Neither can the child’s parents. That’s because saying bonjour is also a strong marker of upbringing. Kids who don’t say the French magic words risk being slapped with the label mal élevé—badly brought up.
Denise says her younger daughter had a friend over who shouted quite a lot and jokingly called Denise chérie—darling. “I told my husband, I will not invite him back,” she tells me. “I don’t want my child to play with children who are badly brought up.”
Audrey Goutard, the journalist, has written a book called Le Grand Livre de la Famille, in which she tries to upend some French parenting conventions. But even Goutard doesn’t dare question the importance of bonjour. “Honestly, in France, a child who arrives somewhere and doesn’t say bonjour, monsieur; bonjour, madame is a child that one rejects,” she tells me. “A six-year-old who doesn’t look up from the TV when you come in, at a friend’s house . . . I’m going to say that he is ‘badly raised.’ I won’t say that it’s normal.
“We’re a society with a lot of codes. And this code, if you don’t follow it, you’re excluded from society. It’s as stupid as that. So you give [your kids] less of a chance to be integrated, to meet people. I say in my book that it’s better that your kids know this code.”
Yikes. I’d vaguely noticed French kids saying bonjour. But I hadn’t realized how much rests on it. It’s the sort of signifier that having nice teeth is in the United States. When you say bonjour, it shows that someone has invested in your upbringing and that you’re going to play by some basic social rules. Bean’s cohort of three- and four-year-olds has already had several years’ worth of bonjours drilled into them. Bean hasn’t had any. With only “please” and “thank you” in her arsenal, she’s at just 50 percent. She might have already earned the dreaded label “badly brought up.”
I try to appeal to the tiny anthropologist in her by explaining that bonjour is a native custom she has to respect.
“We live in France, and for French people it’s very important to say bonjour. So we have to say it, too,” I say. I coach her in the elevator before we arrive at birthday parties and at visits to the homes of French friends.
“What are you going to say when we walk in?” I ask anxiously.
“Caca boudin,” she says.
Usually when we walk in, she says nothing at all. So I go through the ritual of, very publicly, telling her to say bonjour. At least I’m acknowledging the convention. Maybe I’m even instilling the habit.
One day while Bean and I are walking to her school, she spontaneously turns to me and says, “Even if I’m shy, I have to say bonjour.” Maybe it’s something she picked up in school. Anyway, it’s true. And it’s good that she knows it. But I can’t help worrying that she’s internalizing the rules a bit too much. It’s one thing to play at being French. It’s quite another to really go native.
• • •
Although I’m ambivalent about Bean growing up French, I’m thrilled that she’s growing up bilingual. Simon and I speak only English to her. And at school, she speaks only French. I’m sometimes astonished that I’ve given birth to a child who can effortlessly pronounce phrases like carottes rapées and confiture sur le beurre.
I had thought that young kids just “pick up” languages. But it’s more like a long process of trial and error. A few people tell me that Bean’s French still has an American twang. And though Bean has never lived outside the Paris ring road, thanks to us she evidently radiates some kind of Americanness. When I take her to her Wednesday-morning music class one day (the babysitter usually takes her), I discover that the teacher has been speaking to Bean in pidgin English, though she speaks French to all the other children. Later, a dance teacher tells the class of little girls, in French, to lie down flat on the floor “comme une crêpe”—like a crepe. Then she turns to Bean and says, “comme un pancake.”
At first, even I can tell that Bean is making lots of mistakes in French and coming up with some bizarre constructions. She usually says the English “for” instead of its French equivalent, “pour.” And she knows only the vocabulary that she’s learned in the classroom, which doesn’t really equip her to talk about cars or dinner. One day she suddenly asks me, “Avion is the same as airplane?” She’s figuring it out.
I’m not sure which mistakes come from being bilingual and which come from being three or four years old. One day in the metro, Bean leans into me and says, “You smell like vomela.” This turns out to be a combination of “vomit” and “Pamela.”
