People rarely travel on foot in the sprawling suburbs of Ottawa, unless they’re newly arrived immigrants, who don’t own a car.

It takes a lot to put the people of Ottawa into a bad mood. They shovel driveways in temperatures well below freezing, and they don’t mind. If an ice storm tears down the power lines, they cheerily start up their emergency generators and go right back to doing whatever had occupied them before. After enduring a long, dreary winter in the nondescript Canadian capital, when most of the snow has melted, locals rejoice, don shorts over goose-pimpled, raw-pink flesh and celebrate the advent of spring. If the temperature happens to dip into the low 30s a few more times, no one complains.

Because in Ottawa people are nice. That was one of the first things I noticed upon my arrival 15 years ago with my family from Czechoslovakia.

The second thing I noticed was that Ottawa didn’t have any skyscrapers. The huddle of 10-story governmental buildings and the empty, immaculately clean streets that made up Ottawa’s downtown proved sorely disappointing for someone expecting the bustle of a New York or Chicago. I was hungry for all the American clichés: soft drinks, wide, busy streets, oversized cars and greasy hamburgers. What I got was a watered down Canadian broth.

On the other hand, the people were so nice and cheerful, I wondered if they were trying to compensate for the blandness of their hometown. Unlike Czech parents, Canadians don’t spank their kids when they throw tantrums in the middle of the street. And shopkeepers don’t scowl the way cashiers in Prague’s supermarkets usually do. Instead, they bare their shiny white teeth, give each customer a highly personalized smile and say something kind like “have a good one” or “please come again.” Of course, having virtually no knowledge of English, I didn’t understand any of these courteous phrases or anything else that was being said around me, for that matter. Words melted into one another, and sentences sounded like mystical incantations, sing-songy and drawn out, unlike the harsher tones of my native language.

At nine, I hardly shared my mother’s thrill about leaving the then-still-communist Czechoslovakia for a democratic country. Where she saw clean sidewalks, well-stocked shops and tidy rows of cute, identical suburban houses, I saw only disappointment.    

I initially consoled myself with the belief that this was all just temporary. We had come for a two-month visit to see my father, who had spent the past year working as a visiting professor at the local psychiatric hospital.

A week later my mother asked me what I would think if we were to stay in Ottawa forever. I said I wouldn’t like it.

The parliament building, which houses Canada’s federal government, is the city’s main tourist attraction. It was one of the first places we visited in Ottawa.

Fake vacation

At first, I found our vacation only mildly depressing. It had stopped raining, and the weather became warmer, but the trees that lined the city’s tidy boulevards remained bare.

Eventually, we moved into a newly-built apartment in one of the city’s suburbs. The beige wall-to-wall carpet smelled antiseptic like my grandfather’s Russian car. The walls were bare and blinding white. My fears were momentarily lulled by the newness of it all but I began to panic when I realized that it was official: we were staying. Temporary had become forever.

Only several years later did I learn that the vacation had been just a pretext for gaining permission to leave Czechoslovakia. Our home country was still in the throes of the communist regime — this was 1989, six months before the Velvet Revolution — and emigration was illegal.

Casually, as though they were telling me that I could no longer spread butter on my toast, my parents informed me that we might not see our friends and relatives for a very long time. No one knew when — if ever –— we’d be allowed to return to Prague.

In any case, I had more pressing matters to worry about: English, above all else. The closer it came to the beginning of the school year, the shorter my nails got. I tried to approach the situation rationally. I knew for a fact that I would never learn to speak the language, so I tried my best to mentally prepare myself for a life spent in mute isolation, surrounded by well-meaning, forever-smiling Canadians.

Nice girls don’t punch

Why did those Canadians have to smile so much, anyway? At school kids smiled at teachers, and teachers smiled at kids. They all smiled at me. I answered by giving them a by-now-well-practiced look meant to convey confusion or at least to spare me the effort of trying to piece together a semi-coherent response.

