> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.czechish.cz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Let's lose the labels: It's time to get Czechish - URL: https://www.czechish.cz/lets-lose-the-labels-its-time-to-get-czechish/ - Published: 2026-11-14T17:50:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-14T18:48:42.000Z - Description: After two months of reporting and conversations across Czechia, I discovered that the labels we use for people who call this country home are only part of a much bigger problem. Here's why I'm launching Czechish. - Author: Elizabeth Zahradnicek Haas - Tags: Opinions, #Wave 1 – Design Everything my kids know about American culture, they learned from television. Sitcoms, to be precise. Modern Family, The Middle, and Young Sheldon have done most of the heavy lifting. But curiously, the shows that have proven themselves to be more than just pop-culture primers are the ones about identity: Black-ish, Mixed-ish and, lately, Fresh Off the Boat. The humor, the family dynamics, and the awkward negotiations between different cultural expectations also strike a chord in our Czech-American household. I've had plenty of experience with that last part myself. Recently, a researcher interviewed me about what it's like to live in the Czech Republic and speak the language with less-than-stellar proficiency. What I expected to be a fairly straightforward conversation turned into a long, cathartic look back at the twenty years I've spent here. And it made me realize something. In America, I was never forced to confront my Americanness every day, or apologize for it, even jokingly, the way I sometimes do in Czechia. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/87/f2/87f245f6-8af6-48c6-923d-c9d54587f7c7/content/images/2026/11/516603642_10161262115187181_7717712915420437620_n.jpg) Fourth of July, Lawton, MI, 2009. Yet I've never felt less American in my life. I've spent most of my adult life here. It's where I've built my career, married, raised my children, and made a home. I've been reporting on Czechia since the early aughts, and I have a deep affection for its culture and humor. The person I am today has been shaped as much by this country, for better or worse, as by the one I was born in. I'm no longer entirely American. But I'm not quite Czech, either. And increasingly, I'm not sure what to call myself. Which, as it turns out, is one of the reasons I started Czechish. One of the researcher's questions was how I feel when I have to speak Czech. The answer was complicated. If I manage to mail a letter, order a meal, or sign for a package without getting hopelessly tangled in the language, all my sensors start blinking. Not because I've conquered Czech grammar, but because, for a moment, I belong. I'm one of them. There are plenty of moments when I'm not. The frustration, and sometimes devastation, of being unable to communicate better isn't necessarily about my failure to master the genitive plural. It's about feeling sidelined at my children's school, helpless at the doctor's office, or tongue-tied in conversations about the country's future. The feeling that language is the golden ticket to becoming Czech. I've met plenty of people whose lives, like mine, don't fit neatly into the categories available to describe them. We didn't all arrive on corporate transfers, enroll our children in international schools, and leave after two years. Many of us came for entirely different reasons, put down roots and stayed. We have Czech partners, Czech children, Czech friends, and Czech mortgages. Some of us have Czech passports. Others have lived here for decades without one. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/87/f2/87f245f6-8af6-48c6-923d-c9d54587f7c7/content/images/2026/11/555727289_10161598342017181_886670358277457904_n.jpg) Wedding day in Prague, August, 2012. Yet we're still called expats, foreigners, or immigrants, depending on who's doing the talking. Those labels tell you something about our legal status, perhaps, but very little about our lives. And sometimes, because we don't fit the categories, we're barely part of the conversation at all. After twenty years of living and reporting from Czechia, I realized I still had an awful lot of questions about how this country works, who gets heard, and where people like me fit into it. So I decided to start a grassroots independent journalism project (aka found myself unemployed) and devote some time to asking these questions publicly. I spent the better part of autumn making calls, sending emails, interviewing people, and going on coffee dates and meet-ups all over Prague. I discovered organizations I never knew existed, stumbled across stories right under my nose and met people with questions that weren't being asked, problems that deserved more scrutiny, and experiences that didn't fit the usual narratives. ### Czechia's naming problem up close One of my first stops was a meeting organized by the MigAct initiative, where international residents had been invited to help workshop the city's new integration strategy. Several participants, the kind of people usually called expats (mostly white, all from the EU, US or UK), described struggling to find doctors or get schools to address problems. Yet they felt guilty using subsidized legal or translation services they assumed were meant for people from other, usually non-white, countries. Even among people living with the same frustrations, the labels had created a hierarchy of who deserved help. Czech bureaucracy is very good at sorting people by citizenship and residence status. It's less good at recognizing what they actually need. Education nonprofit META told me Czech schools still classify children by citizenship and length of residence rather than the support they actually need. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/87/f2/87f245f6-8af6-48c6-923d-c9d54587f7c7/content/images/2026/11/468545166_10160413782312181_5780064610216654107_n.jpg) Taking my daughter to preschool. 