Quelle Misère

I wanted to study French because its literature fascinated me, and after taking the year one French course at my college I wanted to move on to the Alliance Française’s intensive summer course, during which several times I found myself losing all interest in the language. Our first instructor spent more time on google images and youtube than I think he did actually teaching, which is perhaps his own “idiosyncratic pedagogy” to quote a director whom I saw to ask about the situation, or perhaps is simply his being ill-prepared: he was visibly annoyed at being kept an extra two weeks while everyone else left for vacation. It was also done with such a passive-aggressively condescending manner that he found it necessary to pull up an image of Caesar to explain that the word amphithéâtre came from this civilisation by the name of Rome: one is reminded that the Alliance Française came down first as a project of the civilization mission of new imperialism, of which this seems to be a miserable shadow. We were spending six hours in class daily covering about the same material that my former one did in an hour-long class each day. Monsieur was telling the same the WWF panda is white is black is asian joke three times and laughing along himself without exhausting himself too much. He was perhaps the epitome of the pauvre type in China: not sure what he’s doing here; pleasantly surprised at how available sex is for the white man; yet still desperately trying to exert some kind of superiority as a cultured citizen from the first world.

I stopped going altogether as it was simply a waste of my time: the class I could do too well without, too bad they don’t allow refunds, and too bad monsieur le directeur could only tell me to “write my feedback in the form of an email” and send it to the department of something else (more kafkaesque than chinese bureaucracy): I was getting about five sentences of speaking practice for the six hours spent, not to mention two hours to and fro spent in the metro, when I could be spending the time home following a more condensed course online, finding a language partner of my own, and simply forcing my way through the French novels that inspired me to study the language in the first place.

Then there was the second instructor who cut to the chase. The chase turned out to be the DELF. When we weren’t going through the textbook exercises we were having broken conversations on superficial cultural differences, which annoyed me more than it bored me. On the one hand, it’s only natural: a foreigner was obviously curious about this or that bizarre thing that seemed so inexplicable; and my distinguished colleagues were only too eager to provide this and that explanation of great Chinese traditions. On the other hand, this talk could do better elsewhere, in a bar (or on Tinder, for that matter); on the other hand, I thought I was back in the US, in orientation, with wide-eyed Americans staring at you as if you were some strange animal shipped in as oriental curiosities and asking “do pool halls exist in China?”, who after some reply would be beaming at having learnt some obscure but fascinating factoid that he could reuse in a pickup-line later to prove himself a worldly and sophisticated man. Apparently our instructor took me as a class clown eager for attention because a chinaman doesn't say “la famille, c’est un joli nom pour le suicide” and decided to ignore me completely. The normality is perhaps to shut up and play the stereotypes so as not to undermine the immigration argument that we’re of value to you because we bring to you diversity and all that. After all, everyone with the means in China wants out, right? as evident from smuggish look on my female colleagues’ faces as one recounted the story of some Chinese woman who without a word of french when she arrived ending up marrying the mayor of Lyon. No, of course one shouldn’t be too cynical and of course one shouldn’t mind all that, but as Jean-Baptiste Clamence said in la Chute, “comment surtout, en les regardant, penser qu'on a raison?”