“The Czech Republic does not exist,” blatantly stated my first-grade classmate. “What do you do there, just check boxes?” Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I felt a sense of embarrassment associated with my ethnicity that I had not yet encountered before. Sharing my annual summer plan of visiting my family in the Czech Republic to my seven-year-old peers ended up sparking an identity crisis that would last nearly a decade. I had never been ashamed of my ethnic and cultural background before, but suddenly everything shifted: I had realized how different I was from my peers.
Both of my parents were born in communist Czechoslovakia, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. When she was nine, my mom fled the country with her mother to join my grandfather in America. He had left years prior, when my mom was born, to escape political turmoil. Later, after the regime fell, my father joined my mother in the United States after they got married (they had met during a summer she was visiting). I grew up with stories of my parent’s relatives being thrown in prison for expressing anti-communist ideas, and seeing the lasting impact my family’s history left on them. As a young child I admired their bravery and strength, and was always eager to share their stories with my classmates. However, as I got a little older, namely around first grade, my unique heritage became something that made me weird instead of cool. Before this, my classmates found my bilingualism impressive (we spoke Czech at home) and envied my summers spent in the Czech Republic (my parents kept a house there). This sudden shift led me to attempt to erase that part of myself in pursuit of being able to fit in and be liked.
Before starting at Lowell, I attended a small private school. Most students were of Asian or Irish origin, so my Slavic background made me stand out in a school where it was essential to blend in to avoid getting teased. I was constantly getting picked on for the ethnic food I brought, characters I liked, and how I would accidentally say something in Czech instead of English. Not having a friend who was also Czech made this even more difficult. Unlike other first generation children in San Francisco, I had no sense of community: I didn’t know any other Czech people in the city outside of my parents, grandparents and brother. I felt isolated, and since I had no one to lean on, my relationship to my ethnicity and culture became a struggle I faced alone.
My first language is Czech; I didn’t learn English until I started preschool. I was almost oblivious to American pop culture and was often unfamiliar with the shows and movies my classmates and friends often referenced. While my parents incorporated American media into our household, I felt frustrated that none of my friends could understand the cartoons and characters I loved and watched every day. I felt alienated from my peers, so I turned to the most logical solution at the time: become as Americanized as possible in the hopes of fitting in. I believed that if I consumed American media instead of engaging with my Czech roots, I could finally blend in.
This was an era of my life populated by my own cultural cleansing, and repression of my ethnicity. I never brought up being Czech in fear of being pretentious, and swore myself to never mention any Czech shows or characters because I felt my peers would never understand anyway. Even worse, in my eyes, they already saw me as “weird.” I refused to bring cultural dishes to school, ever since I got told that my Guláš (Czech beef stew) smelled bad by a classmate during lunch. If I ever slipped up and accidentally said something in Czech instead of English, I felt ashamed; I didn’t even want to be bilingual. This sense of shame lasted from first grade until the beginning of high school. Even at my peak of Americanized identity — basically being as little Czech as possible — I was not content. I felt plastic, like I was purposefully hiding something, yet at the same time ashamed of hiding it.
While I was shifting away from my culture, my older brother was moving in the opposite direction. He had changed the default language on his computer from English to Czech, in an attempt to get more familiar with reading the language. He started borrowing Czech books from my dad, falling in love with old Czech rock, and sharing Czech memes with his American friends. Peering into his fluorescent laptop screen, I felt embarrassment flood me, as I could not read a single word in Czech. In the attempt to be liked by people I myself didn’t even like or want to embody, I had completely lost myself and my Czech-American identity, which had once made up the core of who I was as a person. The realization of that moment was so potent, it altered my mindset forever.
The summer before my sophomore year, I spent my annual two and a half months in the Czech Republic with my family. My earlier realization had sparked a fire within me to reconnect with my ethnicity and culture like never before, and being in the best place to express it only let that desire burn brighter. I did everything I could to learn to read Czech, from reading 50 pages of a book a day to listening to Czech music and watching Czech movies. I found myself feeling at peace in the place I had blamed for my misery. While it was not an easy thing to accept, I realized that the only way to face my deeply rooted insecurity regarding my ethnicity was to reconnect with it, face it, and accept it instead of being averse to it.
Although my connection to America and the English language is stronger than my one to the Czech Republic and its language, I am proud of how far I have come, not only in literacy, but in the strong sense of love and appreciation I have for my ethnicity and culture. While I don’t think that I will ever feel as though I completely belong in America, or the Czech Republic, I find myself comfortable in my Czech-American Identity. I no longer believe that my ethnicity is something that makes me weird. Actually, it allows me to empathize with others who share similar experiences. Not only do I accept my Czech-American identity, I pride myself on it. It is something that I no longer wish to hide. Instead, I showcase it and display it for everyone to see. So to my first grade classmate: the Czech Republic does, in fact, exist, and every day I wake up proud of my connection to it.