A minute later Bean leans into me again.
“What do I smell like now?” I ask.
“Like college,” she says.
At home, some French expressions edge out the English ones. We start saying coucou instead of “peekaboo,” and guili-guili when we tickle her, instead of “coochi coochi coo.” Bean doesn’t play hide-and-seek, she plays cache-cache. We put our garbage in the poubelle; her pacifier is a tétine. No one in our household farts, they make prouts (rhymes with “roots”).
By the spring of Bean’s first year in maternelle, friends tell me that her American twang is gone. She sounds like a genuine Parisienne. She’s become so confident in French that I overhear her joking around with friends, in French, in an exaggerated American accent (probably mine). She likes to mix up the two accents on purpose, and decides that the French word for “sprinkles” must be “shpreenkels.”
Me: How do you say d’accord in English?
Bean: You know! [sounding like an Alabaman] Dah-kord.
My father finds the idea of having a “French” grandchild charming. He tells Bean to call him grand-père. Bean doesn’t even consider doing this. She knows he’s not French. She just calls him Grandpa.
At night Bean and I look at picture books. She’s excited and relieved to confirm that, as with “airplane,” certain words in French and English refer to the same thing. When we read the famous line in the Madeline books, “Something is not right!” she translates it into colloquial French: “Quelque chose ne va pas!”
Although Simon has an English accent, Bean’s English sounds mostly American. I’m not sure if that’s my influence or Elmo’s. The other Anglophone kids we know in Paris all have their own accents. Bean’s friend with a dad from New Zealand and a mother who’s half-Irish sounds full-on British. A boy with a Parisian mother and a Californian dad sounds like a French chef from 1970s American television. The little boy around the corner with a Farsi-speaking father and an Australian mom just sounds like a creaky Muppet.
In English, Bean occasionally emphasizes the wrong syllables of words (the second syllable of “salad,” for example). And she sometimes puts English sentences into a French word order (“Me, I’m not going to have an injection, me”) or translates literally from French to English (“Because it’s like that!”). She tends to say “after” when what she means is “later.” (In French they’re the same word, après.)
Sometimes Bean just doesn’t know how native English speakers talk. In a weird appropriation of all the Disney princess DVDs she’s been watching, when she wants to know if something looks good on her, she simply asks, “Am I the fairest?” These are all small things. There’s nothing that a summer at an American sleepaway camp won’t fix.
Another French word that infiltrates our English vocabulary is bêtise (pronounced beh-teeze). It means a small act of naughtiness. When Bean stands up at the table, grabs an unauthorized piece of candy, or pitches a pea on the floor, we say that she’s “doing a bêtise.” Bêtises are minor annoyances. They’re bad, but they’re not that bad. The accumulation of many of them may warrant a punishment. But just one bêtise on its own probably doesn’t.
We’ve appropriated the French word because there’s no good English translation of bêtise. In English, you wouldn’t tell a child that he’s committed a “small act of naughtiness.” We tend to label the kid rather than the crime, by telling him that he’s being naugh
ty, misbehaving, or just “being bad.”
These phrases don’t really show the severity of the act. Of course, in English, I know the difference between hitting the table and hitting a person. But being able to label an offense as a misdemeanor—a mere bêtise—helps me, as a parent, to respond appropriately. I don’t have to freak out and crack down every time Bean does something wrong or challenges my authority. Sometimes it’s just a bêtise. Having this word calms me down.
• • •
I acquire much of my new French vocabulary not just from Bean but from the many French kids’ books we somehow end up owning, thanks to birthday parties, impulse purchases, and neighbors’ garage sales. I’m careful not to read to Bean in French if there’s a native speaker within earshot. I can hear my American accent and the way I stumble over the odd word. Usually I’m trying so hard not to mispronounce anything too egregiously that I grasp the story line only on the third reading.
