The woman went abroad and began to lose her grip on things. She tried to tell her mother on the phone, but the connection was poor.
“I’m losing my grip on things,” she said, several times. She imagined her voice trembling thinly across the Atlantic.
The voice on the phone crackled, “What kind of things?”
She did not know how to explain. First, she had lost all her marbles—milky blue, clear with purple spirals, even her least favorite, yellow and red, twined garishly together. One morning she saw them from her window, rolling down the hill into the ocean, one by one.
Then she had lost her passport. It had simply walked off one night, climbing out of her nightstand and leaving only its clear plastic folder behind.
She was a woman without origin.
***
The woman had wanted to get away from the ocean but the town she had been sent to was a seaside town. It was very small, on the west coast of France. All the buildings were gray and boxy and only two or three stories high. Because of the bombs during the war, people said. She had not imagined France would look this way. Her guidebook had pictures of tall buildings, carved from soft beige stone with curly iron railings.
The apartment she lived in was cold and damp and opened up to the weak north sun. Her bedroom overlooked the tangle of her neighbor Pierre’s garden. He was an old widower who had been taken onto navy ships when he was twelve. His job had been to cook and clean for the soldiers. He still liked to bake squid folded around minced pork and onion and invited the woman to try it. The white flesh was as tender as a baby, so soft she could cut through it with a spoon. Afterward, she sat in his kitchen and listened to him talk about the Germans. People in the town remembered the war as though it had happened not so long ago.
Every time Pierre saw her walk by his house, he cried, “Ah, la jolie Chinoise!” and waved his garden shears, like a metal bird snipping the sky.
***
She lived with a French woman named Nadine who had felt her name was too bourgeois, so she renamed herself Zada. She tried to ask Zada for help.
“I’m losing my grip on things. I used to have—I don’t know how to say marbles in French. Marbles?” she tried, in a bad French accent.
Zada gripped her by the shoulders and said very slowly, “Materialism is a farce.” Then she brewed her an herbal infusion. She was always making infusions.
In the evenings, Zada made her watch documentaries on slaughterhouses and the fate of honeybees. She disparaged Americans. The woman took to disparaging America, too, in a voice like she had never been to the place but had only heard terrible things about it on the news.
“Those Americans,” she would say and shake her head, sipping from her dandelion-root infusion.
But sometimes, during a segment about a particular place, like Florida or Arizona, the woman would accidentally nod and say, “Oh, I went there when I was ten” or “Phoenix is such a vibrant city.”
Zada would look very disappointed so she would quickly add, “Just kidding.”
***
On the walls were masks from Africa, photographs of temples in Asia, textiles from Latin America. Spider plants and anti-fascist flyers crept along the walls. The woman did not mind, not at all. It was only that she had imagined her French apartment to have a different kind of aesthetic. Like the pictures in her guidebook, of checkered tablecloths and posters of dusty absinthe bottles.
“Is your family Buddhist? Taoist?” Zada wanted to know, a pair of chopsticks rising from the nest of her coiled dreadlocks. She looked at the woman as if she wanted to climb inside her.
The woman’s family was not, but she nodded yes.
“Both? Fascinating. Your people’s religion is far more peaceful than that of Western countries. Zada petted a dreadlock. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Can you feng shui the living room?”
The woman rotated a few chairs and dragged a potted plant to the other side of the room, where there was little sunlight.
“Does the . . . chi energy feel different?” she asked hopefully.
***
The woman was going to teach English at the little primary school that faced the town’s main square. When she arrived, she was given a tour. The sinks were troughs wide enough for horses, and the windows had neither bars nor screens. She had an image of herself leaning out an open window to suck in the briny air and tumbling down to the black pavement. Then she laughed; what a silly thing to imagine.
In the cafeteria, the children delicately buttered their bread rolls and patted their pursed mouths with cloth napkins. The woman burped on accident, having much enjoyed the blanquette de veau and the creamy cut of Camembert, and the children had gasped at her, horrified.
