Someone Else is Living Your Parisian Dream

“On recontrer a Borneo.” and I pronounce it “Born-ee-o.” She was confused, and I thought that I’d pulled one over on the French, with this non-geography knowing French teacher. I explained that it’s a cote Malaysie and Thailand/ Un demi isle ce’st Indonesie, and la autre c’est Malaysia, where The Husband and I met. La Mer de Sud-Chine (Forgive my French). She was still lost until she suddenly got it a full few minutes of which I spent stuttering and reaching for words to throw out.

“Ah!” Bor-nay-o! C’est Bor-nay-o!”

Most Americans understand when a French person with a heavy accent comes to the US that when they say, “zee”, they really mean, “the.” And when they say “buce” they really mean “bus.” When they say, “BAY AWSH VAY,” I know that they mean BEE ACH VEE. When they say une chemise, I know that they mean a shirt, nevermind what it’s gender is. Chemise is chemise as is chemisiere. Nevermind that I don’t know the difference for the majority of gender specifics. When I hear Pheeeeleeeepa, I know that they’re calling my name with their pronunciation of the I.
Almost every time I speak with my American accent though, I lose them and force myself to retrace the steps and replace my I’s with an ee sound and other such alphabetical pronunciations, and it’s not until all of those amends have been made that the ground stops shaking, and everything is once again set right on middle earth.
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I told him, “Alselmo moved to Belville.”

“Where?”

“Belville. You know. Belville.”

“OH! Bel-veel-uh.”

“Yeah. Bel-veel-uh.”

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“Un vodka tonic, svp”

Puzzled face.

Vodka Tonic?

Puzzled face.

Une Vodka toneeeeek.

He finally got it.

We were at a pub, so the context wasn’t vast and varied.
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And another thing:

“Un baguette, svp.”

(puzzled look).

“UNE baguette, svp.”

Ahhh!

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Not that I don’t make mistakes. Since I’m bashing, I’ll share one of my own horrors.
On the metro, I got up and offered my seat next to the door with an allez-y to one woman. It’s the first and only word that came to mind and I was kind of in a rush to have her sit down, since the rush hour crowd was boarding/deboarding regularly. I tapped her arm and might’ve even tried to steer her a bit, even though I know better under any other circumstances. But I’m not sure. She knew what I meant and declined. She was blind and probably wanted to beat my head in with her stick for touching her elbow when her surroundings were already chaotic. A know-it-all standing next to me looked up from her book and told me almost at the same time in English, “She would not like to sit down.” Suddenly, a line of French came to me, and of course I couldn’t say it. “Qui t demandez?”

Instead, I said, “K.”

I wrote a bit ago that I’m undergoing a strange experience with a potpourri of languages. I’ve got a handle on it for the most part, and have retrieved some Mandarin. While my brain is being stretched, I thought that I may as well go the extra distance and bought a mandarin phrasebook for myself and The Husband, who has been harassing me to teach him one of the Asian languages. While Mandarin isn’t a dialect that I grew up speaking or hearing, it’s the most useful of dialects for the both of us. Thus, I learn French by day and relearn and teach a bit of Mandarin by night, as My Husband counts to 10 over and over again … Yi … Er … San … Si … Wu … Lieu … This is my one chance to give someone else a bit of grief over accents and new languages, and I’m not one to pass up an opportunity like that….

We saw A Bittersweet Life, an OK Korean movie with French subtitles. I concentrated on reading the subtitles, trying my best to speed read and speed select relevant words, the way I would in English. The entire process, however, is slowed by a need to look at every. single. word. to determine it’s significance. I was encouraged, like a child who’s discovering their A B C’s that I was able to follow during the first five minutes, granted I read and filtered quickly and didn’t get discouraged by missing a few words. I was certain that I would stop following as the storyline became more indepth. The added burden in this instance, of the hum of Korean, shouting matches, fist fights and neverending gun battles distracted my reading and comprehending process. At some points it sounded Chinese and I found myself making an effort to decipher the “Chinese” for a moment before I remembered that it’s not. All the while, I was keeping up with the action on the screen and happily understood the French subtitles to THE.WHOLE.MOVIE. The whole movie!!!

I’m encouraged that my reading and listening comprehension are tangibly improving, and am impatient for my speech to catch up. The Husband restates phrases for me in French when I say them in English at home; this is the same way my parents taught me to retain Burmese and Chinese at home while I was surrounded by English at school and on the playground. 8 hour a day classes are likely helping more than I think, and hopefully I’ll wake up with the big surprise of French one day soon. Hopefully next week.

KNLA: Karen National Liberation Army

This is an email I sent to a small handful of friends after a trip to the warzones of Burma’s jungles in April 2003. Outside of this e-mail, I’ve never written of or shared my experience beyond a few casual memories, “When I was in the jungle, I saw a boy with bandage wrapped around his head. A landmine exploded in his face while he was planting it.” They carried him on a stretcher, made of bamboo pieces that were hacked by machetes that every single Karen wears around his waist. The “clinic” was two hours away. I would throw out this sparks of memory as casually as dandelion grazing the grass in the breeze.

