Unit

Unit 6

A French Fourth

Charles Trueheart

1 Along about this time every year, as Independence Day approaches, I pull an

old American flag out of a bottom drawer where it is folded away － folded in a

square, I admit, not the regulation triangle. I’ve had it a long time and have always

flown it outside on July 4. Here in Paris it hangs from a fourth-floor balcony visible

from the street. I’ve never en anyone look up, but in my mind’s eye an American

tourist may notice it and smile, and a French pasrby may be reminded of the date

and the occasion that prompt its appearance. I hope so.

2 For my expatriated family, too, the flag is meaningful, in part becau we don’t

do anything el to celebrate the Fourth. People don’t have barbecues in Paris

apartments, and most other Americans I know who have ttled here suppress such

outward signs of their heritage － or they go back home for the summer to refuel.

3 Our children think the flag-hanging is a cool thing, and I like it becau it gives

us a few moments of family Q&A about our citizenship. My wife and I have been

away from the United States for nine years, and our children are eleven and nine, so

American history is mostly something they have learned － or haven’t learned －

from their parents. July 4 is one of the times when the American in me feels a

twinge of unea about the great lacunae in our children’s understanding of who

they are and is prompted to try to fill the gaps. It’s also a time, one among many,

when my thoughts turn more generally to the costs and benefits of raising children

in a foreign culture.

4 Loui and Henry speak French fluently; they are taught in French at school,

and most of their friends are French. They move from language to language, ldom

mixing them up, without effort or even awareness. This is a wonderful thing, of

cour. And our physical paration from our native land is not much of an issue.

My wife and I are grateful every day for all that our children are not expod to.

American school shootings are a good object lesson for our children in the follies of

the society we hold at a distance.

5 Naturally, we also want to remind them of reasons to take pride in being

American and to try to convey to them what that means. It is a difficult thing to do

from afar, and the distance ems more than just a matter of miles. I sometimes

think that the stories we tell them must em like Aesop’s (or La Fontaine’s) fables,

myths with no fixed place in space or time. Still, connections can be made, lessons

learned.

6 Last summer we spent a week with my brother and his family, who live in

Concord, Massachutts, and we took the children to the North Bridge to give them

a glimp of the American Revolution. We happened to run across a reenactment of

the skirmish that launched the war, with everyone dresd up in three-cornered

hats and cotton bonnets. This probably only confirmed to our goggle-eyed kids the

make-believe quality of American history.

7 Six months later, when we were recalling the experience at the family dinner

table here, I asked Loui what the Revolution had been about. She thought that it

had something to do with the man who rode his hor from town to town. “Ah”, I

said, satisfaction swelling in my breast, “and what was that man’s name?”

“Gulliver?” Loui replied. Henry, for his part, knew that the Revolution was

between the British and the Americans, and thought that it was probably about

slavery.

8 As we pursued this conversation, though, we learned what the children knew

instead. Loui told us that the French Revolution came at the end of the

Enlightenment, when people learned a lot of ideas, and one was that they didn’t

need kings to tell them what to think or do. On another occasion, when Henry

asked what makes a person a “junior” or a “II” or a “III”, Loui helped me answer

by bringing up kings like Louis Quatorze and Quinze and Seize; Henry riposted with

Henry VIII.

9 I can’t say I worry much about our children’s European frame of reference.

There will be plenty of time for them to learn America’s pitifully brief history and to

find out who Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roovelt were. Already they know a

great deal more than I would have wished about Bill Clinton.

10 If all of this resonates with me, it may be becau my family moved to Paris in

1954, when I was three, and I was enrolled in French schools for most of my

grade-school years. I don’t remember much instruction in American studies at

school or at home. I do remember that my mother took me out of school one

afternoon to e the movie Oklahoma! I can recall what a faraway place it emed:

all that sunshine and square dancing and surreys with fringe on top. The sinister

Jud Fry personified evil for quite some time afterward. Cowboys and Indians were

an American cliché that had already reached Paris through the movies, and I asked

a grandparent to nd me a Davy Crockett hat so that I could live out that fairy tale

against the backdrop of gray postwar Montparnas.

11 Although my children are living in the same place at roughly the same time in

their lives, their experience as expatriates is very different from mine. The

particular narratives of American history aside, American culture is not theirs alone

but that of their French classmates, too. The music they listen to is either

“American” or “European,” but it is often hard to tell the difference. In my day little

French kids looked like nothing other than little French kids; but Loui and Henry

and their classmates dress much as their peers in the United States do, though with

perhaps less Lands’ End fleeciness. When I returned to visit the United States in the

1950s, it was a five-day ocean crossing for a month’s home leave every two years;

now we fly over for a week or two, although not very often. Virtually every

imaginable product available to my children’s American cousins is now obtainable

here.

12 If time and globalization have made France much more like the United States

than it was in my youth, then I can conclude a couple of things. On the one hand,

our children are confronting a much less jarring cultural divide than I did, and they

have more access to their native culture. Re-entry, when it comes, is likely to be

smoother. On the other hand, they are less than fully immerd in a truly foreign

world. That experience no longer ems possible in Western countries － a sad

development, in my view.