She began teaching in October. Her students were named after the ocean, cherries, clementines, Greek gods. On her first day, Océane and Clémentine pointed at her and pulled the corners of their eyes into slits. The woman pretended not to notice.
For an hour, she performed for the children: yodeling the alphabet, gesturing rather obscenely with flash cards, tap dancing out the various uses of the simple present tense. She had been sent to France from America through a government program, and she took her job very seriously.
Hippolyte whispered to Cérise, “Is this English class or Chinese class?”
“They’re just curious. Ce n’est pas méchant,” the head teacher Madame Joulot said afterward. She was a dumpling-shaped woman obsessed with her French bulldog, whose pictures were strung all over the classroom. “That reminds me. On Wednesdays the children have free time for extracurricular activities. Do you know Tai Chi? No? What about origami?”
***
The woman felt that her guidebook had cheated her, a little. It had not told her to brush up on Eastern religions. Nowhere in its pages had it suggested that learning feng shui, tai chi, or how to make origami would be required of her. The guidebook had mentioned strolling in outdoor markets, fondling plump figs, enjoying pastries named after important French presidents. But Zada said eating processed sugar was the same as inviting cancer into her body, so the woman stopped bringing sweets home. She began eating more nuts and difficult-to-digest grains.
At night she lay on her bed, a lumpy mattress placed on wooden pallets, and gazed at the slice of moon in the sky, wondering what kind of person she was supposed to be now that she had gone abroad.
***
The woman was losing her sense of left from right, Celsius from Fahrenheit, metric from imperial. She would memorize the hours for the pharmacy (open from seven to eight thirty a.m., then three thirty to five fifteen p.m.) only to discover that the bank was closed six days out of the week, not to mention the seven Catholic holidays in one month, and she would have to start planning her days all over again. To the authorities, her little notebook might have looked suspicious, with too many anxious arrows and circles and slashes.
Often she would be walking along a road when she saw a poster for a film, an American one, and a feeling like vertigo would whip through her. She would have to rest and lean against a lamp pole until she felt well again. The film’s title would be in English, except it would be different from the American title. Very Bad Trip. Sex Friends.
She started carrying motion-sickness pills in her purse.
In November, she asked Zada where she might buy some new socks. She was deposited in a vast shopping center next to the highway, where she drifted from Subway to McDonald’s, before finding herself inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken. An uncensored Jay-Z song thumped loudly through the empty restaurant. She stared at the menu for a long time, which featured only sandwiches, and announced, firmly, “Je voudrais des biscuits.” She missed biscuits very much.
The young man behind the counter frowned and handed her a chocolate chip cookie wrapped in wax paper. She thought she might cry but instead ate it cautiously, as if there were a plot against her.
She would have to remember to tell her mother on the phone that France was not at all what she had expected.
***
For New Year’s Eve, Zada asked her to come to a party in the forest—everyone was going to dance and bathe in the freezing river, and her friend Jean-Marc was bringing his steel drums.
“Jean-Marc spent nine months living in Thailand. He wants very badly to meet you,” Zada told her, fingering the hem of her cotton áo dài that she had begun wearing around the apartment.
The woman declined and said she had a terrible headache. Alone in the apartment for the first time, she ate hot dogs and popcorn while watching illegally streamed American TV, a reality show where men and women were foolhardy and rash with their emotions but very well dressed.
She awoke the next day with Zada shaking her by the shoulders.
“You left the gas to the stove on,” she screamed. Zada said that maybe the woman wanted to die but just hadn’t realized it yet. The woman thought back to the image of herself falling out of the school window toward the black pavement, and shook her head, laughing a little.
“Mais non,” she said. “I would like to keep on living.”
***
The woman couldn’t figure out French from English anymore. Everyone was saying, “super cool” and “très speed.” They said “le playback” for “lip sync,” which in French seemed to be “to sing in yogurt.” She bought a second notebook.
