Biography:At the tender young age of 22, Kimberle followed her heart (a man) and moved to the Netherlands. What was meant to be a six-month stay turned into twelve fabulous and cold years, during which time she lived as the Dutch do and learned to speak the language like a native. Kimberle and her family now divide their time between the Netherlands and Atlanta, where she has vowed never to complain about the heat.
Lost In Translation
One cloudless day in late January, the Dutchman and I crammed all our belongings into four large suitcases and boarded a KLM plane to Amsterdam. It was the first day of the rest of our lives together, and we were moving to the Netherlands. I wasn’t nervous or unsure; I was young and optimistic and madly, irrevocably, insanely in love, and he was sweeping me off to Europe for an extended, perhaps even indefinite, vacation and what was sure to be a big, fat blast. Not even the fact that we weren’t married, or even engaged, could darken my mood. “All Dutch people live together before they get married,” he said, and I believed him. And besides, we’d only known each other for eleven months; neither of us was ready to get married yet. But we were ready for this new adventure.
While most Americans would choose to ease into a strange new culture, settling with the other foreigners in one of the larger cities or in Wassenaar, where the American school is located, the Dutchman and I were going for total immersion. Sink or swim. We decided on Leiden, a smaller city about half an hour south of Amsterdam, purely because we could move into the apartment his sister had just vacated after she and her live-in boyfriend broke up. I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen.
Even though pretty much everyone in Holland speaks English, learning to speak Dutch was never really presented to me as an option. It was simply assumed by everyone in my new family that I would master the language, and since I hadn’t quite figured out that though standing up to a Dutchman requires a will of steel, it is perfectly acceptable, respectable even, I went along with it.
“I’ve signed you up for Dutch for Foreigners,” the Dutchman’s mother said, pressing a cup of thick, black coffee into my hand, on the morning I arrived in Amsterdam.
“You did?” I asked, a little taken aback; the stamp in my passport was barely dry and already I had a schedule.
“Ya,” she told me, nodding. “You start tomorrow.” For a moment, I just blinked at her. I had kinda been hoping to sleep off my jetlag, but okay, I thought. Dutch for Foreigners it is.
Our apartment was a fourth story walkup located on the edge of Leiden, with slanted walls that got in the way of walking around and made its meager 400 square feet seem even smaller. Half of the apartment was taken up by a living area and small kitchen, and a dark, narrow hallway led to a tiny bedroom and an even tinier bathroom. Its only saving grace was that it was cheap, and if you leaned dangerously far out the living room window, you had a fabulous view of Leiden’s red-tiled skyline.
There was an iron-shaped burn mark in the beige synthetic carpet in the middle of the living room, so strategic placement of the lone houseplant, a bushy peace lily in an ugly terracotta pot, was necessary. It was in this living room that I would while away my lonely days while the Dutchman was building his business, looking over the plant’s shiny fronds at the children’s shows on the television. I learned the words for shapes and colors and house pets from Bert and Ernie and numbers from the Count – een, twee, drie, mwa ha ha ha. It was only after watching too many episodes of Kabouter Plop, a Belgian series about a bearded gnome who sits on a toadstool and sells plopmilk and plopcookies, that the Dutchman told me I had to stop before I drove him plopcrazy.
“What the hell else am I supposed to do all day?” I asked him. When your one and only friend in the entire land is gone all day, in a place where the rain never seems to stop falling out of the sky, there isn’t much else to do besides watch ploptv. The days were endless, and endlessly boring.
“Talk a walk. Go sightseeing,” he suggested, but I could see the panic rising in his eyes. We both knew he was in a tricky place. On the one hand, he wanted me to be happy in Holland, to make his country my new home, to not sneak away in the middle of the afternoon on the next US-bound flight. But on the other hand, he couldn’t help me do so because he was spending his days at an office, making a living so he could provide for his once-sociable girlfriend who was suddenly spending her all her days in a tiny apartment, watching Sesame Street and blubbering into her can of Cola Light. Maybe he wanted me to leave on the next KLM flight, I don’t know. What I am positive of is that he was wondering who the hell this new girl was. As was I.
“It’s no fun by myself. Can’t you come with me?” I whined, blinking back more tears. Going out in public alone almost certainly meant interacting with the natives, something I had found to be both awkward and extremely uncomfortable. Kan ik u helpen? I could understand if spoken slowly enough, but sometimes the shop clerk would give me a Zoekt u iets speciaals of bent u gewoon lekker aan het snuffelen? and I would panic. At that point, I had no choice but to bolt or admit I’d been in her country for two whole weeks now and could only count to ten.
“You should take classes,” the unnaturally tall shop girl would tell me, and I would be flattered. We’d just met, and already she cared enough to want the very best for me. Maybe she could be my new best friend.
“I am,” I said proudly, “and practicing every day for weeks now.” I didn’t feel the need to tell her that practice was mostly in the privacy of my own head or teeny apartment, and she didn’t ask. She just looked at me with what I knew to be pity.
“Too bad,” my new BFF said, and I felt miffed. Why wasn’t she being more supportive? Where were the words of encouragement?
And then with her next words, I knew there would be no coming back from this argument. “You haven’t learned very much,” she told me. Up until that point, I had thought it only my own Dutchman who was so straightforward, but apparently, it was a cultural trait. Regardless, our friendship was over, and I was crushed.