Some cultural differences proved harder to comprehend than others. Take the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, for instance. It took me months just to wrap my mind around the concept of eating spongy white bread smeared with a mixture of salty brown goo and sweet pink jelly. Or cereal. What was the trick to eating it quickly enough so that the flakes wouldn’t become soggy? All the food tasted quite strange, in fact. And for a while, my normally ravenous appetite left me altogether.

At school, being something of a curiosity, I got plenty of attention from my classmates, so my visions of isolation didn’t materialize. But the attention I received as a foreigner didn’t keep me from feeling isolated, as when my teacher assigned me a reader one grade level below. The cover of the ugly green book depicted clowns tossing around inflated balloons. Compared to the other kids’ readers, it looked impossibly childish, and, limited English proficiency notwithstanding, I was disgusted.

But it didn’t matter because most of my English lessons took place outside the classroom anyway.

I learned the language by appropriating new phrases, just mimicking the sound of other people’s speech without distinguishing between the different words. I roughly knew what each new phrase meant, such as one of the first sentences I learned: “Have a nice weekend.”

But it took me a while to adapt to the culture of niceness. During school yard games, for instance, when I kicked a boy in the shin after he destroyed a sandcastle that I had built with the other kids, a few of the girls took me aside and explained that this was bad. It wasn’t nice to kick boys in their shins. Not having the linguistic skills to argue, I just nodded dumbly.

Mute agreement soon became the way I dealt with most situations. During school lunch break, when no one wanted to be left turning the end of the skipping rope, I would do it, mostly because I couldn’t argue my way out, but also because it was the nice thing to do.

Being nice was becoming addictive. It meant you didn’t have to explain anything, people approved of you, and they generally left you alone.

Eventually, the language situation improved, and the culture gap shrank. By the end of the year, my family and I were beginning to feel settled, and I was promoted from the green clown reader to a far more sophisticated looking one with a black and white cover. Yet even though I no longer relied on niceness as a protection mechanism, somehow, it stuck.

I learned to add the tag “How are you?” after every greeting. And when boys destroyed our sandcastles, I didn’t punch anyone. Instead, I ran away screaming with all the other girls.

In short, I had become nice.

Ottawa’s ByWard Market is by far the most colorful part of the city.

You can take the girl out of Canada …

It would be four years before we returned to Prague for a visit. Friends and relatives had been sending us excited letters about the first free elections, about shopping at Tesco and not having to wait in line for shopping carts, about buying oranges and bananas every day of the week. We saw photographs and postcards of Prague — the same cobble-stoned streets lined with crumbling historical buildings, but now those buildings were covered with colorful ads for cereal and hamburgers and dishwashing detergent. It looked cheerful, I thought — even reminiscent of North America. But it didn’t look like home.

We went to Prague in early June when everything looked fresh and new. The grass in parks, the billboards lining the streets, the shelves in supermarkets — they all formed a colorful, albeit confusing, collage. But after a four-year absence, I couldn’t find my way around the city. Even more confusingly, although I spoke Czech fluently, I was finding it difficult to communicate with Czechs. When, for instance, after paying, I would tell shopkeepers to have a nice day, they regarded me with uncomprehending suspicion. I was distraught by this at first and began to feel that maybe, just maybe, I had become too nice for my own good.

I spent the two-month visit counting the days until my return to Ottawa. But then, back in Ottawa, oddly enough, I found myself nostalgic for the rude shopkeepers and the harsh, careless drawl of the Prague accent.
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Over the next few years, I traveled back and forth — physically and mentally — between the two cities. In Ottawa, I sometimes felt like a Czech tourist, considering the friendly manner of the locals to be annoying and insincere. In Prague, meanwhile, I was pegged as the perpetually-smiling Canadian.

There is a Czech saying: however many languages you speak, that’s how many times you are a person. Sometimes I wonder if, instead of being about Czech appreciation of multilingualism, the saying is actually a warning about fragmentation. Since I left Ottawa, at age 19, I haven’t been back since. It takes a long time to recover from niceness.  Sometimes, I still have a relapse.

In The Fray Contributor