The woman would start speaking English but felt sure she was speaking French. Or she would definitely be speaking French, and people kept responding to her in English she could not understand. And if they did understand her English, they would ask what accent she had and where she had learned to speak English in the first place. In the middle of these exchanges, sometimes a confused laugh would climb its way up her throat, and then, to avoid people’s gazes, she would start to hum and wander away. She thought they would think she was being a crazy American and it would be all right. It was a very popular belief that Americans were crazy. But after a while she had a difficult time remembering whether or not she was American.
She shouted through the phone, which was more crackly than usual, “Where am I from?”
She thought the line had gone out, but then she heard her mother’s voice from far away say, “Why, America of course—land of the free and home of the brave!”
That sounded distantly familiar to the woman, like a jingle from her childhood.
“Are you sure I’m not from China?”
Her mother’s laugh traveled back faintly to her left ear.
The woman had begun to think her childhood had been invented. It was unlikely that 67 million Frenchmen were wrong. They would not become so upset when she told them where she was from unless they were on to something.
She heard people say, “Mais tu es chinoise. C’est clair! Don’t be ashamed of your origins!” so often that she couldn’t ever remember saying otherwise.
Eventually she learned to save time and say “la Chine” right away when people asked where she was from, but sometimes all she had to do was smile and wave when the grocer or the butcher or the baker hollered “Ni hao!” across the street at her.
When she went to the only museum in town, a museum dedicated to the war, she did not protest when she was automatically handed an audio guide in Chinese. When salespeople bowed to her in shops, she bowed back. Sometimes she even steepled her hands together.
Perhaps because she had made herself more approachable, more likable, the townspeople began to ask her questions. Like what the Great Wall of China was like. She had never been to China, but she began describing in earnest National Geographic episodes she had seen.
“Well…it’s long. It’s really quite long.”
They sucked in their breaths and widened their eyes. “Et quoi d’autre?”
“Width-wise, I have to say it’s also quite long.” “C’est incroyable!”
When she was describing these places she had never been, she would acquire an audience. Passersby clustered around her in the supermarket, her hand stuck in the freezer, still deciding whether or not to buy a 19.99 euro pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. There was only one flavor: Chunky Monkey. A small child stretched his finger out to touch her sweater, then hid behind his mother.
“Et les bébés filles—dites moi, c’est pas vrai que les gens noyent les bébés filles là-bas?”
She felt her fingers turning numb, but she tried to think back to more National Geographic episodes.
“Yes, they do. I believe they, I mean we, drown baby girls,” she said finally. She knew it was the right answer because everyone gasped in a horrified way, but they seemed very happy.
***
Her friend Marnie from college visited in the spring. They had taken French classes together.
“What’s going on with you, Grace? You’re acting funny. Since when do you wear a visor and gloves when it’s sunny out?”
“Stop calling me Grace. Everyone here calls me Xiao-Hua.”
“Why? You’re not Chinese.”
The woman laughed hysterically at this, and they happened to pass her neighbor in his garden.
“Coucou, la jolie chinoise!” Pierre called.
The woman turned to her friend, “See? I told you I’m Chinese.”
Marnie was silent.
“Remember how I lost my passport? Well, I found it again—and it’s from China. It says I was born in Guangdong province. The cover’s dark red. I think it’s pretty.”
Now her friend started to look unwell, like she could use some color in her face. She walked ahead of the woman and licked her salted caramel ice cream rather angrily.
Still, the woman tried to show her friend a good time. They sat on benches and ripped apart bread and cheese, throwing the crumbs to pigeons. They stared at the churning gray-blue ocean. Marnie talked about the people in her life, and the woman listened very carefully.
“Please tell your friend congratulations on his new job,” she said.
Marnie frowned with her mouth open, as if she had just discovered a snail in her salad.
“He’s your friend, too! You know Gregory, from the dorms? Hello—Gregory Crook?”
