Notes from the OPOL Family

2 book reviews for Bilingual Siblings: Language Use in Families

2011-01-26T10:48:00.001+01:00

Review:

Multilingual parents are often surprised by the different language preferences of their children. Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert shows just how dynamic the family language situation becomes with the arrival of younger siblings, thus putting the finger on an under-researched area of bilingualism research. She combines academic rigor with extensive hands-on experience and manages to present the issues with vivid descriptions and insightful comments and suggestions. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in bilingual and multilingual families.
Dr.Jean-Marc Dewaele, Birkbeck College, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/linguistics/our-staff/jean-marc-dewaele

A resounding cheer goes out to Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert for writing this insightful, informative and truly essential book for families raising more than one child in more than one language. This book is packed with research, family profiles, an overview of various myths, personal stories, and much, much more. It is an amazing resource for anyone eager to understand why bilingual children in the same family develop along uniquely individual linguistic paths. My only regret is that this book was not around many years ago before my three children were born.
Corey Heller, Editor-In-Chief of Multilingual Living Magazine
http://www.multilingualliving.com/

Bilingual Siblings book published

2011-01-17T11:25:00.003+01:00

The book cover of my new book

Bilingual Siblings: Language Use in Families

Available now to order via Multilingual Matters

http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

(20% discount for online orders)

or through Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/

To contact Suzanne about reviewing the book please email:

bilingsiblings@yahoo.com

Suzanne's book on Bilingual Siblings

2010-12-15T19:04:00.000+01:00

My second book on Bilingual Siblings is being published this week, after almost three years of research, writing, re-writing and proof-reading it’s finally available for pre-orders via Multilingual Matters, otherwise it will shortly be available to buy via amazon.com.

http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781847693266

BILINGUAL SIBLINGS

Language Use in Families

Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert

Taking a different perspective to traditional case studies on one bilingual child, this book discusses the whole family and the realities of life with two or more children and languages. What do we know about the language patterns of children in a growing and evolving bilingual family? Which languages do the siblings prefer to speak to each other? Do the factors of birth order, personality or family size affect language use? This book unveils the reality behind life with bilingual siblings.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – What do we know about Bilingual Families?

Chapter 2 – The Growing and Evolving Family

Chapter 3 – The Sibling Relationship

Chapter 4 – Age Difference, Family Size & Language Orders

Chapter 5 – Gender & Language

Chapter 6 – Birth Order: A Child’s Position in the Family

Chapter 7 – Individual Differences: Same Languages, Different Language Histories

Chapter 8 – Bilingualism and Twins, Adoption, Single parents & Step-families

Chapter 9 – Five Themes on Family Language Use

Paperback ISBN No: 9781847693266 C. £18.95 / US$29.95 / CAN$29.95 / €24.95

Christmas update on the Hauwaert family

2010-12-12T23:01:00.001+01:00

This has been a year of change for all of us, we moved down the road from our old summer house (with the blue shutters) to the Logis Vert (green shutters, of course!). The work to restore, stabilize and renovate the ruined house took about two and half years. We had three teams of workers and friends helping us out. One project was digging up the old stone floor and installing underfloor heating and then re-tiling with handmade terracotta tiles. Another was scraping off the old plaster and covering walls with three layers of natural hemp insulation and tradtional whitewash. Likewise, we redid the roof and added in windows at the back, where there were none. As the heavy work ended I was busy this year tinting windows to a traditional dark colour inside, painting the windows green outside, varnishing wood staircases and floors and ceilings and choosing paint and curtains. For anyone who has restored a house you’ll understand the high levels of stress the whole process creates, even when everything is on track! For anyone thinking about it, beware!! It takes over your life…and you talk about nothing but taps, screws, tiles or double glazing, even to total strangers!!!

View of the Logis

Jacques 40th birthday party at Logis Vert

We officially moved in on Jacques’ 40th birthday in August and celebrated with all the French family and my sister and her family, who were here on holiday. We cooked Mexican for 22 and all wore green for the occasion!! We bought Jacques a metal-detector because he was looking for treasure all the way through the work; nothing found so far….but you never know!!
Marc has grown a lot, way over my head now, and his voice has broken already. He’ll be 14 in January. He’s working hard at school in certain subjects, like maths. Homework is more challenging, hard to get him off Facebook or YouTube and he tends to start working at 9pm! He helps Jacques a lot with heavy DIY work and has learnt to make walls and dig holes! Nina started secondary school in September, she’s also growing fast and has same shoe size as me now. She loves school, works hard and is class rep. She’s still doing horse-riding on weekends and chilling out with her girly friends. Gabriel is also growing older, although he is still very cute and the baby of the family. He has a great male teacher this year, who is pushing him to read more. He loves football and plays twice a week. Sadly, he just discovered Santa doesn’t exist…so this year will be less make-believe, but he is enjoying being ‘grown-up’ and allowed to stay up till midnight on xmas eve!!
As for us, Jacques is still working for the same American company, he works from home two or three days a week now, good when he was overseeing the Logis project. My second book, on Bilingual Siblings, is published this month. I have several minor projects; teaching, writing, voluntary work, but nothing major, so next year I’m hoping to find a full-time job teaching English or possibly another book.

Here is the link for my book, via the publishers, Multilingual Matters (who give 20% discount)
http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781847693266

Wherever you are in the world, have a wonderful christmas and good luck for 2011!!

Sloppy speech

2010-10-04T10:35:00.002+02:00

Ask anyone in an OPOL family if they only speak their own language to their kids and they’ll assure you ‘Yes, absolutely and the kids only reply in one language too!’, but add in a quiet observer and you’ll find it’s a different story. When we have guests visiting, who are not bilingual in French and English, their confused faces reveal how much we mix languages, often unconsciously. We all have a tendency to ‘drop’ in the odd word from the other language as and when it suits us, or we have a word that is easier to say! My sister and her family came to stay from England recently and proved this point in the following dialogues (taken from video footage):
Me: ‘Hurry up and get your bombe for horse riding, Nina!’ (Cousin looks horrified that we are taking along a bomb with us to horse riding session, bombe being French for horse-riding hat)
Gabriel: ‘I want a glace!’ (Aunt passes him a glass of water, which he refuses with angry face because he wanted an ice-cream, which is a glace in French)
Me: ‘So, Marc is going to collège in September…’ (Aunt who looks confused because for her college is at age 16 and Marc is only 13, but in France secondary school is called collège)
Nina: ‘We get the car here and the chauffeur takes us to school every day.’ (Uncle wonders how we have a personal chauffeur when he thought the kids took school bus, turns out that the school bus in French is a car.)

Your recipe or mine?