So no, going out in public wasn’t much fun. I wanted the Dutchman to be my buffer, and I wasn’t above begging at that point. But he shook his head.
“I have to work,” he said, sitting down next me to on our new couch, the one and only piece of furniture in the entire living room. “You know that.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What are you saying? Are you trying to tell me to get off my lazy plopass and get a job?”
“No,” he said, but then he added, “Only if you want to.”
“But what would I do?” I whined. It seemed my Bachelor of Arts degree from a small, in Holland completely unknown women’s college wasn’t doing me any favors here. And then there was the bigger issue: Dutch still sounded like a soggy, guttural accident in my ears, and how was I supposed to get a job in a country when I didn’t even speak the language?
“There are plenty of multi-nationals in The Hague. Why don’t you talk to a temp agency there and see what they say?” he suggested, but the idea terrified me. Let’s see, I could just hear them say. No skills, no real work experience, a worthless degree, and on top of that, you don’t speak Dutch!? What the hell have you been doing all day these past two weeks? Watching tv?
“I’ll go with you,” my Dutchman added, but I shook my head. I didn’t want any eyewitnesses to what was sure to be another humiliating experience.
“No,” I said, bursting into yet another round of tears. “I’ll do it myself.”
I could tell my erratic behavior was confusing – and scaring – him. “I’m sorry,” I sputtered into his chest. “I just miss . . .” I couldn’t even finish. How could I tell him that I missed every single thing? I missed my comfortable, furnished apartment and four-door car and MTV in a language I could understand. I missed giggling with my girlfriends and cokes with ice cubes and movies without intermissions. I missed sunshine and skyscrapers and air conditioning. But most of all, I missed me, because this insecure, blubbering mess on the couch was someone I didn’t at all recognize. In fact, I hated every single thing about my new life here; the Dutchman was the one and only reason I was still sitting here, sobbing into his chest.
“I know,” he said, smoothing a hand over my hair. “And as soon as I finish my thesis and graduate, I’ll get a job in the States. I promise.”
And that right there was my carrot. The one thing that motivated me to turn off the goddamn tv, suffer through the visit to the temp agency and the resulting tedium of an administrative job at Shell, and move the Dutchman in any way I could towards completion of his thesis.
“I wish I could help,” I told him one night, after he’d pulled a long day at the office followed by a meeting with his advisor in Rotterdam. “If only your thesis were in English . . .”
“Well,” he said, considering the idea, “it is about American real estate.” But it turned out to be an offer he couldn’t refuse, and as soon as his advisor okayed it, it was a done deal. I knew nothing about real estate but I could write, and with a move back to civilization to look forward to as payoff, I didn’t even mind that I didn’t get a bit of credit from anyone but him.
But in the meantime, I plugged along with my Dutch lessons, and more and more often, I found myself understanding what people on the streets and in the stores were saying to me, and though I couldn’t always string the few Dutch words I knew into a grammatically correct sentence, I could give an appropriate answer. And even though they would always answer me in English, my attempts at their language were visibly appreciated, and the looks of pity became more and more infrequent.
At Dutch for Foreigners, I became the class star. Teacher’s pet. Never mind that the others in my class came from countries with entirely different alphabets, I was so far ahead of their clumsy Dutch that I found myself bored and frustrated during class. They couldn’t even count to ten, for God’s sake. I was just getting my Dutch legs, thinking maybe I had been overreacting, that life here in Holland wasn’t really that bad, when we went to a party.
The Dutchman was a member of a fraternity in Rotterdam and the first in his group of friends to be threatening to actually graduate. When his fraternity threw a band party, I was psyched. “I may not know much about windmills and cheese making,” I told him, “but I know band parties.” Finally, someone was speaking my language!
My Dutchman introduced me to his friends, and I found that they spoke my language, as well, and spoke it fluently. As long as they were speaking directly to me, that is. As soon as someone else entered the conversation, though, the dialogue would flip back into Dutch, and I would find myself blinking in confusion. Hello!? I would think. Am I not standing right here, smiling stupidly? I clearly don’t understand a freaking word you’re saying! I put a hand on my Dutchman’s arm.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, as if he had just suddenly noticing me standing there.
“You should take classes,” his friend told me, leaning in to make himself heard above the Hermes House Band singing a heavily accented I Vill Survive.
“I am,” I said, a stiff smile plastered on my face. “And practicing every day for weeks now.”
“I know someone who was fluent within three months,” the friend said, and right then, it became clear to me. People were watching, charting my progress, comparing me to others. The conversation continued as if I were invisible, flipping halfway through a sentence back into their native tongue, but I didn’t care; I’d stopped listening. That friend of my Dutchman may not have realized it at the time, but he’d extended a challenge, one I wasn’t about to ignore. This language thing was a competition, I realized, and it was one I wasn’t planning to lose.
“I want to quit Dutch for Foreigners,” I told my Dutchman that night on the way home, “and get a private teacher. That way it’ll go faster.”
At first he just blinked at me, surprised at my sudden motivation, and then he smiled widely. He put his arm around me and pulled me close, planting a kiss on my hair.
“That’s my girl,” he said.
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