xanghe?

You know that face that someone gives you when you've just said something that makes no sense at all, or if you just spoke too fast while they were day dreaming and then they finally come to? Or the best is when you are eating out with someone and they find a hair in their dish - you know that face? Yeah, well that's the face most people give me when I give them my blog address. I'm assuming it's because xanghe is not a word you encounter everyday (get this, as I typed it just now, my auto spell check underlined it in red, as if it's not a word or something.) The only other time I've seen this word is in phou xanghe, a tiny conservation forest of cypress trees in southern Laos. So what is this word, and why do I insist on using it as my online alias despite "the face?" Well, I'll tell you... it all started when I was trying to learn Vietnamese... (flashback sound effect...)

It must have been my first summer in California, and I must have been driving by this time instead of biking. I was at a friend's house practicing Vietnamese before our appointment. I believe it was Cindy and Vân we were talking to. Cindy asked me several questions - all of which I answered in glorious infant Vietnamese, I'm sure - about how my day was going. Then she got to the kicker: "Em đến đây bằng gì?" It's a simple question, really, something like "How did you get here?" I had been on bike before that so my initial reaction was to blurt out: "Em đi bằng xe đạp!" and feel proud of myself, even though my answering verb was off. I caught myself just in time to construct a variation of the same sentence ("Em đi bằng xe hơi.") , but also just in time to throw my tongue for a spin so that the words that came out were definitely not Vietnamese (apparently they were Laotian). "Em đi xăng he." Usually, I'll transpose the first letters of two words and realize the slip almost as the words cross my lips, so I correct it naturally as if I meant to do it. This time it was like I got hit by a train mid-sentence and all the first letters of the last words bumped up to the middle words and the very last word got swept away with the caboose. There was a silence, during which I picked up my tongue from off the floor, then a burst of giggles (Cindy and Vân were master gigglers), followed by an immediate christening: "Xanghe."

Any practical usage of the name died off pretty quickly (probably because of the face others made when we said it), except when Cindy wanted to tease me. But it stuck in my head as a reminder of how slippery language is, that there are unique letters and sounds and tones laws and rules and conventions for each language, but when it all boils down it's just a way to communicate. I've used the name as a title for my blog because even when I don't write about language, I still think about it. When I don't know what to think or feel, I just talk. And what language do I speak? Whatever comes out. That's what xanghe means to me now: it's just talkin' my thoughts out.