2010-10-04T10:34:00.000+02:00

It was the smell of chips with salt and vinegar that did it. A van parked in the car park of our small French town was selling the traditional British meal of fish and chips to tourists and curious locals. I was transported back to Friday nights at my parents or my grandparent’s houses, going to the chip shop to buy greasy chips wrapped in newspaper, battered orange fish and a pot of mushy fluorescent green peas. Without thinking we ordered our dinner. Forget the healthy tuna salad I’d planned. Back home the kids wolfed the fish and chips down and told stories about how they always get free chips while waiting in the queue with Grandpa in Nottingham and remembered the tasty fish and chips that we ate on holiday in the Isle of Skye last year.
Living in France I love the local food and we generally eat French food, but there are days, like the fish and chip day, when a wave of homesickness for English food takes over and I’ll fry a big English Sunday morning breakfast, bake scones or make crumbles with custard. The kids are curious and go along with it, even if they do sometimes make comments together on how could Mummy possibly like strange things like Branston pickle, baked beans or Marmite. The kids are now old enough to cook and love to get messy in the kitchen. While I bake scones with Nina we chat about how my grandmother would make wonderful afternoon teas. I think how much language and cooking are linked, and the importance and passing on a heritage through food and cooking for others.
However, it’s not so simple in the OPOL family. I have my memories of food and cooking with my English mother and grandmother and Jacques has his memories of home cooking in his French kitchen. But what happens when we both try to pass on our traditions with the same food item? Take potatoes, for example, a staple of both our childhood dinners. For Jacques it is purée, a smooth blend of potatoes with generous doses of cream, egg yolk and grated nutmeg stirred in, while for me it is mashed which is more lumpy and made with less butter and milk. Both are good in their own way. Or apple pie, for me, chunks of stewed apple enclosed in buttery pastry top and bottom, for him, fine slices of apple arranged in a circle on just one thin layer of sweet pastry. Which one do the kids prefer? It’s hard for them to choose without upsetting one parent.
Compromises have to be made too, or we mix the two cultures. As we prepare for a big family dinner or birthday meal there is a natural tendency to mix culinary tastes, like, a French salad to start, with goats cheese, then steak, cooked rare, with roasted parsnips and English gravy, followed by a plate of French cheese and then an apple and blackberry crumble with custard for dessert. Does the OPOL family become a new mélange of food heritage by default? Are we creating a new type of fusion food? As I clear the empty plates away, I wonder what food memories our children have when they are older and what kind of food they will cook in their own kitchens…

All about....Growing up with two languages and cultures - Monday 7th June in Civrary

2010-05-21T13:58:00.001+02:00

The time has certainly flown this year and we are already at the final seminar in our popular "All About...." series for 2009/2010! We've covered the basics of the education system from Maternelle through to Collège as well as an introduction to bilingualism.

For our final seminar, we're looking at the implications for children growing up in a second (or even third) culture and language, particularly where this is away from the parental cultural background. We'll be focussing on culture in schools and at home - how to balance the needs of both, especially as children grow and are exposed to increasing peer pressure. If you've ever wondered how your children would adapt to life outside France, whether to watch French or English television or how to introduce your own culture into the lives of your children, then this is the seminar for you.

We'll also be having a general Q&A on all aspects of bilingualism and multiculturalism so please send in any questions you have before the day.

You can send questions via this blog, email me at bilingsiblings@yahoo.com or via the Accents facebook page.

And of course, this will all be rounded off with the opportunity to have a light lunch at the Café and chat with the other parents. Hopefully the sun will be shining and we can make the most of living in France!

Look forward to seeing you all there!

Suzanne

10 Little Words

2010-05-07T18:08:00.003+02:00

Did you know you can measure the average number of words a child uses to compare their levels of language knowledge and usage? The calculation of number of words spoken over a period of time gives the mean length utterance (MLU). For my Masters course I had to calculate the MLU of a young child. Conveniently my own son, Marc, was then aged two and a half and I diligently noted and counted his words for a week.The results showed that our English conversation was heavily overloaded with ten words. Marc said No! Yes! Why? and I want! frequently, and I replied with Stop! Don't touch that! and Because.

Looking at the results I couldn't imagine how on earth this child would become bilingual with such a limited vocabulary. When I told my mum she laughed and said it was him being in the Terrible Two's phase and that things would improve. Over time, Marc did become a great conversation partner. By the time he was four I couldn't possibly count his daily word-count.

Now Marc is an official teenager, and we seem to have returned to the 10-word-count days again, which is not enough to support his English. Our daily after-school conversation goes on the lines of:
'How was school?'I ask,
'OK'
'Any homework?'
'No.' (not true). Marc says, 'Can I go on the computer?'
I say 'No!' and he asks 'Why?'
An argument breaks out between him and his siblings and I shout 'Stop!' It's déjà-vu, but with a child who is now 160cm tall....

I heard on the radio that the best place to talk to teenagers is in the car. It's true if they are alone with a parent (if Nina or Gabriel are there he'll hook up to his Nintendo and ignore everyone). Car journeys are the place where we talk in long sentences. The twenty-minute trip to drop him off at tennis, or at school when he has a late start, are the rare times when he is chatty, interesting and thoughtful. Can the car be a useful tool for maintaining bilingualism? I think so, and it's worth trying at least until your child gets his own drivers licence...

Do-It-Yourself or Translate-It-Yourself

2010-05-07T18:05:00.002+02:00

Most bulky items are sold in neat flat-packs to be magically assembled at home; climbing frames, bookshelves and even a whole kitchen from Ikea. To successfully put it together one needs to be able to read the instructions, tricky in your second language if you are living in another country. Lacking knowledge of French DIY terms I made a simple metal towel rail back to front, and mixed up all the screws until the boys came to help out and put it together in five minutes. 'How could you misunderstand it? they ask. But there's no time for translation when you are rushing to get the new product finished. Who learnt the conjugations of twist, screw or hammer at school?

There's often a part or tool missing and a trip to the DIY store is unavoidable. Not knowing the right word I feel stupid making a noise like a chain-saw or miming rope for a swing while staff gaze on wondering what I might want. The vocabulary is a black hole of jargon, because if you manage to get a staff member to understand the product you want, they'll ask you ten questions about the material, size, model or price range, until you walk out with anything just to escape.

Some electrical items from major brands come with a handy 200 page multilingual book of instructions. No matter what the linguistic mix in the family each person has their section. The older kids love this instant world language course and flip through the pages saying, 'Look how Hungarians say Plug it in!' or 'That's Chinese for Recharge the Battery'.

I hope that the translators did a good job from the original version, and didn't just cut and paste it the text into one of those free translating websites to save time. Although multilingual instructions are a lifesaver for the OPOL family, there is just one technical problem, flicking from the French version to the English pages to check the translation wastes time. While I'm painstakingly learning new words, 'A screwdriver is a tournevis...', my husband is left holding up one end of a cupboard with his shoulder and is not amused. So we revert to a more simpler communication 'Pass that red thing over there!'

Big Bad Words - Older Children

2010-05-06T22:43:00.003+02:00

What happens when you move to a country where another language is used and your children are enrolled in a local primary of secondary school? Chances are high they'll pick up a few swearwords as they become bilingual. It's part of fitting in and sounding 'right'. But do you actually know any French swearwords? How do you know if the neighbour's child is just being silly or really insulting you? Which words should you ban your children using?

My lack of knowledge was highlighted when my sister gave my youngest child a set of washable pens to doodle on the bathroom tiles while in the bath. My two older children and their two French cousins 'borrowed' the pens and wrote French swearwords on the bathroom wall. I was furious because I was unable to deceipher the messages. The cousins sniggered that their English aunt was so naïve, and my children saw a chance to misbehave and say rude things to each other or me without being caught. Their punisment was to give me a basic grounding in gros mots, (or Ten Things Not To Say In Front Of Your Parents Or Teachers). Here are the results. They are listed in order of seriousness and vulgarity.

Dégage! – Get out of my way!/Get lost! (often used between kids)
Ferme ta geule! – Shut up!/Shut your gob! (rude)
Chiant – a pain/annoying/boring (mildly insulting)
Emmerdeur - nuisance/annoying (mildly insulting)
Imbécile/Cretin/Idiot – idiot (can be insulting)
Con/conard – stupid (offensive)
Salope/pétasse/pouffiasse – bitch (offensive)
Pute/Putain - slut/tart (offensive)
Merde! - s**t (offensive)
Je m’en fous! – I d'ont give a f**k! (offensive)

There are also some words which have become a 'lighter' alternative to an offensive word, like the way we say 'sugar' or 'shoot', in place of a stronger curse.

