Il y a 10 ans

I was a French major in college, and people often asked me What are you going to do with that?, a question that’s rhetorical for Humanities majors and one we ignore for as long as possible.

I sometimes answered with “Speak French”, but that didn’t apply to everyone. If the lack of any meaningful French-speaking environment didn’t pose enough of a challenge, there was always someone willing to make you feel like shit because you didn’t speak like a native after a few years of study. I knew a lecturer who was notorious for doing this; he made fun of his students’ French. He considered himself above teaching introductory classes, destined for great things, and eventually he could no longer reconcile his infantile narcissism with the struggling life of an adjunct lecturer. He applied to business school at the last minute and works for a company in France today. In the States, he’d just be another worker bee, but of course in France he’s somehow a “special” worker bee, living not the life of yet another wage slave, but une aventure formidable.

But even without those people, every French major knows the following experience: studying French for several years, and then going to France, and realizing you can’t follow a fucking word. Simply put, it takes balls to bring your foreign language out of the classroom laboratory, and if someone does that, don’t they deserve encouragement rather than ridicule?

Of course, buried under all this were some legitimate complaints. Take my senior capstone class for instance, full of French majors who couldn’t speak a word of French. They read the English translations of the assigned readings and on the whole we just sat there with our professor, whose enthusiasm diminished and frustration built to the point where she played The Beatles’ All You Need is Love for the class in an attempt to get us talking, at least in English. But no one took the bait. Everyone sat there quietly and her passion for teaching breathed its last.

Another, equally rhetorical question comes after you graduate: why did you major in French? People often ask that question with a kind of incredulity. Out of all the majors you could pick, you chose…that one?

Why’d I do it? Because it challenged me. My high school didn’t prepare you for college. Like any good public school, it prepared you for life in the working world. I was raised to see going to college as something prestigious, but while colleges pretend to have standards, the truth is they’ll admit just about anyone who applies, only to have them weeded out later.

As a general rule, if they tell you upfront that an endeavor is “what you make of it”, run for your fucking life. You’re better off going to a vocational school and learning some tangible skills than taking on mounds of debt for a degree that (supposedly) qualifies you to speak a foreign language no one outside campus can understand.

High school replenishes the servant class. None of us were prepared for college-level work, and I made a D on my first college French test. My high school French teacher wasn’t much help. The woman didn’t really speak French so much as she spoke of French: it’s much harder than Spanish, it’s the most difficult Romance language to learn. A bully who openly played favorites with her students, she spent the twilight of her career teaching only English Lit, French removed as an elective due to lack of interest.

I took the “D” as a challenge to get better, and five years later, the first question forced me to give an answer. So I did.

I was going to France to teach English.

The Assistant d’anglais program was not only going to save me from the working world, but several other French majors too. We prepared our applications, all our documents, gathered our reference letters and sent everything to the French Embassy in DC, with the assurance from our professors that everyone gets in.

I was certainly confident. March, 2008, I told friends in family that I was going to France. I had Lille at the top of my list, followed by Caen and Rouen. My plan became clear: I was going to spend two years teaching English in France. After that, I was going to do my Master’s and PhD in French Linguistics at a university in France, before returning to the States to seek a tenure-track position. I would have finished my Doctorate before my current age (32), and would spend the rest of my life climbing the academic ranks in a cushy job doing what I loved.

About a month after sending in my application, I realized I’d forgotten to include a passport photo. I emailed the woman at the embassy about it, asking if I could send my photo separately. Here’s a highlight of her encouraging response:

First of all, you needed to include THREE passport-sized photographs… the instructions on page 1 of the application explicitly say to staple a passport-sized photo to each application…

No, you cannot send the pictures serarately, there are simply too many applications coming in, it would be an impossible task to attempt to find your application and match it up with the missing photos.

She did show mercy, and emailed me the next day, telling me to send in the photos. I rushed them out and waited, assured by people who’d done the program in the past that everyone gets accepted.

Then May came. Two girls in my capstone class received their acceptances via email. I remember checking the teaching program forums and receiving a heap of conflicting information. Either…

a) All acceptances have already gone out

or

b) Some acceptances now, some later, so if you haven’t received yours yet, don’t panic.

I chose b, panicking more, and I eventually emailed the woman at the French Embassy, who informed me in an unsigned email that all acceptances had been sent out. The email a few days later confirmed it: France was out. And here I was, a week from graduating, no plan.

Not getting accepted to the Assistant d’anglais program was a pivotal moment in my life. How pivotal?

It’s possible that if I had simply included passport photos with my application, my daughter would not exist. A strange thought, but who’s to say for sure? Our professors assured us that everyone gets accepted, but what none of us understand was that there were too many people, and not enough openings. Someone was going home disappointed, and I was one of them.

Do I regret not getting picked? For years I did, and I think some small part of me always will. I enjoyed learning French, and although I can follow French podcasts fairly easily, I know that I will always lack the finer idioms and slang and natural speech that only comes from living in-country for an extended period of time. Me listening to Europe 1’s Libre Antenne is my attempt to justify all the time I spent studying French. It can’t all be a waste, can it?

