–I swear to god, you’re not speak­ing French. We’re all Amer­i­can here, we don’t under­stand your stu­pid lan­guage.
– Let’s speak Chi­nese !
– Not when we’re drunk ! Speak Eng­lish or get out !

Since I don’t want to get out, I speak Eng­lish. Let’s avoid a diplo­matic breakdown.

Dur­ing morn­ing classes, we have to stand our ground in the u-shaped class­room. The French on one side and the Amer­i­cans on the other. The teacher is Chi­nese but he trans­lates non-stop in bro­ken Eng­lish. We don’t speak Shakespeare’s lan­guage. We do we what we do best : we protest.
1–0 USA

We tease each other loudly. Funny to see no one really need trans­la­tion. Chirac just came back from a trip to China. Alright, not our best ambas­sador… We fight back mak­ing fun of Clin­ton and Lewin­sky. They retort with Mit­ter­rand and his mistresses.

2–0 the New World.

The teacher shouts to calm us down. It’s the final strug­gle and every­one head towards the MacDonald’s to avoid eat­ing another rice meal in its lit­tle plas­tic box.

We did talk to each other tough. The war in Kosovo was this sum­mer of 99’s big issue. Amer­i­cans gen­er­ally con­sid­ered us as hope­less social­ists and we though they were dumber than their president.

– This war was use­less and harm­ful to civil­ians ! Don’t you get it ? You can’t truly believe the USA helped any­body by bomb­ing vil­lages !
– Yep. We agree. This war was a major waste of time for us. We were too gen­er­ous. The money should have stayed in the USA.

Our only revenge was the daily morn­ing singing class. It was just so fun to see all the Amer­i­cans singing aloud Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s song !

I will always remem­ber them. The first Amer­i­cans I met. We were bound to hate each other in a coun­try none of us, for­eign­ers, truly under­stood. Talk about a cul­ture shock !

After all, we were French. And French don’t work but always sur­ren­der, French are rude to for­eign­ers, arro­gant, ungrate­ful and con­ceited. French must love China since they live in a bureau­cratic Social­ist sys­tem where they totally depend on that State to sur­vive. And above all, French don’t use soap. Gross. Just gross.

Really ? Well, why would we use extra-soap for arro­gant mor­al­iz­ing Amer­i­cans ? I mean, these peo­ple have no his­tory and they keep on shoot­ing each other when things go wrong, right ? And what were these cap­i­tal­ist war­mon­gers doing in China any­way ? Spy­ing for the West bloc ?

The only thing we both agreed on was we couldn’t really trust the Chi­nese. We couldn’t really argue with them cause, well, you know, they’re pretty good at Kung Fu and were all trained in Shaolin tem­ple some­where up in the foggy moun­tains of Tibet. Besides, they all had been brain­washed into wor­ship­ping Chair­man Mao. Damn Com­mu­nists. Oops, did I say that aloud ? Watch for micro­phone, I don’t wanna end up in a Xianjiang’s jail !

Mind you, Chi­nese would have had their rea­sons to stay away from us. Mostly cause you know, for­eign­ers are just in Uni­ver­sity for fun and they don’t actu­ally study. They hate their fam­i­lies too, they have no respect for their par­ents. But hey, we take pity on them. I mean, they live in a very dan­ger­ous world were they shoot each other all the time and go on war for no rea­son. Man, they are stu­pid, aren’t they !

But we had to live together like a mini United Nation. The rooms were small at the Uni­ver­sity and we had to share every­thing : show­ers, bath­rooms, mat­tresses… yes, mat­tress, cause beds were hard as a rock and some of us had man­aged to steal extra-mattresses from Yan Laoshi, the jan­i­tor. We were all woken up by the con­struc­tions in front of the build­ing at 5 am and we would meet each other on the steps of main entrance, still sleepy. We smoked the weed we picked in Beijing’s main parks – humid Chi­nese sum­mers does mir­a­cle when it comes to this kind of prod­uct. None of us had rolling paper so we had adopted the Hui’s tech­nique : we rolled a sheet of news­pa­per in a cone. Yes, I smoked the ????, the People’s Daily News­pa­per. No, I was Social­ist before, it wasn’t a side effect.

We sure teased each other. But it turned out the Amer­i­cans really didn’t bring any guns with them. And they seemed to enjoy tak­ing pic­ture of old build­ing cause they didn’t have many of these at home, so we couldn’t really blame them, right ? You won’t believe it, but some of them were bor­der­line Com­mu­nists too !

So we com­pro­mised. We used extra soap (since it was l’Oréal, the Amer­i­cans though we were actu­ally really posh) and stopped both­er­ing every­one about the fact we were once the cen­ter of the world. We quite enjoyed learn­ing US slang too.

***
It’s 1am and I’m lying on the couch, watch­ing CNN. And I sud­denly had this crazy though. What if we sent all our polit­i­cal and reli­gious lead­ers on a desert island ? Forced to live together. Forced to learn about each other. Forced to find com­pro­mise. Like us, in China.

Related arti­cles:

1. Another World
2. Another World Is Possible