Punaise! – literally a 'drawing pin' or 'bedbug' (to replace putain)
Puree! - literally 'mashed potatoe' (to replace putain)
Mince! – literally 'slim' (to replace merde)
Je m’en fiche! I don’t give a damm! (cheeky)

For parents of children growing up in France I would recommend listening carefully to your children, particulary when they are talking to their friends. If you are not sure about new words ask your child's teacher, or a French friend to tell you which words are unacceptable for your children.

See also:

Titeuf - a cartoon character based on young adolescent who knows several gros mots (see comic books/dvds, available in all good bookshops)

http://www.wordreference.com
Useful dictionary website, which gives translations of colloquial French/English words and has an excellent forum for questions on language or swearing in context.

Big Bad Words - Little Children

2010-05-06T22:27:00.005+02:00

Young children love French 'naughty words' or gros mots...For bilingual English/French families living in France the most commonly heard are body words:

pipi (pee or wee-wee)
caca (poo)
zizi (willy)
fesse (bottom)
prout-prout (literally the sound of farting)
crotte de nez (snot)
crotte de chien (dog-poo).
caca-boudin (poo-black-pudding-sausage),
Beurk! means ‘yucky’, or a nasty smell or taste
Conjugating verbs like ‘to fart’ (péter) and ‘to burp’ (roter) are popular!
To insult each other young kids can say grosse vache or gros cochon (fat cow/pig).
pouet-pouet camembert is a silly phrase that young children say, something like 'na-na-ni-na-na' in English.

Words which your child should be careful of using in front of sensitive adults, neighbours and teachers are Dégage! (Get out of my way!), and Ferme ta geule! (Shut up!) Some words should be avoided, for example, cul (stronger word for bottom/arse), which can be considered vulgar, and con (stupid/idiot) is insulting.

If you are not sure about rude words your child is using do ask your child’s teacher or a French friend whether they think their vocabulary is suitable. Parents do need to be clear about the difference between ‘naughty’ words used between friends or in the playground, and words which should not be used in front of the teacher or adults

*See The Connexion newspaper (May 2010) for full version of swearwords for young children and Questions from parents about swearing.
http://www.connexionfrance.com/

See also:

http://www.dailymotion.com les-gros mots des- tout-petits (Titou le Lapinou)
A silly song about gros mots for little children.

http://www.wordreference.com
Useful dictionary website, which gives translations of colloquial French/English words with a forum for questions on language or gros mots.

‘Caca boudin’ by Stephanie Blake (5 €, www.ecoledesloisirs.fr)
A story in French for young children about a rabbit who likes the word caca-boudin…

Bringing Up Bilingual Children Talk (BEE Association) - 24 March 2010

2010-03-14T21:21:00.012+01:00

I am presenting an informal talk on Family Bilingualism, organised by Victoria Turvey-Sauron from the BEE association, based in the Dordogne.

Date: Wednesday 24th March 2010

Venue: BEE Association, Roumagne, Lot-et-Garonne (47)

Cost: 3 euros BEE members/5 euros Non-members

Meeting Format: A presentation on bilingualism for one hour, followed by small group discussions on your experiences of bilingualism in France. The talk ends with your feeback from the discussions and time for questions.

If you have any questions on Family Bilingualism and schooling in France that you would like me discuss in the talk please email me(bilingsiblings@yahoo.com)before the talk. Please give me brief details of your family (how many children, their ages, languages spoken etc.)

I will also bring some books on bilingualism for you to browse and copies of my book Language Strategies for Bilingual Families will be available to purchase (12euros).

For more information go to the direct link on the BEE website: http://www.bilingual.fr/bilingual.html

BEE website: www.bilingual.fr

or via BEE on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bilingual-Education-Exchange/316286696240?ref=mf

Thanks,

Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert
Email: bilingsiblings@yahoo.com

March 2 - Talk on Young Children & Bilingualism

2010-02-16T21:49:00.001+01:00

Tuesday 2nd March - Accents Association Bilingual Talk
Speaker: Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert
Civray Grande Galerie, 10-12am
3 euros Accents members/5 euros non-members

This talk and discussion will focus on young children (from age 2 to 6 years) and the issues of early years schooling and bilingualism for English-speaking families in France. Parents are welcome with children in maternelle or those preparing for it. Proposed areas for discussion are:

Explanation of the French maternelle school program
Communicating with teachers & the cahier de communication
Parent-teacher meetings and grading of children
Language use in the classroom and playground
Gros mots or naughty words
French accents and sounding 'right'
Library books
Maintaining English at home

If you have any questions you would like me to answer please email me with brief history of your family (age of child, schooling etc.):

bilingsiblings@yahoo.com

You can also post ideas for the talk on the Accents Facebook page.
http://www.facebook.com/l/4cc77;www.accents-asso.fr

Feb 1st - Talk on Older Children and Bilingualism (English/French)

2010-01-19T10:12:00.005+01:00

This talk and discussion will focus on older children (age 11+) and the issues of secondary schooling and bilingualism. Parents are welcome with children in secondary school or those preparing for it. Proposed areas for discussion are:

Explanation of the French secondary school program
Public versus private schooling?
Transition from primaire to collège
Being independent of parents
Homework
Parent's evenings and communicating with teachers
Increased need of specific vocabulary
Maths, History, Geography, Science: learning subjects in a 2nd language
'English is boring'
French is hard
A foreign language: German, Spanish, Latin

If you have any questions you would like me to answer please email me with brief history of your family (age of child, schooling etc.): bilingsiblings@yahoo.com

You can also post ideas for the talk on the Accents Facebook page.
http://www.facebook.com/l/4cc77;www.accents-asso.fr

Or leave a comment on my blog:
http://opol-family.blogspot.com/2010/01/feb-1st-talk-in-older-children-and.html

Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert

2010

2010-01-06T15:30:00.003+01:00

Best wishes for the New Year!

The Accents Association will be hosting a series of monthly talks this year, in an informal setting parents and educators can discuss issues relating to French/English bilingual children and their families. Specific subjects that were requested in the talk in December are:

- Teenagers and maintaining bilingualism.
- Primary school and bilingualism.
- Pre-school and the first steps towards bilingualism.

The first meeting of 2010 is planned for MONDAY 1st February in the Chef-Boutonne area.

For more information contact Kathryn:
http://www.accents-asso.fr/
AccentsAdmin@orange.fr
Tel: 05 49 97 10 17

Let it snow!

2009-12-22T21:47:00.001+01:00

A little bit of family news...

2009-12-08T19:34:00.000+01:00

As 2010 rolls in I am amazed how quick time flies and how history seems to go in circles. The decade started in rural France, at Jacques' parents house, with the heavy storms of the end of December 1999 and no electricity for a week. Then we had two young children under the age of two. We end the decade living in rural France, via England, Malaysia, America, with three children. Marc, our 12 year-old growing-up-fast-almost-teenager, Nina, our 10-year-old pre-teen chatterbox and Gabriel, the angelic, but lively six-year-old. Along the way we gained a cat, rabbit and fish too.