I soon notice that French and English kids’ books and songs aren’t just in different languages. Often, they have very different story lines and moral messages. In the American books there’s usually a problem, a struggle to fix the problem, and then a cheerful resolution. The spoon wishes that she were a fork or a knife but eventually realizes how great it is to be a spoon. The boy who wouldn’t let the other kids play in his box is then excluded from the box himself and realizes that all the kids should play in the box together. Lessons are learned, and life gets better.
It’s not just the books. I notice how deliriously hopeful I sound when I sing to Bean about how if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands, and, when we’re watching a DVD of the musical Annie, how the sun’ll come out tomorrow. In the English-speaking world, every problem seems to have a solution, and prosperity is just around the corner.
The French books I read to Bean start out with a similar structure. There’s a problem, and the characters struggle to overcome that problem. But they seldom succeed for very long. Often the book ends with the protagonist having the same problem again. There is rarely a moment of personal transformation, when everyone learns and grows.
One of Bean’s favorite French books is about two pretty little girls who are cousins and best friends. Eliette (the redhead) is always bossing around Alice (the brunette). One day Alice decides she can’t take it anymore and stops playing with Eliette. There’s a long, lonely standoff. Finally Eliette comes to Alice’s house, begging her pardon and promising to change. Alice accepts the apology. A page later, the girls are playing doctor and Eliette is trying to jab Alice with a syringe. Nothing has changed. The end.
Not all French kids’ books end this way, but a lot of them do. The message is that endings don’t have to be tidy to be happy. It’s a cliché about Europeans, but you can see it in the morals of Bean’s French stories: Life is ambiguous and complicated. There aren’t bad guys and good guys. Each of us has a bit of both. Eliette is bossy, but she’s also lots of fun. Alice is the victim, but she also seems to ask for it, and she goes back for more.
We’re to presume that Eliette and Alice keep up their little dysfunctional cycle, because, well, that’s what a friendship between two girls is like. I wish I had known that when I was four, instead of finally figuring it out in my thirties. Writer Debra Ollivier points out that American girls pick the petals off daisies saying, “He loves me, he loves me not.” Whereas little French girls allow for more subtle varieties of affection, saying, “He loves me a little, a lot, passionately, madly, not at all.”2
Characters in French kids’ books can have contradictory qualities. In one of Bean’s Perfect Princess books, Zoé opens a present and declares that she doesn’t like it. But on the next page, Zoé is a “perfect princess” who jumps up and says merci to the gift giver.
If there were an American version of this book, Zoé would probably overcome her bad habits and morph fully into the perfect princess. The French book is more like real life: Zoé continues to struggle with both sides of her personality. The book tries to encourage princesslike habits (there’s a little certificate at the end for good behavior) but takes for granted that kids also have a built-in impulse to do bêtises.
There is also a lot of nudity and love in French books for four-year-olds. Bean has a book about a boy who accidentally goes to school naked. She has another about a romance between the boy who accidentally pees in his pants and the little girl who lends him her pants while fashioning her bandana into a skirt. These books—and the French parents I know—treat the crushes and romances of preschoolers as genuine.
• • •
I get to know a few people who grew up in France with American parents. When I ask whether they feel French or American, they almost all say that it depends on the context. They feel American when they’re in France and French when they’re in America.
Bean seems headed for something similar. I’m able to transmit some American traits, like whining and sleeping badly, with little effort. But others require a lot of work. I begin picking off certain American holidays, based mainly on the amount of cooking each one requires. Halloween is a keeper. Thanksgiving is out. Fourth of July is close enough to Bastille Day (July 14) that I sort of feel like we’re celebrating both. I’m not sure what constitutes classically “American” food, but I am strangely adamant that Bean should like tuna melts.
Making Bean feel a bit American is hard enough. On top of that, I’d also like her to feel Jewish. Though I put her on the no-pork list at school, this apparently isn’t enough to cement her religious identity. She keeps trying to get a grip on what this strange, anti-Santa label means and how she can get out of it.
