing my stomach in a pantomime of satisfaction. At this they would beam and nod and shuffle off, leaving me to contemplate the run of the wood grain on the table, or stare at the refrigerator and wonder how long a cat would survive if it was shut inside.
Every few minutes someone would wander by with a plate of food or a beer, which they would set in front of me, as though caring for an alcoholic baby.
"Have you potato in Thailand?"
"Oh, yes," I'd say, once more rubbing my belly. "Mmm, potatoes!"
Soon I was bleary-eyed, exhausted, taking in an overload of information that could not, except for the most obvious slabs, be processed.
Later, I sat on the sofa between Tessa and her grandmother, a woman with a miraculous clump of thick, wavy hair. Even Tessa had reverted back to her native tongue, a feat completed with the ease of an eel undulating through the sea.
At times she would forget this, turning toward me and speaking in fluid streams of Dutch.
"Wil je nog iets eten?" she'd ask.
I'd blink.
"I mean, oh — do you want something to eat?"
While I didn't understand the minutiae, you couldn't ignore the convectional warmth in the room, a faint radiance at once pervasive and unthreatening. It seeped through any barrier language could construct, and I latched onto that, the remora on the clog-finned shark. My family, across oceans and time zones, would soon be celebrating Christmas of their own. I would not be there, but I had Tessa, and her uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, people with names like Bjorn and Annet and Wiebe, all amounting to an odd, foreign film of home, a facsimile, albeit one in dire need of subtitles. But that's family — a feeling more than blood-thickened physicality.
And unlike language, family doesn't require translation.
As people began to trickle home, pulling on coats and wrapping woollen scarves around their necks, Tessa's grandmother approached me.
"Was the party fun?" she asked. The words were accented and choppy and rehearsed, altogether heartbreakingly endearing. She leaned in for a hug goodbye.
"Yes," I told her, hugging back. "The party was fun."
Adam Kohut is a subeditor in the Life section of the Bangkok Post.