A Completely Unrequited Affair

Translation and other inheritances.

By Lily Ouellet

Illustration by Selin Ho

French may be the language of love, but for me it was always a completely unrequited affair. Between my dry, stretched-out winters spent in Quebec, and harsh, humid summers in Louisiana, the language never quite sank in. Childhood trips to Quebec were long, bookended by the familiar exhaustion of transnational travel, where the snow fell dry and light and the sky flattened early into a grey that clung to the buildings of the old city. There, French swirled around me, existing only as soft voices pooling, unlike home in Louisiana where the French is noticeably harsher, choppier, and sounds best in a gravelly voice. We would gather in relatives’ houses and talk. Or rather, they talked.

I always understood some. I had, after all, spent days in school absorbing classroom-related vocabulary and conjugation charts. But unlike my younger cousins who have always glided easily between French and English, I recognized French words but not the shapes they took together, the small shifts of tone or the casual Quebecois contractions that make it sound alive. For them, the two languages lived together in the structurally bilingual cities of Ottawa and Montreal. For me, they lived on opposite sides of a very wide, fast-moving river. 

Alone in Louisiana, when my dad spoke in French, I would cry or scream until he stopped. My brother slipped into fluency by some plasticity of the brain that I lacked; the hope of my parents was that I would hear enough to shape the sounds instinctively, as he had done. I instead rejected what little was given, accepting only the fragments that already lived in me—half-formed, mostly domestic, my dad’s tired commands and Quebecois swears. But these never cohered into fluency, floating separate and inefficient. When I try to force them out, the attempts come out inelegantly like a cat coughing up hairballs, involuntary and vaguely embarrassing. 

…

Despite the fluency of my brother, my French deficiency didn’t become apparent to me until middle school, when my French teacher, a strict Belgian woman, approached my desk. She had a stiff white bob that hovered around her face when she walked, and the sharp lines of her face made smiling seem anatomically impossible. She frightened me so deeply that my body flushed before every class, a red stain crawling up my back and, if I was unlucky, onto my neck and face. It was a lesson on depuis. 

Depuis combien de temps apprends-tu le français? She asked. How long have you been learning french? 

Depuis cinquième année, I choked out, the rash already showing itself on my cheeks. Since fifth grade.

She dismissed it. Unsure of where to go next, I tried the same phrase embedded in a full sentence, to no avail. She waved me off, sharp and final. I opened my mouth like a fish. Tu apprends le français depuis toujours, she said. Depuis ta naissance. Since you were born.

There is a particular hell reserved for language classrooms, but this was a special kind of low. How had I ended up here, paired with kids who started a year ago? There were other sixth graders already in French IV, I thought clumsily, while my so-called native tongue remained several paces behind. Even now, at Columbia, it seems every fifth person was sent to a Lycée somewhere, with vineyards in Provence or Nice or wherever the weather is good for grapes. 

…

Early this summer we went to Quebec, due to my dad’s belated admission that he despises snow, cold, and ice. It was also my grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday, and marked ten years since my dad had seen his family or boarded a plane. Aside from my eight-week stay in Quebec City the summer before college (another well-intentioned but failed attempt at French immersion), none of us had returned. We were now all to gather in a discount winter ski-lodge just north of Quebec City. 

This trip worried me immensely. Would everyone expect that Barnard’s Intermediate French I and II had done what family, childhood, and geography could not? In the Chicago airport, as we were waiting on our connection to Montreal, each time the speaker went off I would try to translate the announcement before the gate agent. Perhaps knowing how to say boarding soon would lead, eventually, to a real conversation. I spent the plane ride going over everything I might need to say, verb tenses and conditionals I had learned but long forgotten. I checked the small amount of slang I knew with my mom. 

My parents and I pulled up to the lodge in a rental Nissan. Everyone hugged us, teared-up, and maneuvered around the awkwardness of elapsed years quite easily. Yet despite my efforts, my mouth locked up, as if the presence of this family, who had known me long before I had any words at all, made all phrases retreat. My French teacher materialized over my shoulder, arms-crossed with an infinite spectral judgement. Suddenly stripped of any bravery, I instinctively reverted to my usual habits. I didn’t want to confess, not with my silence, and certainly not out loud, how stubbornly the language resisted me. So, they spoke to me in French, and I responded in English. It was, in this sense, familiar. 

…

At breakfast, the smoke from the bacon continued to set off the fire alarm. Every half minute, its wail pierced the room with a sharp, synthetic shriek, and every half minute I had to wave a thick, folded towel beneath the detector to make it stop. I spent this time trying to digest where the conversation was going. This was the real work. 

The best possible outcome was if my dad, who speaks the most and the loudest, began to tell a story in which I was there. If I could understand his setup, I could parse out the punchline, prepare to laugh at the correct word, and show the appropriate expression of amusement. If I could keep pace without any sort of translation, it was enough of a victory, a demonstration that I can belong with simply good timing and pattern recognition. After successfully pulling off this maneuver several times, thanking god for my dad’s fondness of a good retelling, I felt a surge of pride. 

But this safety net quickly dissolved the moment my dad ran out of stories. With no shared history to hold me, I was back to catching fragments and nodding haphazardly. I began to count minutes at the table until I could leave. I knew it was shameful that I wanted to escape from breakfasts with my perfectly pleasant family—but at what level would I ever know them if we never communicated? A relationship can only go so far through nods and smiles, I thought pitifully. I complained to my mom that night, drained from continuous translation: “They’ll never know who I am in English,” I said. Her lips turned downward, confused at my admission: “What are you talking about? They already do.” 

It seemed no one could figure out exactly how much I understood; I hung in linguistic purgatory, stuck somewhere between fluency and not. Because of this, my cousins took on the role of translator, a role for which I was eternally grateful, flicking their eyes toward me mid-sentence to see if I needed help. My dad began paraphrasing entire anecdotes in advance. Sometimes, someone would say something that made the entire table erupt with laughter, and then, when the moment passed, my dad would turn to me: “Did you get that?” I’d shake my head the smallest I could, the shame in admitting my fake-laughter burning into my cheeks. “Fourrer is like, quebecois for ‘doing it.’” he’d say. My father translated sex jokes just for me. 

…

I was so afraid of confirming, once and for all, that I didn’t belong, that I was never fooling anyone. Elegance in a universal language I didn’t speak wasn’t exactly something I could fake—my hefty American accent, my hesitation, and the way I laughed slightly too early at everything weren't hiding anything. My family saw through every feeble attempt I made at perfect fluency, which was obvious by the way they continued to sporadically translate for me even though I naively thought I appeared to understand everything.

Everyone looked out for me and did seem to know the exact amount I understood. This wasn’t because I was performing well, but because they already knew me “in English.” I was too anxious to see it—I wanted to prove that since I’d studied French my entire life, I had something to show for it. But no one was ever waiting for proof, as they already understood what I knew and adjusted, not in pity, but in our own language, meeting me where I was. My uncle brought me the desserts I liked, warm cookies from their cherished family bakery, and my cousins curled up with me and watched English Top Gun. My aunt took visible delight in the use of French idioms, pausing each time to turn to me and explain what they meant.

After a few days, I began to look forward to my personal translations. What I once saw as an acute marker of failure began to feel like a fluency of another kind. I began to notice everyone more in their languages, just like they noticed me, the rhythm of their laughs and small beats before silence. My dad moves his arms more when he speaks French, and enunciates less; my brother always sounds mildly surprised and tilts his head slightly upward. My cousin has a tendency to begin yelling mid-story, or laugh so hard that she has trouble even getting it out. I can now read stories through their hands alone. It is, aptly named, our language of love.