On the other hand, there were the people. When I panicked and applied to grad school afterwards (asking one of my profs for a big favor), the lecturer I mentioned earlier tried to torpedo my application. A pathological liar, he referred to himself as a “faculty member” and a “Professor of French”, and I love the plausible deniability “Professor of French” gives you. Lecturers who only hold a Master’s degree are not professors, even in the longest stretch of the word, but referring to yourself as a “Professor of French” rather than a “French Professor” gives you just enough plausible deniability so that if someone calls you out on your bullshit, you can claim that you weren’t committing professional fraud, you meant professor in the sense of teacher, and that you taught French.

As I consider reenlisting for another tour, I’ve thought about what might’ve happened if I’d gone to France. Maybe my French would have hit that C1 level, and maybe I’d be on the tenure-track today, living the life of the mind. Maybe.

Or maybe I’d have to refer to myself as a “Professor of French”.

In the meantime, I’ll listen to Libre Antenne and keep my tools sharp. Why? Because of what I know.

I know I’m doing twenty years in the Navy in the same way that I “knew” I was going to France after graduation. In the same way the people kicked out by the Enlisted Review Board knew they’d get a pension after twenty.

When you get down to it, you don’t know a fucking thing.

Expressions I Can Live Without

wow just wow — see also: wow. Just…wow Use the ellipsis when you want to emphasize just how speechless this week’s fashionable outrage has made you.

I can’t even — often combined with wow just wow for a tag-team of shit.

This — used emphatically when sharing links that reinforce your biases. See also: This. Just…THIS. People have an attraction to the word the word ‘just’ followed by an ellipsis.

It is what it is — Good. I was worried it might be something else.

fur mommy/daddy — ultrasounds for dogs? doggie daycare? It seems fur parents and their money are easily parted. Associated term: fur babies. When someone talks about their fur babies, I wonder how many homeless family members they have.

White dude — used in a derogatory way. If you’d like to be completely unoriginal, try using the -bro suffix.

People/Person of color — such a sterile expression. I don’t mind it when used sparingly, but some people feel the need to use it in a Ralph Wiggum-esque repetition, even when an alternative would fit better. See also: PoC. I’ve yet to see POC. They don’t drop ‘of’ completely and use ‘PC’ because ‘PC’ is too well associated with Politically Correct or Personal Computer.

however comma — Know what I like more than however comma? When people pause, to indicate a comma and then say the word comma.

More to come, I’m sure…

A Mei Suzi Level Event

March 2014, Hankou train station and my wife’s had enough.

“Tamen dou mei suzi de ren.”

The crowds rushing past us, the unhelpful train station workers, four suitcases and a fussy one-year old. First day here and she’s already hit a China Breaking Point.

Tamen dou mei suzi de ren. One of the rushing passengers bumps into our suitcase.

It falls over.

***

How do you convey this to the people back home? How do you make them understand what it’s like to haul your four suitcases up the stairs after the guard tells you the elevator’s out, and then watch that same guard open the elevator for someone else, quickly locking it again?

How do you do it?

How do you explain what it’s like to get on the train and find people in your seats? Then these people argue with you and you have to get a stewardess to make them move and they argue with her too.

How do you do it?

If you can explain all that, then you can understand what it’s like to stand there atop the stairs as the crowd surges around us. As not one person bothers to stop and help, as the guards just watch us and the train whistle blows again. Hurry up.

If you can, you’ll understand why my wife said “Tamen dou mei suzi de ren.” When it comes to a China Breaking Point, it’s actually rather tame.

It was my first time in China in three years. Going in, I tried to be realistic. I tried, because three years does funny things to the brain. It makes the brain think that the every man for himself mentality is not a big deal. Hell, it’s part of the culture, it’s a quirk. It makes you romanticize the days when you had no money, weighed over 200 pounds and subsisted on a diet of beer and hot dry noodles. It makes you long for the taste of baijiu — fucking baijiu! And not the well-brewed kind but the tiny 5 RMB bottles, one of the many perks of your “high” ESL salary. It doesn’t make you realistic. So I prepared myself.

But preparation only takes you so far.

We make it to my wife’s hometown. We’re heading out of the train station. As we close in on the exit, a guy behind us starts to speed up. He and my wife hit the door at the same time, and he goes faster. While there’s plenty of room on the right, he has the warrior’s instinct: he knows the slit between my wife’s shoulder and the wall will be quicker.

He squeezes through. The checkered flag drops.

Still, I’d say I’m better equipped than most. Check out the airplanes. Taxi’ing in, seatbelt sign on? What seatbelt sign? One guy actually made it all the way to the front with his luggage before we’d come to a complete stop. That’s more than skill — that’s an inbuilt instinct, the difference between waiting at the front or waiting close to the front.

The difference between life or death.

Not everyone sees it my way. When we landed in Chicago,, a man cut off this old lady, nearly whacking her with his suitcase. She glared at him.

“Excuse you!”

Then she gave me this look. The look of someone who’s on her first (and only) trip to China. The man didn’t react. I could tell her he can’t understand “Excuse you”, but I don’t think she knows how to say it in Chinese.

