The woman who works at my neighborhood market speaks many languages. She speaks to me in English and always asks me where "my honey" is or how my project at work is going. She speaks to other customers in Spanish, Arabic, Khmer. I once asked her how many languages she spoke and she just laughed; she said she talks to everyone who comes into her store in their own language. And I thought: How lucky, and what a nice thing for her to say.

Some nights ago while I was waiting in line she started talking about how she left her native Cambodia at eight. Both of her parents were already gone; when she was six she didn't understand her mother had died and she lay down on top of her still body, touching her face.

After leaving Cambodia, she lived in Thailand for a year, then came to the United States. Her brother-in-law was a soldier in the US Army and the government paid for everything -- their trip, their rent. Now she lives here and sends her children to the local public schools and sells me fresh fruit and vegetables and milk and yogurt and bread and almost everything else I eat each week.

She started telling me this because she is planning a trip back to Cambodia. After so many years of being away she will finally recognize her mother's death. She told me all of that while putting my dinner and my breakfast and my lunch in paper bags inside plastic bags and swiping my credit card and handing me the receipt to sign and then taking the receipt back and pulling the yellow copy from the white copy.

The man online behind me had been to Cambodia before too, he said, long ago, in '68, near the border with Vietnam. He wanted to talk about his experience but I don't think she did because she hardly responded to him, and when I looked up at her she slapped me lightly on the side of the head: "Do you want to make me cry?" she said, although I hadn't said anything, only looked, only caught her eye. "No," I said, "no," and I looked down and I took my food and I left.

And I thought: Speaking just one language, just one's own language, is a luxury in the way that safety and peace are luxuries, and speaking many is not just the province of professors and travelers but also of those who must leave places in the middle of the night or without a say in when or without those whom they love, even when they are still very young.