“I don’t want to be Jewish, I want to be British,” she announces in early December.
I’m reluctant to mention God. I fear that telling her there’s an omnipotent being everywhere—including, presumably, in her room—would terrify her. (She’s already afraid of witches and wolves.) Instead, in the spring, I prepare an elegant Passover dinner. Halfway through the first benediction, Bean begs to leave the table. Simon sits at the far end with a sullen, “I told you so” look. We slurp our matzo-ball soup, then turn on some Dutch football.
Hanukah is a big success. The fact that Bean is six months older probably helps. So do the candles and the presents. What really wins over Bean is that we sing and dance the hora in our living room, then collapse in a dizzy circle.
But after eight nights of this, and eight carefully selected presents, she’s still skeptical.
“Hanukah is over, we’re not Jewish anymore,” she tells me. She wants to know whether Father Christmas—aka the “Père Noël” she’s been hearing about in school—will be coming to our house. On Christmas Eve, Simon insists on setting out shoes with presents in front of our fireplace. He claims he’s loosely following the Dutch cultural tradition, not the religious one (the Dutch put out shoes on December fifth). Bean is ecstatic when she wakes up and sees the shoes, even though the only thing in them is a cheap yo-yo and some plastic scissors.
“Père Noël doesn’t usually visit the Jewish children, but he came to our house this year!” she chirps. After that, when I pick her up at school, our conversations usually go something like this:
Me: What did you do at school today?
Bean: I ate pork.
As long as we’re foreign, it’s not a bad idea to be native English speakers. English is, of course, the language du jour in France. Most Parisians under forty can speak it at least passably. Bean’s teacher asks me and a Canadian dad to come in one morning to read some English-language books out loud to the kids in Bean’s class. Several of Bean’s friends take English lessons. Their parents coo about how lucky Bean is to be bilingual.
But there’s a downside to having foreign parents. Simon always reminds me that, as a child in Holland, he cringed when his parents spoke Dutch in public. I’m reminded of that when, at the year-end concert at Bean’s preschool, parents
are invited to join in for a few songs. Most of the other parents know the words. I mumble along, hoping that Bean doesn’t notice.
It’s clear that I will have to compromise between the American identity I’d like to give Bean and the French one she is quickly absorbing. I get used to her calling Cinderella Cendrillon and Snow White Blanche-Neige. I laugh when she tells me that a boy in her class likes Speederman—complete with a gutteral “r”—instead of Spider-Man. But I draw the line when she claims that the seven dwarfs sing “Hey ho,” as they do in the French voice-over. Some things are sacred.
Luckily, it turns out that bits of Anglophone culture are irresistibly catchy.
As I’m walking Bean to school one morning, through the glorious medieval streets of our neighborhood, she suddenly starts singing “The sun’ll come out, tomorrow.” We sing it together all the way to school. My hopeful little American girl is still in there.
• • •
I finally decide to ask some French adults about this mysterious word, caca boudin. They’re tickled that I’m taking caca boudin so seriously. It turns out that it is a swear word, but one that’s just for little kids. They pick it up from one another around the time that they start learning to use the toilet.
Saying caca boudin is a little bit of a bêtise. But parents understand that that’s the joy of it. It’s a way for kids to thumb their noses at the world and to transgress. The adults I speak to recognize that since children have so many rules and limits, they need some freedom, too. Caca boudin gives kids power and autonomy. Bean’s former teacher Anne-Marie smiles indulgently when I ask her about caca boudin. “It’s part of the environment,” she explains. “We said it when we were little, too.”
That doesn’t mean that children can say caca boudin whenever they want. The parenting guide Votre Enfant suggests telling kids they can say bad words only when they’re in the bathroom. Some parents tell me they ban such words from the dinner table. They don’t forbid kids from saying caca boudin; they teach them to wield it appropriately.
Bringing Up Bébé Page 18