I never told the full story. I felt deeply that I needed to relay it in such a way that would transport the listener to a world of genocide and 57 years of war that is unfathomable to us in the occident. I needed for them to feel my potpourri of emotions, and until I could conjur that ability magically, I sincerely felt that I would do the Karen a disservice. The simplest of words ring in my head, “I wish they would just leave us alone.” Visions of 80 year old men and children, all toting AK47s, never leaving them behind. Ever. I’ve never told the story. Not even to my husband because I couldn’t find the words. Recent events in the jungle, the displacement, murder, rape, violence and kidnapping of another 16,000 Karen nationals beg to be told, not just to those who read Human Rights Watch or NGO reports, but to people like you and me.

Forthcoming stories aren’t about a trek with a tourism agency based in Thailand; this is real. Real soldiers. Real scars. Real children in a real warzone. Real families. Real attacks. Real genocide.

Soldiers spread on the lookout
while we take a break.

If the last class at the Mairie du Paris was a meeting of the United Nations, my new classes are the headquarters of the UNHCR. The United Nations Refugee Agency. Actually, not everyone is a refugee, but you wouldn’t know it on paper. In this class, we are:

• une chinoise
• une ethiopienne
• un bresilian
• une kurde
• un turque
• une egyptian
• une iranian
• un tchetchen
• un bengali
• une sudanais
• trois sri lankaise
• et moi. Je suis le seule Americaine encore, mais je d’origine Birmane et Chinoise. And me. I am the only American again, however, I was born in Burma.

Even in France, it’s not easy to explain a double immigration in the way that doesn’t prompt a whole slew of additional questions, assumptions, or double checks to verify that they heard right.

[A short blurb on my cultural/lingual/immigration history] My family immigrated to the US from Burma (now known as Myanmar) when I was three years old. They had been in Burma for hundreds of years, but our origins are Chinese. I don’t know where. My first languages, learned simultaneously, were 1 dialect of Chinese (Toi San) and Burmese. I learned English beginning in a kindergarten in San Francisco, and continue to speak my first languages with my mother and grandmother. I learned Cantonese in afternoon Chinese school that I attended after regular elementary school. I developed a foundation in Mandarin during high school, though I never got past the simple conversational skills. P There are very mild similarities between these three Chinese dialects, but not enough to have any kind of conversation even in short phrases, words or numbers. The differences may as well be a conversation between a Chinese speaker and an English speaker.

On the first day of French class, I observed that The Chinese Guy is a Mandarin speaker. He speaks very little French, despite having lived in France for many years. He speaks less than I do. During break on that first day 2 weeks ago, he asked me in Mandarin whether I am Chinese. I responded in Mandarin that I am, but that I speak very little. I asked whether he speaks Cantonese or Toi San, and he had no idea what I was talking about. We stared at each other for a moment, unsure of how to proceed with our conversation. I was done. I blanked out on all of the Mandarin that I had ever learned and spoken in my entire life, including the most basic phrases. I wanted to scratch my eyes out in horror and humour but mostly, I was that perturbed. I couldn’t remember the word for parents: fu-mu. I supplemented our conversation with French. My world suddenly turned upside down and I wasn’t quite sure what had happened.

Learning French has been so mentally, intellectually and emotionally draining, that it temporarily robbed me of a another Language-in-Process. I’m certain that within the Foreign Languages part of my brain, there must be a storage room for languages that I’m learning. Because my Mandarin was never developed or practiced enough to claim permanent real estate in my brain, French claimed the territory. It’s a strange phenomenon that I hadn’t anticipated and didn’t understand until I went home and sorted it out with my mom phone in a long distance call. In Burmese. More aware than ever that I was losing some language, I detected the increasing need to ask my mom for vocabulary in Burmese and Toi-san when we speak.

“My friends - the people who live next door to me - are moving back to Maine this week. Wait. How do you say ‘next door neighbor?’ “

“No, Not in Chinese. In Burmese.”

I’ve claimed the seat next to The Chinese Guy permanently and am brushing up on my Mandarin in French class. Ironically enough, I translate the lessons for him because he doesn’t quite understand the teacher. This is a classic case of the blind leading the blind. Initially, I attributed his lack of French to poor language skills, but it dawned on me yesterday that it’s 10 times more difficult for him to learn French, than it is for me. I know the alphabet.

Yesterday, he told me that most of the words for different mettiers (careers) isn’t in his electronic translator. Thinking that it couldn’t be, I took it from him and tried one. It came through with the definitions and told him to try again. As he typed in the next word slowly, copying it from the chalkboard, I realized the immense difficulty that he faces. He hasn’t been exposed to the Roman alphabet extensively and examined each almost as if it was a picture; the way most of us look at Chinese characters. Further exacerbating this hardship, the words on the chalkboard are written in a combination of cursive and simple text print, while handouts, dictionaries and translators display only text print. Not only must a foreign, non Roman alphabet exposed student learn the alphabet, they need to learn it in Capitals, lower case, capital cursive and lower case cursive. I wrote out the alphabet for him in each of these forms and wished him luck with a pat on the back.

I’m bringing my own Chinese-English translator to class so that he can teach me how to use it. Maybe I’ll find my Chinese in the process of learning French.