And besides, she’s nowhere near a “mei suzi” moment.

Boat Goggles: Porn Star and The Mole

First, the clinical definition:

The American Medical Association defines Boat Goggles as the condition in which men and women find attractive people they ordinarily wouldn’t spare a second look. A result of confined spaces and a limited selection pool, Boat Goggles has been known to turn ‘fat’ into ‘plump’, ‘big’ into ‘curvy’ and it has also been known to turn split-second decisions into lifelong regret. (See also: Drunk Goggles)

***

Porn Star came to the library tonight.

She’s part of a squadron, a red jersey, Crash & Salvage. Up until now our mighty warship USS Theodore Roosevelt has held 2,000 people. The squadrons — pilots, people who work on the planes — they bump that number to 5,000. It’s had a wonderful effect on the chow lines, not to mention our six working washers.

Porn Star has blonde hair, unkempt and surely out of regs. She wears her sleeves up, showing arms covered in tattoos, and she walks with a twitch, a deliberate twitch, so deliberate it might be comical.

Were it not for the Boat Goggles.

I see signs of her passage in advance. Heads turn. At the start of the cruise, they turned slightly. Yep, that’s how it starts. The Boat Goggles don’t fit well at first. They’re uncomfortable, the frames too tight.

Then a week passes.

Two weeks, three, marching through this labyrinth of pipes and steel walls, and the Boat Goggles feel more comfortable. Pretty soon, you don’t even notice them.

So you turn your head too. You have no subtlety, but that’s okay. Neither does she.

In she comes. There’s a logbook on the desk where you sign in, and she takes her time, bending over despite the desk reaching her neck. She devotes so much time to ensuring that her letters fit perfectly in between the lines. Attention to Detail.

From there she twitches into the TV room.

Another morning, you’re transiting the mess decks, and you see Porn Star sitting at a table with a bunch of guys. She’s showing them her tattoos.

She has a lot.

***

Before I get out of here, let’s talk about The Mole.

She had a mole on her cheek. Short, chubby full-figured, she was a CTI ((Cryptologic Technician Interpretive. They do foreign languages.)) temporarily assigned to the TR, to gain an understanding of the “real” Navy life she’d undoubtedly picked CTI to avoid.

She was working with the CTTs ((Cryptologic Technician Technical)). Curious about ship life, she asks, The fanrooms are where people go on the ship to get busy, huh?

The guys talk about this at night in the berthing. She said that, yeah dude, she actually said that! No, she’s okay fucking hot.

Who can fuck her first? It doesn’t matter.

This long at sea, you’ll gladly go last.

***

Throughout this feverish tangle of sheetmetal, swabbed decks and wet paint, men and women work together twelve hours or more a day.

The Boat Goggles fit so well. Human nature will reign as the long days continue, as the last of the recruiter’s lies die for the new Seamen checking in to operate multi-million dollar equipment and sent to do a commander’s laundry, as the mighty warship USS Theodore Roosevelt qualifies to deploy, 90,000 tons of bottled lust.

Tribute to the Kick-Ass Muslim Noodle Place

I’m no Tom Carter, I haven’t even traveled half of China, let alone the whole place, but I won’t let that stop me from saying the following:

I know where the best Muslim noodles were in China.

Wuhan.

WUSE’s backstreet, specifically, and I use ‘were’ because it’s not there anymore. You IMAG1141understand. Things change. WUSE went from a xueyuan to a daxue, and WUSE’s backstreet went from home to the best Muslim noodles in China to rubble, to make way for highrise apartments. Good. If there’s one thing China lacks, it’s overpriced real estate.

Part of my introduction to China was a trip to the Kick-Ass Muslim Noodle Place. Did the restaurant have an actual name, I hear someone in the peanut gallery asking…why yes, I’m sure it did, but none of us knew it. They were Muslim. They made noodles. The noodles kicked ass.

Hence the name. It’s descriptive, if nothing else.

But what exactly do I mean by Muslim noodles? Muslim noodles, or Uyghur noodles, were made outside, twisted and swung with an occasional hard slap on the table, just to keep you on your toes. Then they took the noodles to the back, to cook, add spices.

Add drugs.

That’s what my wife said: they put drugs in the food. At first, I dismissed this — stereotypes die hard in China — but after a while, I wasn’t sure.

And I didn’t care.

Drugs? Okay. Who cares? Boil it in liquid crack, just keep em coming. Breakfast lunch dinner and second breakfast second lunch midnight snack…

I introduced new foreign teachers to the place. For initiates, the food there had a peculiar side-effect that physicians refer to as Immediate Bowel Release, which provided another sort of introduction to China.

The Kick-Ass Muslim Noodle Place.

Gateway to the good life in the Middle Kingdom.

A backstreet three years ago, rubble today, highrises any day now. Well, Kick-Ass Muslim Noodle Place, it’s a pity I wasn’t around to say goodbye.

Next time I come to China, I hope the highrises are finished. I hope they’re populated.

I plan on lighting some firecrackers in your memory.