So what happened in 2009? In autumn Jacques started working from home, which is good for us all and less travelling for him. Marc is growing (now taller than me, 158cm and stil going) and still likes tractors, Nina is in her last year of primary school, she likes music and horse-riding and Gabriel has just learnt to read and play football. The children are more-or-less bilingual and manage to juggle two cultures and languages effortlessly. I finally got the draft done of my book on Siblings and have been busy writing for 'The Connexion' (an English-language newspaper published in France) and teaching English locally.

We all enjoyed our annual family trip to ski (this year in La Plagne). Our holidays were linked to visiting friends this year around the world. Our visits to Munich (Mickeal), Thailand (Mahes), Kuala Lumpur for John's wedding (Odile, Hilary, Mahin, Marie-Cecile, Victoria, Mahin, Nilgoun, Aimee and many others) and Scotland (Corinne, Marie). These were places we had been before, but we saw in a new light. We had a lot of friends and family visit us too this year, you are always welcome in deepest rural France!!

Hopefully, next year we will move down the road to the Logis, which is progressing. The 'heavy' work has been done. It has floors now, a new roof, new windows and full insulation. We have started a vegetable garden this year and are planting a mixed fruit/trees hedge (650 trees) around the property.(see post 'Photos 2009'below for some recent photos) Like all renovation projects the Logis needs lots of money and takes more time than predicted but we do still plan to move there in 2010, in time for Jacques' 40th birthday....

Do keep in touch.

Suzanne

2009 photos

2009-12-08T19:23:00.000+01:00

The Logis Vert (back view and front, with steps) and us on holiday in breezy Scotland this summer.

Accents talk in Ruffec

2009-11-19T09:46:00.000+01:00

I am presenting an informal talk on Family Bilingualism, organised by Kathryn Dobson from the Accents Association. If you would like to attend please confim with Kathryn: accentsadmin@orange.fr before the 23rd November.

Date: Tuesday 1st December

Venue: Seppings Café (Condac near Ruffec - about 5 mins off the N10)

Leader: Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert

Cost: If you would like to join us for lunch (recommended) then the cost will be 12€ per head (includes coffees/teas etc.) - please let us know if you would like the vegetarian option. If you would like to just come for the meeting there will be a charge of 3€ to cover coffees/teas etc. but we do need at least 10 having lunch to have free use of the venue.

Meeting Format:

We will start with a presentation on bilingualism and then have a general discussion for the second hour. If you have any specific areas that you want to discuss (starting out, issues, one parent one language etc.) then just let us know.

I will bring some books on bilingualism for you to browse and copies my my book (Language Strategies for Bilingual Families) will be on available to purchase.

You can email me your questions on Bilingualism and schooling in France to me at:

bilingsiblings@yahoo.com

or reply through this blog.

Please give me brief details of your family (how many children, their ages, languages spoken.)

Thanks,

Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert

One-cat-one-language

2009-11-02T22:03:00.000+01:00

Our cat, Caline, is two years old now. As we celebrated her birthday we tried out some IQ tests to see how she was doing. The children set up a timed test.
‘Caline, here’s your dinner!’ (Cat runs across room and eats food one minute later)
‘Caline, vien manger ton dîner!’ (Cat runs across room and eats food two minutes later)
They decide she replies faster to English, probably because four of us always speak English to her. It seemed weird to speak my second language to an animal, and the children simply followed suit, even though she joined our household as a six-month-old kitten from a French family. The cat does have a role to play though. She is a shining example of the one cat-one language strategy, because now Marc, Nina and Gabriel all speak English to the cat. She meows in return and conversations can go on for quite some time. They even made up special songs for her.

My French friend, Corinne, lives in Scotland and just adopted a kitten from a French family who were moving home. Her two children also follow the one-cat-one-language policy and only talk in French to the cat. Corinne is happy to hear them using more of her language and reports that the kitten loves the kids chatting to her. The OCOL approach may not be high level language use, being rather limited in subject matter (food, water, mice, birds, the weather), but at least it gives children a chance to use the minority language with a willing and purring listener.

Game on!

2009-11-02T22:01:00.000+01:00

Family games are a traditional way to bring parents and children together, with timeless classics. However, in the OPOL family games like Monopoly can have two meanings. For me, the cards represent my British childhood (Park Lane, Trafalger Square), while Jacques’ has a more chic version (Champs Elysées, Rue de la Paix). The children have played both versions and, frankly, they prefer the French one, for the practical reason that their French cousins and friends can play too. Marc and Nina said they got sick of explaining the value and cultural meaning of London property sites, and dealing in pounds when they could use euros.

Never agree to play Trivial Pursuit in your second language, unless you have a degree in the History and Culture of the language. At a recent village Games Night I naively joined the Trivial Pursuit table, thinking I could easily score some points for my team. But the only question I could answer was ‘Which three languages are spoken in Luxembourg?’ Otherwise, fifty classic French culture, people, sport and music questions passed straight over my head. It was humiliating. Bingo is a simple game of cards and numbers that any person can play and is popular in the villages in winter. But what if half the family has problems with French numbers over sixty? (That’s me and Gabriel, by the way). While the others coolly serve themselves drinks I desperately try to find ‘quatre-vingt-douze’ (20 x 4 +12, or 92). And when I finally fill in all the gaps do I shout ‘Bingo!’ or ‘Loto!’?

On the early evening family television game shows we watch together Nina is quick to fill in the blanks in the French version of ‘Wheel of Fortune’, while I am still working out what the question meant in the first place. In the French version of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’ I can only answer those trick questions designed to catch the French out, like what is the name of the famous clock in London a) Big Mac, b) Big John, c) Big Ben or d) Big Boy? ‘Yes!’ I shout ‘I know that one. It’s c!!’ as the children groan and say everyone knows that answer.

A classic drawing game, Pictionary, should be transferable across cultures. A recent game of with a group of French-English bilingual children showed a technical problem with languages. The word was ‘Seal’. One child scribbled a drawing and one team yelled ‘Seal!’ as the others screamed ‘Phoque!’ simultaneously. This particular French word is banned in our house (after Marc once said to my mum while watching a nature programme, ‘Oh, look, a phoque…’). As referee I disqualified the team who said the bad word. They cried injustice and argued that any word in any language could be used and the rules do not state which language the game must be played in. ‘You have to choose one language,’ I say, ‘It would create total chaos if we all spoke three or four different languages.’ The children disagree and decide to take me to the European Court of Human Rights for inhumanity towards bilinguals…

Mummy-talk in a Second Language

2009-07-15T22:08:00.001+02:00

Jacques and I were brought up in villages and our childhoods were very simple. You either played in your own garden with your siblings or popped round to play with other kids. You could stay for tea and no-one would bother, and you went home when it was getting late. But thirty years on all that has changed and playing with other kids is timetabled, along with the other after-school activities. You therefore need to ‘network’ other class mothers and work out what day their children are free. I have had to do a crash course in ‘second-language-mummy-talk’ to get by.

The French mothers don’t know anything about me (they are very curious) and on the first official get-together I have to go through the whole thing in French…. where I am from, where we live now, how many kids we have, which class and teacher, why I put kids in French school, what my husband does and even where we are going for the next holiday. When I have got through all that there is the confidential mummy chat….what do you really think about the teacher and have you heard about so-and-so who had an affair…. After emerging from the home a French neighbor, who offered me a coffee when I arrived to pick up Gabriel and interrogated me for 40 minutes, I felt like I was 16 again and taking my oral exam in French. I just need a certificate in ‘mummy-talk’ now!

AZERTY or QWERTY?

