Dec 20, 2016
By Sarah Wolfgang
Personal Freedom Through Language In France
The walk from the jet to Arrivées was like a second trip down the birth canal. The anxiety. The newness. Out from the panorama of windows and light, the director of my university’s French exchange program approached, arms waiting.
“Bonjour!” Carolyn said.
It was an early afternoon in February 2002 in the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. I was 21 and had flown to France once before. That red eye had been my first trip outside the United States, and as an experience, it was an impressionistic view of the life of French people. This other journey would be deeper: eight months of the unknown, eight months of feeling like a fool every time I spoke. I had never had Carolyn as a professor and didn’t know her well enough to feel comfortable falling apart before her.
“Ça va?” she asked.
I was okay, but not completely. I dripped sweat from wearing several pullovers I couldn’t fit into the suspiciously cheap luggage I had recently purchased. The luggage also didn’t have wheels, so I had to lean back hard to keep upright and stop every few feet to take a break. I would have liked to joke about it or at least explain the situation in detail, but I pushed my hair from my face and sighed.
“Bonjour!” I said, with mustered vivacity. “Ça va bien.”
Before arriving in Paris, I had read a stack of ex-pat narratives. The books were useful, but I felt abandoned in that none of these authors talked about the initial period of trouble with the language. Since I was there to improve my French, language ability felt the metric of my worth. Carolyn transmitted a fast-flowing cascade of pretty sounds. I, in contrast, could not assemble a coherent sentence despite six years of studying. Dad’s words “What? Are you going to work at a CVS in Quebec?” when I told him I would be studying French came to me in a wave of shame. My fight or flight organs filled with blood as I stood before Carolyn, a monument of worldliness I hoped to be.
Out of the banlieue surrounding Paris’ core, the shuttle driver flew and then plunged into the smaller streets on the Right Bank. I thought there might be an initial few ornamental sentences in French and then Carolyn would take mercy on me. Instead she filled me in on a play by Ionesco concerning the false worship of language that we were scheduled to see that night, and while she spoke, I nodded and replied, “Bien!”—“Good!” But then it became unclear to me whether the correct response was “Bien!” or “Bon!”
“Bien is an adverb, and bon is an adjective,” I thought.
Or were they both adverbs and adjectives? The battle of bien and bon consumed me, overtaking the importance of the content of what Carolyn was saying.
“Nous sommes ici,” she said.
“Eh?”
“We are here,” I translated a few beats too late to respond normally.
Dad visited months later. When he arrived, he swaggered through Arrivées wearing a stained sweatshirt, a Red Sox cap, holey jeans, and old work boots.
“I thought about it,” he said. “Maybe I should wear something super fancy because, y’know, it’s Paris, but then I decided, Forget it!—and I decided to be comfortable.”
At that point, I had become better acclimated to life in Paris. I had sanded off my usual beaming American smile and was speaking French more fluently. Although I was happy to see Dad, I tucked myself inside myself when he spoke so loudly.
Later that week the two of us took the train to the Palace of Versailles. Outside the Hall of Mirrors, the gardens and Grand Canal to the west were so expansive there was a haze covering it in the distance. I looked over, expecting to see Dad looking unimpressed, but instead, I noticed him crying.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do more to support you with all this kind of stuff,” he said. “You deserved more.”
French came of age as the tongue of the elite and a world of culture while I, on the other hand, grew up in a working class household that didn’t have power and didn’t appreciate culture. French symbolized the refinement I longed for, but it was spoken by everyday people, too, and here it was becoming a thing to respect for my father, who had until then been happy to laugh at it, and my choice for choosing it as a manner to define myself.
I hugged Dad hard. Through French, he could see me, and I looked and saw him. I stopped worrying about his old work boots. We started joking and talking at our volume.
“Let’s go check out some statues,” he said.
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About the Author
Sarah Wolfgang
Sarah Wolfgang is a former community journalist who’s left footprints in her beats in Massachusetts and Florida. Currently, she blogs at Shell Expanding and is in the final stages of book proposal preparation with her literary agent for Between the Ditches, a humorous coming-of-age memoir about her dad and her eighteen-wheeler cross-country chase for “It,” a stopping point where they hope to understand God, love, life, and death. Her writing will be featured in the 2016 Bacopa Literary Review.