Most travelers eventually realize that they are the foreigners, and for me language was an early clue. From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, I spent eleven years teaching in Singapore and Hong Kong, where—despite the broad reach of American popular culture—some form of British English ruled. In Singapore, it is true, many people spoke “Singlish,” full of local words and expressions such as kopi tiam (coffee shop), kampong (village), “can or not” (yes or no), lah (untranslatable word of emphasis) or kiasu (the fear of missing out). But terms like these were rarely the source of my language problems.