A piki piki (motorbike) driver asked me recently where I was going. I gave him the road name and the gate color, in Swahili, and he went quiet for a second in the involuntary way that happens when something doesn’t land where it was supposed to. Then came the questions: Where did I learn? How long had I been here? Where was I from? The conversation kept going, louder over the wind, all the way to my home, because once the surprise passed, he had a lot of questions.

I have been in Kenya since 2010. I came on a Fulbright intending to stay one year and never really left. I am ethnically Japanese, Chinese, Lithuanian, and Welsh, born in Honolulu, with a mother born and raised in Tokyo and a father born and raised in Chicago, a jazz pianist whose family came from Lithuania and Wales. In Kenya I present as something that does not fit the existing categories cleanly, and that ambiguity has been useful. For sixteen years, the way people read me, and the confusion or surprise or curiosity that reading produces, has tracked something real about where this society is and where it is going. My face has functioned as an instrument.

When I first arrived, outside Nairobi especially, the word was always mzungu. Foreigner. White person, roughly, though it stretched to cover anyone conspicuously from outside. I did not take it personally. It was descriptive, and not entirely wrong. Over the years mchina started appearing alongside it and then gradually replacing it. Mchina: Chinese person. Still a category error, but a different one. Kenya’s relationship with China had deepened in visible ways, and Kenyan society was learning to look more carefully at who was actually here. Now, in Nairobi, neither word gets called out the way it once did. The city has grown accustomed to an Asian presence with real internal diversity, and the food scene is the clearest evidence: Vietnamese restaurants that did not exist a decade ago, Thai food that is not fusion-approximation, a Japanese izakaya I was excited to find when it first opened. (Still waiting for Burmese food though!) Most people still default to Chinese as a catch-all, but there is a growing awareness that the category is not a synonym for East Asian in general, and the diversity on the menus reflects the diversity that is actually present. The reading has become more granular.

What is changing more slowly are expectations around foreigners speaking Swahili.

The piki piki driver is not an outlier. Government officials, taxi drivers, hotel staff: the surprise maps across those contexts with a consistency that is worth noting on its own. But I need to be clear that this is not only something I encounter from people who are working in transportation or lower on the economic scale. I regularly face it with middle- to upper-class Kenyans, the friend of a friend meeting me at a dinner party for the first time, people who by the logic of their own professional and social worlds should be the least surprised of anyone. The shock is evenly distributed in a way that tells me it is structural, not situational.

I try to hold this honestly rather than feel proud of myself for having learned the language. The surprise is data, and data is not a compliment.

Because if a Kenyan walked into a government office in New York or San Francisco and spoke fluent English, nobody would pause or light up. The expectation would simply be that you speak English. You are here. Why would you not try? France makes this demand of visitors. Spain makes it too. The expectation that people arriving in a country make some effort to communicate in its language is not an unusual cultural value. It is standard practice in most of the world, except in countries where certain kinds of visitors have historically been permitted to arrive and be served without that expectation ever being applied to them.

Kenyan philosopher and author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has written extensively about what it costs African writers to work in the colonizer’s language. I keep thinking about the inverse: what it reveals when people who visit East Africa, live here, build businesses here, don’t feel pressure to speak back in the local lingua franca. Swahili is not a tribal language requiring any particular lineage to claim. It is widely taught, spoken by tens of millions of people, and learnable at a functional level within a year of consistent effort. The fact that white-presenting people in Kenya in 2026 are still read as exceptional for speaking it is not a measure of those individuals. It is a measure of how low the expectation has been set, and how long it has been allowed to stay there. Honestly, I’m surprised (and disappointed) that people still get surprised.

When that piki piki driver lights up and spends the rest of the ride asking me questions, I read it as insight into societal expectations of foreigners. Kenya is more cosmopolitan now than it was in 2010. But why isn’t everyone expected to have basic working knowledge of the local language and customs?

I want to live in the Kenya of 2036 where a piki piki driver does not do a double take when I tell him where I am going in Swahili. Where the first assumption is that of course a foreigner tried to learn the local language, not “how on earth did you manage it”. That is not a high bar. It just requires that the people arriving on East African land decide that they will try.