I started reading Happiness Falls by Angie Kim because I wanted a mystery. A father disappears, his family is trying to figure out what happened, and details keep changing meaning as the characters learn more.

It is a good mystery. But somewhere along the way, I became more interested in another question running underneath it:

How much do we assume about another person’s mind based on what they are able to show us?

The narrator, Mia, is highly verbal and analytical. She was hyperlexic as a child. Her family is multilingual, and language runs through the entire story. Her younger brother Eugene is autistic and nonspeaking.

As Mia learns more about communication and begins questioning what she has assumed about her brother’s understanding, the reader learns with her.

I found myself doing the same thing, except I kept looking up from the book and seeing my own family.

Three Kids, Three Completely Different Relationships With Language

I have three children who could hardly approach communication more differently.

My oldest, Rae, talked unbelievably early. She was using words by nine months, and by around a year old she could participate in basic back-and-forth communication. She was also hyperlexic.

Now she is a teenager with ADHD and autism, and language has never been something she rationed carefully. Rae thinks out loud. She processes out loud. She tells stories, interrupts herself with other stories and often keeps talking because, in her mind, she is still explaining.

Other people do not always hear it that way.

What she experiences as clarification can sound like arguing. What she sees as adding context can sound like refusing to let something go. I understand that because I was the same way as a kid. Sometimes you are not trying to challenge anyone. You are trying desperately to make sure they understand exactly what you mean.

With Rae, getting language out has never been the challenge. Sometimes the challenge is that having more words does not guarantee that other people will understand what you are trying to do with them.

Then there is Channing.

Channing has a strong vocabulary, much of it gathered from audiobooks and from listening to the rest of us talk. But he does not read reliably. Texting is difficult. He rarely speaks very much unless he chooses the topic, and perceived pressure can make his ability to communicate shrink dramatically.

During psychological testing, he wasn’t able to complete a traditional IQ test. His psychologist was still able to get far enough to feel confident that he did not have an intellectual disability.

That distinction matters because someone meeting Channing during the wrong five minutes could form an incredibly inaccurate impression of what is happening inside his head.

Ask him about something he wants to discuss, when he feels comfortable, and you can hear his vocabulary and knowledge. Put him under pressure and demand an explanation, and you may get almost nothing.

What he knows and what he can demonstrate on command are not always the same thing.

Then there is Royce.

Royce is two and speaks very little. Many of the words he does say are difficult to understand unless you know him well. That does not make him quiet. He is often one of the noisiest people in the house, chattering and vocalizing almost constantly.

Sometimes I am almost certain he thinks he has told me something perfectly clearly. When I don’t understand, he becomes deeply frustrated, and it makes me wonder how many words exist in his head that I simply cannot hear yet.

I already know he understands more spoken language than he can produce.

One of the places I see it most clearly is while he watches movies.

Royce loves Toy Story. He reacts to jokes at the right moments. He reenacts favorite scenes with his toys. His face changes with the emotional tone of the story, and when something is frightening or sad, he responds to it.

Recently, we watched a movie with a particularly sad scene. Royce came over with a miserable little face, climbed into my lap, grabbed my hands and pulled my arms around himself.

He wanted me to hold him while we felt sad for the characters together.

He never said that, but he communicated it perfectly.

That moment has stayed with me because it is so easy to privilege the kinds of communication we recognize immediately. Speech is obvious to us. Writing is obvious. A quick verbal answer is easy to interpret.

Royce did none of those things, and there was nothing unclear about what he was saying.

What If They’re Taking In More Than We Know?

One part of Happiness Falls discusses learning written language through television captions, and that stopped me.

Why weren’t we turning captions on for Royce?

Maybe he ignores them. Maybe nothing comes of it. Or maybe someday I discover he has been noticing written words long before I knew he could.

I was hyperlexic. Rae was hyperlexic. I know firsthand that some children can absorb enormous amounts of written language through exposure. I have no idea whether Royce will follow that path, but why should he have to prove that he can use an information source before I give him access to it?

How often do we wait for someone to demonstrate an ability before giving them the tools that might help reveal it?

Sometimes the Words Are There Until They Aren’t

My wife, Thy, has shown me another side of this.

She speaks English and also Lao and Thai to varying degrees. She can navigate multiple linguistic systems that I cannot.

I have a bachelor’s degree in communication. I work with words constantly and consider myself intelligent, but I speak English and know only a handful of scattered words from several other languages.

Languages are not one of my gifts. They are one of hers.

And yet there are moments when Thy cannot speak.

When a conversation is ordinary or emotionally neutral, she can talk, joke, answer questions and carry on a conversation. When a subject becomes deeply emotional, stressful or personally difficult, her access to speech can narrow quickly. Sometimes the words seem to disappear altogether.

She is not choosing silence. She is not refusing to communicate. In those moments, speech simply becomes much harder to access.

I have watched something similar happen with Channing. The more pressure he feels, the less communication may be available.

Fluent speech is one skill. It is not a complete measurement of intelligence.

Language Comes With Expectations, Too

Happiness Falls explores this from another direction through Mia and her twin brother.

Both are Korean American, but they are perceived differently because Mia looks Korean while her brother appears white. When their family lives in Korea, Mia’s imperfect Korean can be treated as a failure because people look at her and expect fluency. Her brother can know essentially the same amount and be praised for knowing any Korean at all.

Their abilities have not changed. The expectations surrounding them have.

That detail stuck with me because it shows how rarely we judge communication on communication alone. We bring assumptions with us about race, disability, intelligence, education, personality and what someone “should” be capable of. Then we interpret what they say, or fail to say, through those assumptions.

That is one of the things Angie Kim does so well in this book. These ideas are woven into the mystery rather than dropped into it as a lesson. Mia discovers them while trying to understand what happened to her father. She has to reconsider what she thought she knew about her brother, her family and sometimes herself.

The reader has to do the same.

Learning to Listen Differently

I have become the communication person in my family. Part of that is probably personality. Part of it is education. A lot of it is necessity.

I know when Channing is unlikely to answer an open-ended question and when giving him two choices may work better. I recognize Royce’s word approximations, gestures, expressions and reenacted scenes. I know when Thy needs more time or another way to get an idea across. I know that when Rae keeps explaining, she may be trying to make herself understood rather than trying to win an argument.

Sometimes I translate people to one another without translating a single language.

The older I get, the more I think good communication has less to do with being eloquent than I once believed. It can mean waiting longer. Asking differently. Offering choices. Paying attention to a gesture. Letting someone type instead of speak. Recognizing that more words do not always mean clearer communication, and fewer words do not necessarily mean less understanding.

I don’t know what Royce will eventually be able to tell me. I don’t know how many things he understands today that I will only discover later. There are things inside Channing’s mind that may never come out neatly on command. There are moments when Thy knows exactly what she wants to communicate but cannot get the words out. Rae can have the opposite problem and pour out so many words that people miss what she is actually trying to say.

They are all communicating.

Maybe instead of asking, “Why can’t this person communicate the way I expect?” we should ask:

“How is this person already communicating, and what am I missing?”