2009-07-15T22:06:00.000+02:00

With a newly installed wifi system at home the children can use a spare computer downstairs. I hope that having more access to the internet might inspire them to read and write more in English. But we discover that having two languages can sometimes complicate computer literacy. Marc and Nina ask for email accounts, and I register them with same free email provider as me. But no, they don’t want the English-language version, they want the French one. So we sign on with the French language network. We need to create a username. Marc, follows the French pattern, where surnames come first, and chooses ‘hauwaertmarc’, while Nina goes for the other way round ‘ninahauwaert’. Secret passwords are the next step. Marc chooses an English word, saying that no French person would guess it. Nina picks her rabbit’s birthday. I tap the passwords in and ask them to re-type them. There’s a brief glitch as Nina retypes French ‘mai’ instead of my English ‘May’. ‘Does it matter?’ says bilingual Nina, ‘It’s the same word.’ The computer disagrees with her and says no.

I sit with them as they write their first email, but the instructions in the French email inbox are totally unfamiliar for me, supprimer, brouillon….the only word I recognize is poubelle (trash). I feel out of my depth since it barely resembles my email inbox. We struggle along setting up the address book. Marc dictates an address saying jeanlucarrobayahoo.fr, which makes no sense to me and I write Jean Luc Arroba twice until I realize that arroba means the @ sign in French. We try to compose a brief message to my dad in England. Then we hit another problem. They use AZERTY keyboards at school, but we have a QWERTY one at home.

Marc and Nina are painfully slow with the QWERTY one, desperately searching for the full-stop, exclamation and question marks, which have mysteriously ‘moved’ and shouting, ‘Mummy, there’s no A on your computer!’ Their typing skills are so horrifically bad even my spellchecker goes on strike and asks if I want to install a French one. Left to their own devices they prefer phonetic spellings or text abbreviations. My dad nearly got “How R U? Im OK. Skool gud.’ After a frustrating half hour composing an email they tell me that emailing is boring, and I should set up Skype so they can chat to Grandpa via the computer. Even if emails are not for them, they can surf and flick from site to site with speed. I admire them googling sets of keywords in French and English, comfortable and confident in either linguistic zone.

Which language would you like, sir?

2009-04-06T21:58:00.001+02:00

OPOL families can be annoying sometimes. One never knows which language to speak to them. Or which parent is the bilingual one? Or whether they all speak both languages? Or which language they prefer? An airhostess friend told me she makes a quick linguistic judgment based on the book or newspaper the person is carrying when he or she boards the plane. Is this true? To test the theory on a recent Jacques boards first (with a Le Monde newspaper in his hand) and the airhostess greets us all politely in French. We all reply in French (it would be impolite not too). Later on, she hands out the gifts for the children and hears the kids speaking English together and apologises for speaking French. The kids say their mantra, which explains everything ‘It’s OK, we can speak both languages, Mummy speaks English, Papa speaks French…’ She is a little annoyed that she misread us initially, and asks the kids which language they prefer. That’s a difficult question. Should they risk upsetting Mummy or risk making Papa feel like they don’t like his language? Both, they all reply, diplomatically. When she comes back with the snack she sticks with the French for all of us.

On the way back I board first, with the Times displayed obviously, and the reverse applies…the airhostess greets us all in English and we all politely reply in English. This time when she comes round with a the free gifts the kids amuse themselves, Marc speaks English to her, Nina French and then Gabriel English, so the poor airhostess is not sure if they are from the same family or playing tricks. When she asks them exactly which they speak they chorus their mantra: Mummy speaks English, Papa speaks French.

Falling Apples

2009-03-31T15:56:00.001+02:00

The children come home at 5pm. They have a snack and talk about their day. At this point in the day they are swinging between two languages; the French of school and my English at home. Some stories can become a guessing game for me, as they flit from French to English expressions, which are sometimes untranslatable. For example, Nina begins to tell me a story….

‘Today, in the canteen, this girl, Beverly, ….just fell…fell in the apples…at lunch, you know what I mean?’
‘What, she fell in her apple dessert?’ I guess, hopefully.
‘No! She fell.. in the apples!’ says Nina.
‘There were apples on the floor of the canteen?’ I ask, wondering if she slipped on a crate of apples, misplaced on the floor.
‘There were no apples, silly Mummy,’ Nina says, looking grumpy. ‘She fell over, like that…’ and she mimes a girl fainting and a teacher saying ‘Elle a tombé dans les pommes’
‘Ah!’ I say, playing along with the Charades games, ‘She fainted!’
‘Maybe’, says Nina, not really knowing what ‘fainted’ means. ‘Like I said, she fell in the apples…’

With some investigation, we discover that ‘to fall in the apples’ literally means to fall over and faint. You learn something every day in the OPOL Family!

For more French expressions and their translations in several languages visit:
http://www.expressio.fr/expressions/tomber-dans-les-pommes.php

Chicken or kitchen for dinner?

2009-03-31T15:52:00.000+02:00

Gabriel officially has a minor speech problem. He can’t say double consonants like ‘ch’, ‘pl’ or ‘tr’. Some words come out different, for example, he says ‘kitchen’ instead of ‘chicken’. It’s taken almost three years to pinpoint it. His pre-school teachers in Malaysia, America and France had all hinted that his language was ‘immature’. There was also an unspoken message that his bilingual home was perhaps a factor too, so he was given extra time to ‘catch up’ verbally. The question for us was whether the French language was bothering the English, or vice versa. However, the same speech problem occurs in English and French. By the time he was five and a half it was clear there was a problem, because the children in Gabriel’s class were making fun of his way of talking. But at what point do you take your child to see a specialist?

Gabriel also speaks French with an English accent, which worries (and amuses) family members. This should have faded away, especially since we have been back in France for over eighteen months and he spends most of his days in a French environment (or watching French television). It appears that his model is me, with my English-accented French, when he should be copying Jacques’s perfect accent. How has our carefully organized OPOL practice gone so wrong?

At the end of the school year, a speech therapist came to his class and finally checked him properly, and recommended I go to see the orthophonist immediately. Initially, I thought she meant to see an orthodontist for his teeth. After a dental check-up, and realizing it was not a dental problem, I finally found the local speech therapist a few months later. I made the appointment with some trepidation. What if she asks me to stop speaking English to him? Even armed with all the research and academic proof it’s difficult to justify the OPOL strategy when your child is talking wrong.

Fortunately, my local French orthophonist, Agnès, is married to a Danish chap (they speak English together as a couple) and she understands bilingual children. She is also working with several English kids who have moved to France. Agnès could see straightway that his English side was not the issue; she found that he cannot roll his ‘r’s (which makes his French instantly sound ‘English’). Agnès immediately started him off practicing ‘tiger growling’ to get the ‘r’ sound right.

The sessions with Agnès have made me realize that there has been some denial on my side too, a rather naïve idea that time will sort things out. Because we were successful with our older two children we thought that our third child would simply follow. There’s a side of me that feels guilty too. Perhaps I did not speak as much to Gabriel as I did to the others? Did I not correct him enough, like I did with Marc? Did I not sing to him enough, like I did with Nina? Have I left his speech development to other people? Homework from the older children takes up much of the evening these days and he certainly gets less time for bedtime stories (and a tired mother!). But, as Agnès assures me, it is a minor problem, and with a bit of extra help he’ll soon be rolling his ‘r’s and ordering ‘chicken’ instead of ‘kitchen’ in the restaurant in no time!

Don’t dub Troy!

