Everything You Stop Noticing

At some point—you can never pin down exactly when—the place you grew up in stops being visible. The street you’ve walked a thousand times stops having a texture. The food you ate as a child becomes unremarkable. You start looking elsewhere for the interesting things, convinced that interesting things require distance to exist. German music is boring, American hip-hop is alive. German bread is just bread, Japanese food has ceremony. It takes a certain kind of outsider to hand you back your own city.

Dinky Duong was born in Vietnam and came to Germany to study. She made a video about why Germans should feel lucky, and it’s not what you’d expect—not a glossy expat travelogue, not the usual Berlin-is-so-cool takes. She talks about traffic that moves in an orderly way, about the kind of everyday cosmetics available in any drugstore, about trees in public spaces that nobody seems to think twice about. Small inventory items from a country she arrived in with fresh eyes, catalogued with the care of someone who knows what their absence feels like.

There’s a specific genre of ingratitude that Germans have perfected—a talent for locating the grey lining in every silver cloud, delivered with the dry confidence of people who’ve been comfortable long enough to find the thing to complain about. I know this mode well. It’s a form of intimacy with a place, not a rejection of it. But watching someone count the trees you stopped seeing is something else. It doesn’t teach you a lesson—that would be unbearable—it just briefly returns you to a perception you’ve long since closed off. The city you live in was once strange and specific and full of detail. For Dinky, it still is.

She’s right, of course. That’s what makes it land.