For my family in exile, too, the sign made sense, in part because we didn't do anything to celebrate the fourth. People didn't barbecue in their apartments in Paris, and most other Americans I know who settled here repressed their legacy of such outward signs, or they went home for summer vacations to refuel.
Our kids think flag-hanging is a cool thing to do, and I like it because it gives our family a few minutes of Q&A on our citizenship. My wife and I have been out of the U.S. for nine years, and our kids eleven point nine, so U.S. history is mostly stuff they've learned, or not learned, from their parents. The Fourth of July is one of those times when America is in a period where I feel uneasy about the understanding in my children, the great trapdoor sting of who they are, and the prompting to try to fill in the gaps at home. It's also a time when people many times turn my thoughts more generally to the costs and benefits of parenting in an alien culture.
Louis Henri spoke fluent French; they taught French at school and most of their friends were French. They went from language to language, rarely combining them, effortlessly, even consciously. This, of course, is a wonderful thing. And the physical separation from our own homeland is not much of a problem. My wife and I are thankful every day for all that our children will not be exposed to. American school shootings are a lesson for us that our distance keeps society's stupid kids a good target.
Of course, we also want to remind the reason they are proud to be American and try to convey to them what that means. It's a hard thing to do from a distance, and the distance seems more than miles just a matter of sooner or later. I sometimes think that the stories we tell them have to seem like Aesop's (or La Fontaine's) fables, myths that have no fixed place in space or time. But there are connections that can be made, lessons to be learned.
In a period of early experimentation with truth and lies Henry became mesmerized by George Washington's tale of chopping down a cherry tree. A few years ago, a thoughtful godfather gifted the children with a series of wonderful short biographies of different American figures: Elkhart, Jackie Robinson, Abraham Lincoln. These books enable us to trace a bit of American history and trumpet the virtues of American-style courage.
From the archives:
"One Revolutionary Route" (April 2001)
A British tour of historic battlefields in Massachusetts and New York. by Jeffrey Wheatcroft
Last summer we spent a week with my brother and his family, who live in Concord, Massachusetts, and we took the kids up to Northbridge to give them a glimpse of the American Revolutionary War. We happened to be across the run of the outposts that were reformatted to wage the war, and everyone was dressed up in three tricorn hats, hats of cotton. This may just confirm the quality of our goggle-eyed kids' American history make-up beliefs.
Six months later, when we were looking back on our experience here at the family table, I asked Louise what the revolution had been about. She thought it had something to do with the man who rode his horse around town. Ah, I said, Satisfaction is churning my breasts, and what was that man's name? "Gulliver?" Louise said. Henry, part of him, he knew the revolution was between the English and the Americans, and thought it might be about slavery.
As we pursued this conversation, though, we learned what the kids know right. Louis tells us that the Enlightenment, which came from the French Revolution, ended when people learned a lot of ideas, one being that they didn't need a king to tell them what they were thinking or doing. On another occasion, when Henri asked what makes a person "junior" or "bis" or "trois," Louise helped me by putting the likes of Louis Quatorze and Quinze and grabbing the king to answer; Henri answered; Louise told us that at the end of the French Revolution, people learned a lot of ideas, one being that they didn't need a king to tell them what to think or do. and caught the king answering; Henry with riposted Henry VIII.
I can't say I worry much about the children's European frame of reference. There will be plenty of time for everyone to learn a pitifully brief history of America and find out who Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt were. They already know a lot more about Bill Clinton than I would have liked.
If all this ****ing chirps with me, it's probably because my family moved to Paris in 1954, when I was three, and I was enrolled in a French school for most of my grades - the school year. I don't remember studying many instructions at school or at home American. I remember my mother taking me out of school one afternoon to see the movie Oklahoma! I remember as if there was something far away: all the sunny squares dancing, surreys with edges above. Sinister Jude Frye evil incarnate for me long afterward. Cowboys and Indians thought to have reached Paris through the cinematic clichés of America, and I asked my grandfather to give me Davy Crockett's hat so that I could live out the fairy tale against the backdrop of the gray post-war Montparnasse.
While my children live in the same place and at roughly the same time in their lives, their experience as expats is very different from mine. Outside of the particular narratives of American history, American culture is not just theirs, but their classmates in France, too (as is the culture of Japan, embodied in Pokémon). The music they listen to is either "American" or "European", but it's often hard to tell the difference. In my day a little French-speaking kids looked like anything less than other kids in France (we wore blue overalls in school); but Louise and Henri and their classmates dressed like their American peers did, but probably not as politely 'end fluffy. When I went back to visit America in the 1950s, it was a five-day ocean crossing with a month's vacation home every two years; now we fly over for a week or two, though not very often. Virtually every conceivable product offered to the children of their American cousins is now available here.
If time and globalization have made France more like the United States than it was in my youth, I can conclude a few things. On the one hand, our children are facing a more discordant cultural divide than I did, and they have more access to their native culture. Re-entry, when it comes, will likely be smoother. On the other hand, they are less than fully immersed in a truly foreign world. This experience no longer seems possible in the West, a sad development, in my opinion.
Last spring, Louise was in a fourth-grade bilingual "Spectacle" about American history that was designed to help the class travel to the United States for three weeks, where the students lived together with an American family and went to school in a typical American town to prepare for Clinton, N.Y., as it happened. The play, written by their teacher, gives Louise and her classmates a uniquely French gloss on the story of America, with the precipitation of North America beginning with the rediscovery by the Indians crossing the Bering Strait and the rapid forwarding to the continent when King Fran?ois I of France sent Cartier to explore North America. Then came the Boston Tea Dump. The Civil War was a solemn affair. Indians were genocided. Two world wars took place. The end of the saga depicts the era of Grease; Louise is forcibly converted into a blonde lead, Sandy and Lip Sync's song about Summer Nights in a place remotely hers for Oklahoma is Me.
As the trip approached, my family was in the final stages of deciding whether to remain in Paris or move back to the United States. Louise was worried about talking publicly about things American and about the possibility that her hopelessly backward ignorance might make her go to the United States in favor of "home". I privately worried that her exposure to idyllic American towns might make the decision to stay in Paris, my first choice of course, a harder sell. But it worked around the other way. Louise had a wonderful, unforgettable time in upstate New York. She was back in the familiar world of Paris with her curiosity satisfied, content to stay here for a while. So it comes to pass.