2009-02-02T13:37:00.000+01:00

Nina loves the High School Musical films, as do most nine-year-old girls from all around the world. She’s seen the first two films on dvd in English and sings along to the music all the time. When the third High School Musical film came out recently in France there was no way she was seeing it dubbed. I’m not that fussy about which language films are done in, as long as it’s a good film, and suggest a local cinema in Poitiers. To persuade me, she argued that if Troy said ‘I love you’ her French it would mean nothing to her. ‘You would miss out on the real feeling.’ she claims, gazing at her poster of Troy on her bedroom wall.

It’s the school holidays so off we go to Paris to find a cinema that does version originale. There will be the original soundtrack with French subtitles. The only show is on at 9am on a Saturday, and Nina is awake at 7am, already wearing the HSM 3 t-shirt and matching necklace. I watch the film sleepily, as Troy sweet-talks Gabriella, and wonder if it really matters whether he says ‘I love you’ or ‘Je t’aime’. But Nina is absolutely convinced it makes a difference, and she wouldn’t have Troy say it any other way. ‘It wouldn’t sound real,’ she says. A few months later Mamma Mia is released in France. As Nina scans the Paris cinema listings I know it’s time to book the train tickets, after all, Meryl Streep just wouldn’t be the same speaking French either….

At last, a Foreign Language!

2008-12-14T22:12:00.001+01:00

In collège Marc can learn a Foreign Language. Marc never had any choice about learning English and French. When people say how lucky he is to speak two Foreign Languages so easily he must wonder what they mean. It was no fun for him - especially with two parents who were determined that he would speak each language to a high standard. Poor Marc was the first child and the guinea-pig of the family. Right from day one he was blasted with English from his mother (and all her family) and French from Papa (and all his family). There was never any other option than to speak both languages. It’s not that he is ungrateful for the languages we chose for him; he just would have liked a choice in the matter.

Now age eleven years and eight months, he has a real choice at last. English is obligatory all through the four years of collège, but there is an option for a second language starting in the first year. This is where Marc has his wish come true. On the menu is German, Latin or Spanish. Marc discusses each language seriously and meticulously, questioning us on which one we think is the easiest, which one is useful, and which one will help him in the future. He picks German in the end. Jacques is happy since he speaks excellent German. In fact, his mother fought to get a German class established twenty years ago in the same school, rallying round parents to give the children more choice.

The German class is small and is run via webcam, so the teacher can cover four schools at the same time. I am a bit skeptical about this futuristic set-up, but the kids accept it as normal. Talking to the microphone or the camera has become second nature. It is a delight to see Marc saying ‘Ich bin Marc!’ and chanting ‘ein, zwei, drei…’ He is fascinated by the differences and the similarities between English, French and this new language. He is amazed that German has an extra letter (the ‘ss’ sound or ß) and that they use capital letters for so many nouns and enjoys the lack of pressure to become fluent and the slow pace of learning that beginners can indulge in. Watching him enthusiastically tackle his German homework I am glad that finally language learning is fun…

Low Marks in English

2008-12-14T22:09:00.000+01:00

Marc is now in collège (French equivalent of secondary school/high school) and studies by subject now. Madame P. has been teaching English for at least 17 years (she taught my husband when he was at the same school!). You might think that she would be proud that one of her ex-pupils married an English girl, works for an English-language company and now has bilingual children. However, she doesn’t seem quite so happy to see the name ‘Hauwaert’ again.

The term started badly when she played a little ice-breaker game (as she always does). Each child’s name was Anglicized, to get the kids in the mood, so Francois became Frank and Amandine was Amanda. Half the class had a name that existed in both languages (Julie, Charlotte, Sarah, Thomas, Kevin to name but a few) which she could not do much about. Perhaps lacking suitable translations, due to French parents picking Anglophone names, she made the fatal error of re-naming Marc ‘Mark’. This is a sensitive issue, one he has battled with since he was four and started writing his name in an English school. He hates it mis-spelled and valiantly defends ‘Marc’ as an ‘English’ name too, saying it exists in America and England. But Madame P. firmly corrects his namecard.

Marc/Mark is furious and goes out of his way to correct her English expressions and criticize her choice of ‘baby songs’ for the French students to learn. For a dictation exercise he titles it ‘Too-Easy Dictation’ and sloppily answers as if he can’t be bothered. The level is so low he could do it with his eyes closed, he says. So at the Parents Meeting when I mentioned that Marc was somewhat bored she waved his exam paper at me, saying ‘Look, he only got 17.5 out of 20!! He can’t even spell Wednesday’. I agreed that Marc makes silly spelling/grammatical mistakes and told her that he is rapidly losing interest in the subject (an emotional issue as this is my language we are talking about). I asked what she could do to help. Madame P. said he could skip the workbook, and ‘help’ the other students. But assisting the beginner-level French students has lost any interest to him and he says he feels uncomfortable ‘teaching’ his classmates. What he needs is spelling and challenging reading, not singing ‘Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes…’

A week later Madame P agrees to give him more written classwork and moves him out for two ‘extra’ language sessions a week, along with the other four fluently bilingual kids in his year, who are also bored and sat sniggering in the back row. After a few hours of intensive study of the passé simple and English grammar exercises they are soon wishing they were back in Easy English again! These extra sessions are thankfully done with an English native teacher, Mrs. G, who is there to support the bilingual kids in their dual language use. She knows all about their unique combination of confident verbal skills and dreadful spelling. He finally has a teacher tuned to his needs and, most importantly, one who always calls him Marc…

Language gaps

2008-09-24T21:12:00.001+02:00

The other day we went out for a family bike ride. Jacques has just taught Gabriel to ride. He is enthusiastic and desperate to ride on a real road. Jacques goes first, followed by Marc, Nina, Gabriel and me at the end (presumably to pick up any children who might fall off). It all goes well until we set off down a hill and Gabriel picks up speed. Too much speed though, and he starts rapidly overtaking the others. I call out ‘Gabs, brake a little!’ He calls back ‘Break what??’ I reply, breathlessly, ‘Brake…the bike.’ ‘Break my bike? Why, Mummy???’ and he starts looking behind, rather dangerously, to see what I am talking about. ‘Brake, NOW!!!’ I shout, getting nervous as he spins his wheels. ‘Break my leg? Break my head? Break my arms!’ he sings, with no fear in his mind. One little bump on the road and he will be in the hedge, with a broken arm or leg.

I mentally imagine the trip to the local hospital. As I think, in French, how I will explain the accident to the doctor (‘I told him to brake and he ignored me!’) it hits me that maybe he doesn’t know what brake means. He only knows frien, which Jacques taught him, naturally. I never got to explain the English translation. But this is no time to start translating. If I mispronounce frien or put it in an English sentence he might not understand. It sounds a bit like Friend and that might distract him. If I talk to him in French he will be surprised and might turn around to ask me why I am speaking French. Default language use eventually comes into action, my brain automatically finding a linguistic solution.

‘STOP!!!!’ I scream. That works. He stops. We all stop. Everyone understands Stop.
‘Nothing broken!’ smiles Gabriel ‘Why did you say break, Mummy?’

Ah, the joys of parenting in two languages!!

Down on the farm…

2008-09-24T21:11:00.000+02:00

On a recent long car journey to our holiday destination I suggested an easy game that all three children could play. It was called ‘Guess the Animal’. One person had to make an animal sound and the others guess what kind of animal it was. Gabriel had just visited a farm recently with the school, and learnt the names of animals in both languages. They could use either French or English when they answered. But we soon found out that all animals don’t always speak the same language…

Marc went first. ‘Scrontch-scrontch, groin groin…’ he said. The children quickly identified it as a pig. ‘How can that be!’ I said from the front seat. ‘A pig goes oink oink, like the pig called Babe in that film.’ I was quickly out-voted.

