Two Languages, One Person
Language is something most people take for granted. If you grew up speaking one, you probably never had to think about it. But for people who grew up between two languages, it is never so simple. It is not just about words. It is where you belong, who you are, and how you carry that with you when you move from one world to another. UC Berkeley student Helena Li captures this in her award-winning essay, “A World Without Borders.” Li grew up in Guangzhou, China, and moved to the United States as a kid. Her essay follows her experience of arriving in a country where she did not speak the language, slowly learning English while quietly losing ground in Cantonese, and eventually figuring out what it means to hold both languages without losing herself. I chose to write about her essay because her experience connected with mine in ways I did not expect. I grew up in Nicaragua, moved to Honduras, and eventually came to Oakland, California, in the United States. Like Li, I have lived between two languages and two worlds for most of my life. By analyzing how Li uses specific scenes to show the emotional impact of language, I can better understand how language has shaped my own identity, belonging, and sense of self.
One of the most important choices Li makes in her essay is how she frames her arrival. When she first lands in San Francisco, she is surrounded by an entirely new city, new streets, new faces, new sounds and the one thing that hits her hardest is the English. She does not ease into describing it. She writes: “It was loud and pervasive, close to my ear but indistinguishable. It saturated this new world. And it scared me.” That moment lands differently than most arrival stories. The words “loud,” “pervasive,” and “saturated” build on each other; they describe something that is everywhere, inescapable, pressing in from all sides. And then the sentence ends with the simplest possible statement: it scared her. That contrast between the overwhelm of those first three words and the plainness of that last one is what makes the line so powerful. Most stories about immigrating to a new country lead with hope or opportunity. Li does the opposite. By opening with fear, she changes the entire vibe of her essay. The reader is not watching someone arrive at a destination. The reader is watching someone try to survive a place that has not yet made room for them. That honesty is what makes her essay feel real rather than inspirational, and it is the quality that drew me to it in the first place.
The scene that stays with me most is when Li illustrates loneliness without ever naming it. Describing her first recesses at school, she writes: “those recesses spent walking alone around the playground, green water bottle swinging by my side, asserting with every intentional forward-and-back movement of my arms that I was having just as much fun as those girls on the monkey bars.” She never says she is lonely. She never says she is sad, left out, or struggling. She shows you the arms moving forward and back, on purpose, so that no one can tell. That is the psychological weight of this choice as a writer: body language tells more than direct emotion ever could, because it shows you the interior experience from the outside. You see the performance before you understand what it is covering. The word “assert” is the key: she is not just walking, she is making an argument with her body, insisting to anyone watching that she is fine. That gap between what the body is doing and what the person is actually feeling is where loneliness lives. And because Li never names it, the reader has to feel it themselves. That is what makes it stay with you.
Reading Li’s experience made me think about the moment when language began to shape my own life. I had been learning English since I was eight years old, but in Nicaragua, I had almost no real way to practice it. Honduras changed that. I was in a new country with different slang, a faster rhythm to the Spanish around me, and more English filtering in through school and media. I had to pay attention in a way I never had before to the way people shortened words, to the phrases that only made sense in that specific place, to the unspoken rules of how conversation moved. Li describes that same kind of total immersion when she writes: “I joined ESL courses, listened to anything being said around me, asked questions, but most importantly, I read, read, read.” The repetition in “read, read, read” serves an important purpose. It is not describing a slow, steady process. It is describing saturation—the kind of learning that happens when you throw yourself into a language until it starts to feel like yours. I recognized that feeling in Honduras. I listened to the slang around me the way you listen to music in a language you do not speak yet, catching rhythm before meaning. That is when I understood that language is not just vocabulary. It is the specific codes of a place, and learning it means learning which version, and for what context.
By the time I arrived in Oakland, I had built something real in English, but I still could not call myself fluent in the way the people around me were fluent. Li writes, “I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I crossed the finish line between ‘still learning’ and ‘fluent.’” That line resonated with me more than almost anything else in her essay, because I do not have that moment either. What I have instead is a series of smaller ones. The first time I helped a classmate with their assignment at Oakland International High School and realized I had not translated anything in my head. The first time I spoke up in class, the words came out the way I meant them. The first time someone laughed at something I said and I understood exactly why. Oakland International was full of voices from all over the world, and every accent carried a different rhythm. Hearing so many different ways of speaking made me less afraid of my own. I realized that there is no single correct version of English, and that I had already learned to move between versions without noticing. Oakland was not where I started learning English. It was where I stopped apologizing for the way I spoke.
There is a moment in Li’s essay that I keep returning to. She is at the dinner table, reaching for a Cantonese word, and the English word “chair” comes out instead. She does not notice until after it happens. That small slip opens into something much larger when she reflects: “My brain had found English more accessible than Cantonese, and that set off a new panic for me. Was I losing my mother tongue?” The panic in that question is not really about a word. It is about the fear that the language you were built in is being quietly replaced by another one, and that you might not catch it happening until it is already done. I have felt that same disorientation. There are moments now, especially in college, when I reach for a Spanish word while talking to my mom and the English one surfaces first. It is not just a language slip. It is a reminder that the version of me who grew up speaking only Spanish in Nicaragua is not the same person navigating English at Berkeley. But what Li helped me see is that distance is also evidence of everything you have survived and built.
Still, there are moments when I feel the gap between the two versions of myself. A Spanish word slips away for a second, or an English phrase feels too formal coming out of my mouth. But I am learning to see that gap differently, the way Li eventually does. She writes: “I can be both Chinese and American. That isn’t dependent on what passport I have, or what my legal status is.” That sentence does something important: it separates identity from documentation. It says that who you are is not determined by the country that issued your papers or the language you are most fluent in on any given day. For me, the parallel is knowing that being Nicaraguan is not something I lose when I speak English confidently, and that speaking English well does not make me less Central American. Holding two languages means holding two histories, two ways of thinking, and two ways of belonging to the world. It is not always easy. But Li’s essay gave me a way to name what I had been feeling without knowing how to say it: that I was not losing myself in the process of becoming someone new. I was just becoming larger.
Li ends her essay saying that language is the foundation of daily life and the backbone of culture, and that she intends never to forget Cantonese. I feel the same way about Spanish. It is the first version of me, the one that shaped my childhood, my sense of home, and my earliest understanding of who I was. English is not a replacement. It is another room in the same house. My mom told me once that English would open doors for me in college, in new opportunities, in a future I could not have imagined when I was a kid in Nicaragua. She was right. But what she could not have known then is that Spanish would keep those doors from closing behind me.
Work Cited
Li, Helina. “A World Without Borders.” Course packet, R1A: Resilience, UC Berkeley, Spring 2026.
Photo copyright 2026 by Mark North
@marknorth.creative