The woman pulled her lips into a tight smile and offered her friend some more bread, but she could feel Marnie staring at her for what seemed like a long time.
***
On Marnie’s last night in the town by the sea, she took the woman by both arms and squeezed very hard.
“Grace, this place is doing something to you. I need to get you out of here. I’m going to repatriate you—don’t laugh, I’m being serious. I heard about it on a podcast the other day.”
The woman looked at the TV, where an episode of Malcolm in the Middle played.
The actors were speaking French, but their mouths didn’t move in time with the words. She felt a little seasick. She shook Marnie off and went to the kitchen to put various herbs into a pot.
“Wo zuo yige cha,” she said and turned on the kettle.
“What?” Marnie said in a loud voice. “What did you just say?”
Zada stuck her head out from the beaded curtain of her bedroom and said she could feel a strong negative breeze coming from that side of the apartment.
“Do you have any Advil? Or Tylenol?” Marnie asked her, rubbing her temples.
“Would you like to try aural healing instead?” Zada replied, swishing eagerly in her oversized tent pants toward Marnie.
A minute later, Marnie was sighing as Zada clanged a mottled copper bowl around her knees and elbows.
“Taking pharmaceutical drugs is an accepted form of suicide,” Zada explained. “Eastern healing is far less violent, n’est pas Xiao-Hua?”
The woman opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it. She had forgotten to tell Marnie that, three days ago, she had woken up and discovered she could speak Mandarin. When she tried to say toothpaste, it came out yagao; when she tried to say home it came out jia.
The next morning, the woman took Marnie to the train station. Marnie refused to speak to her on the walk over. Then, as the train began to move, she thrust her head out of the window, waving wildly.
“Goodbye, Grace!” she called.
It took a few moments before the woman remembered that that was her name. She turned around to wave goodbye, but she could no longer see her friend.
***
The only time the woman felt she could get a better grip on things was when she walked down to the ocean early in the morning. The beach was empty, and there were no signs, in English or in French, to confuse her. She looked for shiny, glassy objects on the shore. She tried not to think about where she was from or what she looked like. Instead, she focused on how the sand felt under her feet and how the waves somersaulted up and down. She wondered what it was like to just be a person in the world.
She had walked very far one day, all the way to where moss-covered rocks rose up from the ground and the sand gave way to coral and black pebbles. She stopped suddenly and glimpsed a dark blue marble. She reached for it and drew back, the marble not hard and glassy but warm and soft. The water washed over it, and she saw that it was the eye of a large squid. A memory came back to her in a light stabbing sensation—her first memory of seeing the ocean. She must have been four or five. There were bright fish swimming next to the shore, hundreds of them, as if they were in a clear painting. Her father had called for her to come in the water but she had been afraid they were going to bite her toes.
“Don’t be a baby!” he had yelled.
She had said no, and he had taken a photo of her like that, wrapped up in her Bugs Bunny towel, looking like she was going to cry.
What had they been doing in Hawaii? She remembered something about a military base, an endless grocery store with red, white, and blue flags, spam masubi in her lunch box. Had she grown up on a military base in Hawaii?
The squid stared up blankly into the sky.
No, she decided, she had not. That memory did not seem real. It was faded and fuzzy around the edges, not in clear moving pictures like videos on the National Geographic channel. Besides, she had all kinds of new memories—about Beijing and Shanghai, the Yangtze River and the Temple of Heaven. This was part of her new life in France.
Chapter eight of her guidebook said, “Adapting to the culture is imperative to avoid feelings of isolation and homesickness.” That was what she was doing, adapting to the expectations around her. At last the guidebook proved to be useful.
She had gone abroad, and she would be a different person because of it.
Elaine Hsieh Chou is the author of DISORIENTATION. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYFA Artist Fellow, her Pushcart Award-winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares, The Atlantic and elsewhere. Her short story collection WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM is forthcoming from Penguin Press. Find her online at @elainehsiehchou
Photo by Loc Dang