Nina was next, she cooed ‘hulluh hullah...’ and it took a while for us to guess that it was an owl, not a pigeon as I predicted. ‘No way’ the boys protest. ‘An owl says Twit-tu-whoo- tu-whooh’.

Gabriel chose a donkey, most likely inspired by Winnie-the Pooh, and said: ‘Eeyore, eeyore’. Marc and Nina guessed correctly, but disputed this hotly, arguing that a donkey usually says ‘hi-han hi-han’.

We gave up on the game, since no-one could agree on which sound was ‘right’ and ran through all the animal noises in both languages. With the help of the French storybook we had in the car about a farmyard, where the noises are written down, and my childhood memories of English animal talk we compared notes. Down on the farm some fields of French and English animals would not be able to talk to each other. Did you know, for example, that an English sheep goes ‘baa baa’ while a French sheep goes bêêêê? A duck in London would naturally say ‘quack quack!’ while its cousin in Paris says coin coin. A tiny chick would go ‘cheep cheep’ in Manchester, and piou piou in Normandy. Thankfully, cats miao, dogs woof, cows moo, and hens cluck in both countries.

Around the world there is whole orchestra of different ways of translating the same animal’s noise. For example, a male chicken, or cockerel, can ‘say’

Kho-kho-hou-hoûûû! (in Morocco)
Co-co-ri-co! (in France)
Cock-a doodle-doo! (in England)
Qui-qui-ri-qui! (in Spain)
Koké-ko-kôôô! (in Japan)

This is the kind of language use that you don’t see in a dictionary; or learn in a language school, it is often hidden in young children’s nursery songs or books. But it seems logical that a child attending pre-school or primary school would need to know the animal sounds in both languages or it could be very confusing. While this might all seem rather irrelevant in the wider scheme of helping your child become bilingual it is worth bearing in mind, especially if you plan to sing together the well-known children’s nursery rhyme ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm…’

We’re the only English in the village!

2008-06-02T11:49:00.000+02:00

We live in a tiny village, in the middle of nowhere, and yet there are ten English families living near us. When we lived here seven years ago the only English I bumped into were retired couples who lived in their summer houses or eccentric hippies looking for a different lifestyle. I used to meet them at the recycling depot or wandering hopelessly around the supermarket looking for ginger biscuits.

Now we have an influx of young families. Many choose remote rural areas, with houses they can renovate. Families who move out here take a huge risk, the country life can be lonely and there is no English-language school available. It’s hard for the children, thrown into the strict French educational system. The parents are optimistic and keen to immerse the family in French cultural life. Before signing the papers to their houses they imagine chatting over the fence to their French neighbours and speaking perfect French in just a few months with their new friends over an aperitif.

In reality, their best friends tend to be English. The numbers of English residents has sky-rocketed in five years. There are estimated to be around 400,000 British families in France. In the English café in the local town I browse the monthly newsletters offering English plumbers, carpenters, gardeners…A whole community has materialized to meet their needs. The supermarket has an International section now (baked beans, HP sauce, Tetley’s tea-bags…) and the staff speak English these days.

In the local village school Marc and Nina attend (four classes, three teachers and sixty-six pupils) there are seven English kids. That’s nearly 10%. The seven kids naturally talk English together, even though they are all bilingual. Except in class where English in banned. So far, the linguistic balance is working and the seven English-speaking kids make efforts to play with the French children and integrate through after-school activities. Marc and Nina have friends from both cultures and translate when needed. But in the secondary school I hear that 20% of the kids are English. They have become a separate group and rarely socialize with French kids.

What do the locals think about it? French mothers are happy for their kids to play with the English kids after school (free language lessons!) But furious at the prices the English pay for a country house. There is a distinct feeling that the numbers are getting too high and anti-English comments can be heard all around. The teachers hate teaching English as a Second Language (part of the curriculum) to the English kids, who laugh at their pronunciation.

On the English side some of the parents were rather annoyed to have yet another ‘English’ family join the class when we arrived. One mother, who has been living in our village for four years, was furious to have lost her status as the Only Brit in the Village. There’s the unspoken fear that the English kids will not bother learning French or make any French friends if there are too many of them. This is the case in many countries where, once numbers get too large, an internal community is formed.

Who do you want to win?

2008-06-02T11:47:00.000+02:00

We are not a sporting family, but there are some major sporting events, like the World Cup or the Olympics, where you can’t help wanting your country to win. But being a dual-nationality family we are sometimes split on which team we support. When I hear the British anthem being sung, or see Prince William and Henry in the crowd, I can’t help but join in with the chorus of God save the Queen! Seeing the England team run out makes me want to get out the English flag. Jacques has the same effect when he hears the patriotic La Marseillaise.

Which team should our children support? Mummy’s or Papa’s country? It’s tense in our house when it’s an England v France game. There’s always someone who asks the children who do you want to win? England and France are often come head-to-head in the last few matches of an international tournament. In general, Marc and Nina support France, while Gabriel and I are cheering for England (this could be linked to Gabriel having an England football strip that he wears for all sporting events). Should I feel let-down that two of my children don’t support my country? Sport is, after all, about bonding and feeling part of a team or a nation. They live in France now and at school hear kids talking about famous French sporting celebrities.

Luckily there are some players who are admired by both countries. David Beckham. Eric Cantona. Thierry Henry. The Arsenal manager, Arsène Wenger, and five players (who are French, so Marc informs me). French rugby player, Sébastien Chabal, plays for a club in England, even though he cried in public when England beat France in the semi-finals of the Six Nations competition.

Even though we play to win we’ll happily swap sides when our team is knocked out of the game. At the recent Rugby competition last October, when England famously kicked out France in the semi-finals, we all cheered for England in the following match. I would have done the same for France. I was weepy when France lost to Italy in the 2006 World Cup.

That leaves the intriguing question – if one or more of our children was really talented at a sport which country would they play for?

A new direction!

2008-05-19T22:34:00.000+02:00

The story of our life continues, but in the meantime I will be posting the Quarterly column that I write for the Bilingual Family Newsletter Notes From the OPOL Family (One-parent-one-language). The OPOL Family stories are real-life tales of being an English/French family, previously living in Malaysia, now in rural France. My three children, Marc (11), Nina (9) and Gabriel (5) read the columns and often add in their thoughts of amusing comments.

I've been writing this column for nearly four years now, covering subjects such as how to explain to your child, who's lost a tooth, whether it's the French mouse or the English Tooth fairy who drops coins under your pillow to how to deal with two religons and two different Mother's Days!

Please feel free to comment on the OPOL Family column, either via this blog or by email: opolfamily@gmail.com. Some of your comments may be edited used in future editions of the Bilingual Family Newsletter.

Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert

Author of Language Strategies for Bilingual Families: The one-parent-one-langauge approach

Thank goodness for Thanksgiving!

2007-12-10T09:16:00.000+01:00

After Halloween we were straight into Thanksgiving, the second Thursday in November. I had never really understood this festival, which seemed too close to a traditional Christmas lunch. Did they do it all again on the 25th December? It soon appeared that Thanksgiving was a family get-together, and that made me feel terribly homesick, smelling all the turkey and stuffing, and seeing all the grandparents at school and seeing central Chicago empty as families went home to family.

