On not speaking Sundanese/Japanese....

I have finally met Hadassah Emmerich. She spent a couple of days in Amsterdam (she lives in Berlin) with her friend Jeroen and we toured the Open Source route. It was great talking to her.

Hadassah has a Dutch mother and 'Indische' father. In the Netherlands, we speak of 'Indisch' when we refer to people who come from Indonesia at a time when it was still a Dutch colony. It is always such a treat to talk to people from a bi-cultural background. One of the things we talked about was language: how strange it is to have the appearance of someone who speaks Sundanese (in Hadassah's case) or Japanese (in my case) but doesn't. And on how the sound of that language is so familiar, because you have heard to so often during your childhood, that it feels like you can understand, but you don't.

It always reminds me of that great book by Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West.