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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