I went to Fabrice’s this week to tutor him as usual, but since he just had a big test, there was nothing for us to go over, so we ended up just trying to have a conversation for the hour that I stayed. I asked him questions, and he would try to respond, but usually he couldn’t understand the question, so I’d have to help him translate it into French, and then sometimes translate the answer.
And I know that translating is not the way to learn a language (trust me, I know), but the kid is 11, and I am 21, and neither of us is fluent in the other’s language, and we do the best we can. So I was trying to ask him interesting questions, and finally I hit on what I thought was a good one... this is exactly the conversation that went down.
B (english): "Fabrice, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
Fabrice, in French: "Ça veut dire quoi?" "What does that mean?"
B (french): [repeats the question]
Fabrice: "Mais, je ne– I don’t know." [Said in a tone of voice to indicate that it was kind of a lame question, because who really knows that kind of thing at 11?]
So I try to think of something that everyone wants to be when they are 11... and I say:
"You could be a..." [insert realization that I don’t know the word for astronaut]... "man who goes to the moon?"

Fabrice looks at me, not in a rude way, but with a face that clearly reads, in any language, "wow, you really aren’t French, are you?" and he says, in French, "We don’t go to the moon in France. We don’t even try to do it." I just looked at him, trying to figure out how to respond, and he adds, not wanting to seem like he just shot down my suggestion, "Plus if I was going to do it, I’d have to learn English first."

I brightened. "But that’s what we’re doing now! So you can be an astronaut if you want!"
But really– I hate flying almost as much as I hate math, but even I went through a stage where I wanted to be an astronaut. In the US, it’s a sure thing that at some point you’ll want to.
But think about it– NO Frenchmen has ever been to the moon; I am fairly sure they haven’t even put one in space. So why would it ever be their dream? It would be like an American kid dreaming of... hmm... I am at a loss. The best I can come up with is "owning a Vespa," but that doesn’t really work.

And the weirdest part was (here comes a new revelation of my own awareness of myself as an American) that my first instinct was to feel sorry for him. How cocky is that? He doesn’t want to go, and America (last I heard) was not planning on sending anyone else to the moon for awhile because it’s prohibitively expensive and what’s the point anyway? We don’t really do anything once we’re up there, except hide the Russian flag. But it’s just so weird to think about, that he has never even considered being an astronaut.

In a related story, in my photography class this week, the prof lectured on some photos of September 11. Most of the images he used were well-known, at least in the US, though I hadn’t seen a lot of them in years. Ground Zero the morning after with a flag flying in it; Giuliani wearing a dust mask; the newly-empty skyline the night of; and one that I had never seen of a man sitting on a bench checking his email, but the bench was in the middle of the rubble of a building next to the Towers. But the weird part was trying to dissociate all the loadedness of the photos and just study them as photos; especially odd as the only American in the class. Because this was just such a bizarre thing– I can’t imagine in an Art History class in the US a professor throwing in a 15 minute interlude about September 11. But it’s weird that I feel that way, because everything else we studied in class meant the same thing to someone else as September 11 does to Americans...
Born in the USA,
~B