The Nos­tal­gic Chameleon

In a few days, my lit­tle 18 years old brother will take his final high school grad­u­a­tion exams. And I can’t believe I passed mine nine years ago. A life­time, really.

I some­times get hit by nos­tal­gia, a strange over­pow­er­ing feel­ing that takes some time to get rid of. It is usu­ally trig­gered by lit­tle things: a song, a smell, a feel­ing of déjà vu I can’t quite shake off. I did so much in the past ten years that I think I have the right to feel lost some­times. I rarely pause to look back.

It hap­pened so fast. One minute I was in high school and the next one I was board­ing a one-way flight to Hong Kong, with the self-confidence only 18 years old can have. Sev­eral years of trav­el­ing around the world and one immi­gra­tion later, here I am, a for­mer French, a new Cana­dian and a cit­i­zen of the world. It’s still me but I changed. Part of it can cer­tainly be attrib­uted to grow­ing up but a lot is because I moved to another country.

My last year of high school was exhaust­ing. I was a good stu­dent but I stud­ied even harder because I couldn’t stand the thought of not grad­u­at­ing. Ret­ro­spec­tively, I think I would have passed any­way but this is such an impor­tant rite of pas­sage in France that I didn’t want to screw it up. I have ran­dom mem­o­ries of this last year: falling asleep review­ing my note cards in bed; stay­ing up until 2 am on Sat­ur­day draw­ing and watch­ing late night show; going to restau­rants, to bars and to disco with my friends; beg­ging my mum for notes to skip school and finally being able to sign these damn notes myself because I turned 18 before graduating.

The break was bru­tal after that: my French pop cul­ture stops in June 2001. While I will still be French to a cer­tain extent, I can’t be quizzed on pop cul­ture past that date: bands, singers, movies, polit­i­cal scan­dals, crazes – I don’t know any. I feel like a habi­tant of one of these cities sud­denly swal­lowed up by an earth­quakes or a vol­cano erup­tion and found years later cov­ered in a thick layer of dust. The world around changed but I remain stuck in the past.

It’s not that I didn’t try to keep in touch with French cul­ture. At first, my mind stretched itself to join the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean – it was exhaust­ing. I lis­tened to French talk shows but I grew frus­trated because they seemed to have lit­tle rel­e­vance to my cur­rent life. I read all the French books at the library – yes, all of them. I tried to trans­late jokes but failed mis­er­ably. I threw the odd cul­tural ref­er­ence in that no one here got.

Things would have prob­a­bly been dif­fer­ent if I was liv­ing with a French, but Feng is Cana­dian and Chi­nese. He was inter­ested in French cul­ture but at the time, we hadn’t been in France together. When­ever I wanted to tell him a story, I first had to set it and that meant explain­ing cul­tural facts that don’t always trans­late well. Let’s say I wanted to tell him about the “Bac”, the French high school grad­u­a­tion exam, a major national rite of pas­sage: I had to explain him briefly how the French school sys­tem works and stress on how drain­ing (and dreaded) the exam is. Basi­cally, by the time I was done with my lengthy expla­na­tions, I just didn’t feel like telling the story any­more. We had a lot in com­mon, mostly our trav­els at that time, but my French­ness often got lost in translation.

Ottawa is not a city a lot of French choose to live in either, most set­tle in Mon­tréal. I have very few French friends here and most of them have been there for a lit­tle while so we are past the stage where we gather and bitch about how cold Canada is or pon­der why there are no good crois­sants in this town.

And this is why, 9 years after leav­ing France, I’m prob­a­bly less French than a lot of expats I know. I don’t mind it – peo­ple change, that’s life. It’s just a bit strange at times. This is also prob­a­bly why I obses­sively cling to my French mem­o­ries – I’m a nos­tal­gic chameleon.

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4. Ten Things I Can Do
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