在法国庆祝美国独立日

查尔斯·特鲁哈特

1 每年差不多到了独立日日益临近的时候，我都会把一面折叠好的旧的美国国旗从底层抽

屉里取出——我承认我折叠国旗不是官方规定的三角形，而是正方形。我拥有这面国旗很长

时间了，每年到了7月4日我总是把它挂出来。身处巴黎的我把它挂在四楼的阳台上，在

马路上都看得到。虽然我没见过有人抬头看它一眼，但在我脑海中，我想象着美国游客或许

会注意到它并莞尔一笑，而法国路人会从中想起促使这面国旗出现的相关日期和原因。诚愿

如此。

2 对我们这个旅居国外的家庭来说，这面国旗之所以意义深远，部分是因为我们没有其

他任何活动来庆祝独立日。巴黎人不在公寓里烧烤，我认识的大多数在此定居的美国人并不

张扬他们的这种传统，他们宁可回国消夏来为自己加油打气。

3 我的孩子们觉得悬挂国旗很酷，我也喜欢这种做法，因为它让我们家有机会就我们的公

民身份问答一番。我们夫妻离开美国长达9年，两个孩子一个11岁一个9岁，所以美国历

史对他们来说，很大程度上要么是从父母那里已经学到的知识，要么是还没学到的知识。每

到类似7月4日这样的日子，我的美国心便感到忐忑不安，因为孩子们对他们身份的认同

存在巨大的空白，所以我想尽力填补这些空白。这也是很多场合中的一个，让我的思想更全

面地考虑在异国文化氛围中养育子女的利与弊。

4 路易丝和亨利法语都说得很流利。学校里使用法语教学，他们的朋友大多数是法国人。

他们在法语和英语之间切换自如，不费吹灰之力，极少把两种语言搞混。这当然很棒。我们

远离故国，相隔千山万水，也不是什么问题。每天我们夫妻俩都为儿女不用面对的一切坏事

而心怀感激。美国校园枪战对我们孩子来说是避之不及的社会愚蠢行为的极好反面教材。

5 当然了，我们也希望能提醒他们身为美国人而自豪的原因，想方设法告诉他们这样做意

义何在。在远离祖国的情况下这样做不容易，距离并不是和祖国相隔有多远的问题。有时我

想我们给孩子们讲的故事听起来一定很像伊索寓言或拉封丹寓言，都是些没有确凿时间地点

的神话。但无论如何，毕竟还能做点联系，学点东西。

6 去年夏天，我们和我弟弟一家在一起度过了一周，他们住在马萨诸塞州的康科德城。

我们带孩子们参观北桥，让他们看一眼美国独立战争的遗址。我们碰巧赶上了一个表演，表

演重现了触发大战的小规模战斗的情景。演出中男士都戴着三角帽，而女士戴着有带子的帽

子。这也许恰恰让这些瞪大眼睛的孩子们加深了美国历史虚幻性的印象。

7 6个月后，我们吃饭时在饭桌上回忆起参观的情景，我问路易丝美国独立战争是怎么一

回事。她认为这和一个人骑着马从一个镇子跑到另一个镇子有关。“啊，”我回答道，满意之

情在心中油然而生，接着问道：“这个人叫什么名字？”“格列佛？”路易丝答道。至于亨利，

他知道独立战争是英国人和美国人打仗，而且打仗也许是为了奴隶制。

8 然而当我们进一步讨论这个话题，我们知道小孩子们都掌握了哪些知识。路易丝告诉

我们法国大革命发生在启蒙运动末期，那时人们已经懂得很多道理，其中一个道理就是人们

不需要国王告诉大家该想什么、该做什么。还有一次，亨利问为什么要在一个人名字后面加

上“小”，或者加上“二世”，或者“三世"，路易丝帮我回答了这个问题，举了路易十四、路

易十五和路易十六几位国王的例子，亨利立刻机敏地回以亨利八世的例子。

9 我不能说我很担心对孩子们凡事都以欧洲作为参照系有多少担忧。让他们学习美国短

得可怜的历史，了解托马斯·杰斐逊、富兰克林·罗斯福是谁来日方长。他们现在对比尔·克林

顿的了解已经比我希望的要多了。

10 如果说我对这一切产生共鸣，也许是因为我们家在1954年就迁往巴黎，当时我才3岁。

我大部分小学时光都在法国学校里度过。我不记得在学校或是在家里学了多少关于美国的知

识。我记得很清楚的是有一天下午妈妈把我从学校里领出来去看电影，电影名叫《俄克拉荷

马!》。我记得那看起来似乎是个非常遥远的地方：阳光普照，人们跳着方形舞，还有顶盖饰

有流苏的萨里式游览马车。此后很长时间里阴险的贾德·弗赖成了邪恶的化身。通过电影，

巴黎早就熟悉了像牛仔和印第安人这样代表美国的陈词滥调。我还让一位祖辈给我寄了一顶

戴维·克罗克特式的帽子，这样，我就可以在蒙巴纳斯二战后灰蒙蒙的背景下重现当年的传

奇了。

11 尽管我的孩子们在大概像我小时候那样的岁数时住在同样的地方，他们作为外国侨民的

经历和我的大不相同。撇开特别的美国历史的叙述不谈，美国文化不仅仅属于他们，还属于

他们的法国同学。他们听的音乐不是“美国的”就是“欧洲的”，但经常很难加以区别。我

小时候法国小孩看起来就是法国小孩，但路易丝和亨利还有他们的同学穿着打扮和美国的同

龄人很像，尽管美国小孩可能因为穿的是“极点牌”的时装，看上去更加毛茸茸一些。20

世纪50年代，每两年我回美国探亲一次，要花5天时间横跨大洋，然后在美国呆上一个月。

如今我们乘飞机过去住上一两周，尽管不太频繁。孩子们的美国表兄弟姐妹们可以想象得到

的几乎任何产品现在在法国也买得到。

12 如果时间和全球化使法国变得比我青少年时代更像美国的话，我可以得出几个结论。一

方面，我们的孩子们所面临的文化差异不像我少时那般难以调和，他们有更多的机会接触他

们的本族文化。如果会出现这样的情况，也就是再次进入一种文化，有可能更加顺利。另一

方面，他们不是真正浸淫在纯正的外国世界中。在西方国家，生长在纯粹异域文化中的那种

经历似乎再也不可能了——在我看来，这种发展是件悲哀的事情。