2014 A child born here may speak fluent Czech but struggle with textbooks and exams. Another may lose eligibility for language support after two years without ever receiving it. META says children still fall through the cracks, particularly at secondary school. “The system knows how to categorize children, but not how to see them,” Martina Škrdlantová, META's head of advocacy, told me. ### Sent off to play our cellos Perhaps nowhere is Czechia's failure to recognize what its international residents have to offer more apparent than in the job market. Migration researcher Lucie Macková, co-author of a new book on highly skilled migrants in Czechia, told me about people with university degrees and professional experience who end up delivering food or working in fast-food restaurants because they can't find jobs that match their qualifications. Highly skilled migrants often have another option, Lucie pointed out: they can take their qualifications elsewhere. And it's not only adults whose abilities are overlooked. Linguist Tomáš Graf told me Czech schools are wasting the talents of children whose English is far ahead of what classrooms are prepared to teach them. He would know; for years Czech teachers sent his own bilingual son off to do something else during English lessons. Playing the cello was apparently one option. He's now a concert musician. ### The people behind the stats Despite it all, Prague's planning institute has declared the capital an “international city.” But does it understand what that looks like for the people living here, or is this proof that it can count? In Prague 7, I visited Studánka, a newly opened community living room in Letná, where I joined two Ukrainian seniors, both named Valentina, a Russian-American doctor and a Syrian mother, to talk, practice the language, and get to know one another. When I later asked the head of Diakonie's migrant work program whether he expected more people to get involved, he told me: “People don't know about us.” That stayed with me. There's help to be found, advice to share, places to explore and people to meet, if you know where to look. During my research (and yes, walking eating fifteen dumplings is research), I've met people who've never quite felt at home anywhere, and others who aren't Czech but have a babička here. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/87/f2/87f245f6-8af6-48c6-923d-c9d54587f7c7/content/images/2026/11/cc146630-56ba-42ef-add2-e803b49629ff.jpg) Eating Chinese dumplings in the name of research. I've explored Prague's tourist zones with Czechs who actually live there. I met a Chinese kung-fu master who told me how the people she considers her chosen family helped keep her restaurant alive. I want Czechish to make room for these stories, too. The people you might walk past every day, the places you never thought to enter, and the lives unfolding right next to yours. ### Having a say For all my uncertainty about what to call myself, there's no question that what happens in Czechia affects me and my family. For me, writing is a way not only to participate in, but to challenge the system, whether or not the system has made room for me to do so. To that end, there are signs of change. Volby pro Všechny (Elections for All) is a relatively new organization pushing for visibility around voting rights. Tenants' groups are organizing around housing discrimination and other issues. And at Microsoft, workers in Czechia won their first collective agreement, including provisions to help employees who aren't native Czech speakers understand their rights. And that's something I want Czechish to explore: not only the rules and policies that impact our lives, but the people questioning them, helping us understand them better, and sometimes changing them. ### Beyond the labels After a month or so of listening, I had more questions, conversations, and stories to pursue than I knew what to do with. What I found wasn't a single community with a shared experience. It was people with different histories, rights, languages, and relationships to this country, many of whom had far more in common than the labels suggested. We don't all need the same things. We don't necessarily agree about what needs to change. And we certainly don't all identify the same way. But we have a shared stake in what happens to the country we call home. The name Czechish is partly a tip of the hat to shows like *Mixed-ish* that use humor to explore questions of identity and belonging from perspectives very different from my own. For me, that little *\-ish* captures something about living between cultures without having to choose just one. Czechish isn't about being almost Czech or aspiring to become Czech. It's about the many ways people belong to this country, including Czechs whose lives intersect with our own. We may be (sigh) expats or immigrants. EU citizens and third-country nationals. Refugees, permanent residents, naturalized citizens. Czechs with international families. We may be Czech, something else, or a little of both. But we're all, in our own way, Czechish. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/87/f2/87f245f6-8af6-48c6-923d-c9d54587f7c7/content/images/2026/11/ChatGPT-Image-Nov-7--2026--11_01_24-AM.png) Photo: Author ### Over to you I started Czechish because I had questions. Now I want to hear yours. What's happening in your workplace, school, building, town, or neighborhood that deserves a closer look? Is there a person or business we should profile, a place we should visit, or an issue worth debating? What stories aren't being told? What do you wish someone had explained to you years ago? What have you discovered about life here that other people should know? Czechish will report on the policies and systems shaping our lives, but also the people, places, ideas, traditions, and unexpected encounters that make this country what it is. And I don't want to decide all of that on my own. **Don't just read Czechish. Help make it.** Tell us what you'd like to see. Join the conversation by signing up for free. Suggest a story, or contribute an opinion. Follow us on social media. Write to me at czechishcz@gmail.com.