This Tuesday, the girls in my fellowship started reading More Than Serving Tea together. Over our coffee table stacked high with fresh cherries, Chinese haw rolls, kettle-cooked potato chips, and Korean Choco Heim, we exchanged stories of growing up as Asian-American women of faith. We talked about expectations, gender roles, stereotypes, cultural norms, mainstream media representation — eventually, we arrived at the phrase “Asian-American” itself. One friend expressed how ill-fitting this word was, how, since she spent part of her childhood in Asia and part in America, she didn’t ever feel Asian enough or American enough but, depending on the situation, felt extremely one or the other. The feeling is seemingly inexplicable, and I could see the frustration on my friends’ faces at this fact. Years ago, though, I had found a phrase used by one of my favorite poets that encompassed this exact experience. 

Third culture kid: a person raised in a culture other than their parents’ or the culture of the country named on their passport.

Through the quintessential young-adult undertaking of self-discovery, I have learned that I process my thoughts and experiences best by talking to others. The other person doesn’t even have to be listening, I just apparently need another human being in the room to think properly and an inanimate object is an insufficient proxy. A crucial part of this processing strategy is the basic ability to find the exact words to articulate what I’m feeling; oftentimes when I speak, I take seemingly random pauses as I search and search for the right word. 

As I explained the phrase “third culture” to my friend, her body lifted as she had found language to identify her experiences. Language is exceptionally powerful: not only does it merely shape how we think, identify, and experience the world, it is how we think, how we identify, and how we experience the world. In the absence of language to accurately describe them, ideas and feelings are stuck in a limbo between existence and non-existence. Like with my friend, sometimes being able to attach language to an inexplicable feeling is necessary to find comfort and structure in an identity. For me, finding the right words to describe an idea is exactly the same as formulating the idea in the first place. Without the words, my thoughts are amorphous.

So what happens when we don’t have the right language?

We read books, we read poetry. We pore over anthologies compiled by others before us, we import libraries of language into our consciousnesses. In fifth grade, I averaged about a book every day. I kept a notebook of words I came across, words that I thought expressed something no other word did, something slightly unique compared to everything else. I wanted to keep these words because I thought I might need them one day.

Sometimes, we borrow from other languages. Growing up in a household that spoke three languages, there are some concepts that only exist to me in Cantonese or Mandarin. To understand a language is to understand the culture it comes from: this week at SEED lunch, Chisomo asked about the existence of tribal languages in America. In Malawi, each tribe has a different language. Everyone speaks Chichewa, though, and it shares enough with ‎Swahili that Esther and Novath can understand some of the inside jokes. The closest thing we have to tribal languages in American English is regional dialects. We spent a good portion of lunch exchanging phrases from across America. The slang of a people is extremely telling — information about what they care about, what they do, and how they interact with each other can be gleaned through the language they create.

When we don’t have the right language when coding, though, we turn to Google — or, at least, I turn to Google. This Wednesday, Ring the Decibels started integrating our two codes (LED strip controller and data smoothing) together. We were having issues with the timing loops: the device needs to poll data continuously and store and calculate averages after specific intervals, all while updating an LED strip and using another loop to blink the LEDs. I couldn’t get the processes to run simultaneously without impeding on the operation of the other. 

Google wasn’t helping. I read as much documentation as I could find about the millis() command, I kept searching through the FastLED library for answers, kept googling to find any previous project like ours. Eventually, I reached a point in my Google searches where I literally did not know what else to search; I didn’t have any other way to explain my problem.

I stared at the code for hours, taunting it with my frustration to reveal some secret, some command I overlooked. I kept rearranging the loops as if I was rearranging phrases in a sentence, hoping that the grammar might finally check out. By sunset, I gave up for the day. I drove to Kung Fu Tea to drown my frustrations in boba tea, went home, ate ramen, and went to sleep.

Thursday morning, I looked over the code again, moved some lines around, and it worked. Joy, glee, elation, jubilation, ecstasy — none of these words encompass the feeling of relief that came over me as I reveled in the fact that our project actually functioned. Know any more precise words that I could add to my list?