It was our first family holiday of the school year, well just a couple of days off, but better than nothing, but we all felt sad; the kids disliked school, I missed Malaysia a lot and Jacques was not too happy at work either. Winter had arrived, and we were cold, and had to rush out and buy skiwear and boot for all of us.

To cheer up we went to the Chicago Thanksgiving parade. Chilled to the bone, with only a Starbucks for warmth, we watched the floats and balloons line up and go down Michigan Avenue. Later on in the day we were invited to eat with Elisabeth and David, our new French friends who had lived in New York and enjoyed celebrating Thanksgiving. The food was gorgeous, roast turkey, cranberry sauce, real gravy and pumpkin pie, and the five kids played nicely together. It was cosy and we felt good. Even though the school and life was not what we have expected at least we had good company. Thank god for friends I thought.

The Limousine

2007-12-07T09:26:00.000+01:00

My parents came at the beginning of November to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday. They loved Chicago, and seeing it from a tourist view it did seem quite charming too. We visited the town, zoo, Navy Pier and around the lake. The children were delighted to have guests and showed them around.

On my Dad’s birthday we had a surprise, we told him we would eat at the Rainforest café downtown, and would call for a taxi. It was a long black limo for eight. Dad was surprised and we all climbed in for a cruise around Chicago as night fell, we picked up Jacques outside his NBC building office and were dropped off at the red-carpeted Rainforest café. It felt good! I was proud to have hosted his birthday and it made up for all the family tensions we had had in 2005.

My parents were relaxed, they liked America, were great with the kids and helped with the homework in the evenings. They could walk to the schools to pick up the kids and so their time with us was refreshing for me and I felt miles better and began to think we had made a good decision to live in America. The week went too fast though and before we knew it they were heading back to England. We were left, alone, wishing Grandpa and Nanna could be around every night for the school pick-up or to read the kids a story…

The Sweetest Halloween ever…

2007-12-06T15:20:00.000+01:00

I have always loved Halloween, and was delighted to see the effort the Americans put into this festival. It started in September, with pumpkin patches in the local city-farm, weekend Fall Parties in the parks and stuff to buy everywhere…before long we had a collection of twenty decorated pumpkins and thanks to the cheap imported junk from Walgreens we had a decorated house like never before.

The local neighbours around Lincoln park competed for who could have the most decorated house. Round the corner from us a competing trio of huge Gothic style houses showcasing witches and wizards who moved, ghostly yhands sticking up out of the garden, spider webs everywhere and spooky lighting. It was like a theatre and I was amazed no-one stole the whole lot…

On the 31st October each class had a party. Gabriel went as Batman and was promptly told he could not wear a mask (rules, rules…) so I dried his tears and grabbed some black paint and painted a mask for him. Nina was a witch. Marc was Shrek, with borrowed green tights and green face-paint. After school we invited our French friends for a gouter, or afternoon snack, with some decorated cupcakes. Around 6pm as it got dark we went out trick-or-treating as a group. I thought it would be short half-hour trip…

Houses were bursting with activity, and kids trailed in and out with huge bags. The occupants were often in costume, some funny, some scary, and handed out generous portions of wrapped sweets (or candy as Gabriel would say…). I was stunned at the sheer proportions of it all, how much could they get? With all our coat-pockets full and our plastic bags over-flowing I tried to get them home, but the lure of sugar, lights and so many dressed up people was addictive and we didn’t get home until 9pm…

Six months later when I spring-cleaned the front hall cupboard I found a whole bag of candies, unopened and forgotton! And as a bitter-sweet reminder Nina had to have five holes filled in by the dentist, that I was sure was linked with the Halloween excess….

A good class mom…

2007-12-04T09:49:00.000+01:00

Being a mother is taken very seriously in America. You are asked almost immediately which team you play for: Working Mom or Stay-at-Home Mom. The Working moms all looked overdressed in suits and busy as they picked up their kids, while answering their Motorola and driving a tank. The Stay-at-Homes wore trendy sports clothes and always had a huge Starbucks in their hand, or in the drink holder of the trendy stroller they were pushing with their new baby or toddler. They liked to jog with strollers around Lincoln Park, often with a dog attached, running along too.

So, for me, it was a tricky question, since I work and stay-at-home. I don’t dress chic, but I am not sporty either and I hate jogging. We don’t even have a car as a status symbol or a posh address, which confused them. When I said that I was English with a French husband living in America, they could not categorize me and gave up.

I felt miles more comfortable with the French mamans, who looked well-dressed even at eight in the morning, didn’t overdo the sports thing, went to cafes for their coffee, and had much better conversation anyway. But I felt I should try with the Americans, so I offered to do a class trip to the Botanical Gardens with Nina's 2nd Grade class.

The trip was over-booked, eight mothers for about 25 kids, and we had to sit in threes on the antique yellow school bus. The moms were excited, proud to have been selected and trying hard to be better than anyone else. Instead of going round as a group we were split into groups of three, and we rushed off, trying to give our kids the best school trip ever. Nina was clingy, but I understood why, the American girls all had a Best Friend. The two French-American girls in her class had no interest in Nina, probably because they already had a Best Friend in another class, or perhaps didn’t want to seen speaking French with Nina in class, which was frowned on. I saw that Nina was terribly lonely and missed her KL friends. And I felt the same way.

The only mothers in the whole school who talked to me for more than five minutes were divorcees. They were incredibly candid and open about their situation, telling me more than I wanted to know. I guess we both felt somewhat excluded from the perfect Lincoln life the moms were trying to have.

No more butts, we’re English!

2007-12-03T10:05:00.000+01:00

Gabriel was becoming more American by the day, while Marc, Nina and I were getting more English! The three of us visibly winced when we heard the way the Americans pronounced things, and the spelling tests were a test for all of us. Who says ‘color’ has to spelt like that? Why such a half-hearted attempt to change the spellings, since the vast majority of words stayed as tricky as before?

Meanwhile Gabriel started saying ‘butt’ instead of ‘bottom, and ‘I want to go potty!’ inside of toilet. He talked about pants, when he meant trousers. He put his rubbish in the ‘trashcan’ and asked for the ‘restroom’ in restaurants. Gabriel would ask for a ‘juicebox’ from the ‘icebox’, called me ‘mom’ instead of Mummy and so on…

I hated it and resented every single change to the language I had once taught. Although I had always discussed the differences with my TEFL students I had not realized how different America and England was.

At school shows or class assemblies the whole school would sing the National Anthem. I could cope with that, mouthing along while the chap next to me sang his heart out. But then I found out the kids had to sing it every morning at school. I asked Marc and Nina, 'Do you sing along?'‘No.’ they replied together. ‘We are English.’

Gabriel’s class were usually out at play when the school sang at 8.15am, but if it was rainy or cold they assembled around the class loudspeaker and with one arm over their little chests (I kid you not) sing that Star-spangled song. I would collapse into laughter watching them sing so seriously, like they had won the Olympics! Of course, I was told off by th teacher for moving while it was on (you could not walk through the corridor or barely breathe while it was playing either) and for showing a bad example to the children...

I’ll sue you!

2007-11-29T14:48:00.000+01:00

Marc was struggling with his French homework. I went to see the French directrice to say that Marc was not able to read the French book and do the review because he had so much American homework. I also felt he was being ‘punished’ and that reading should be a pleasure, especially since he had hours of American homework. Not so, she replied. Marc’s teacher tells with me that he is lazy and this is normal in America. The teacher had said that Marc had obviously never really worked before in Kuala Lumpur. (This stunned me and I had no idea what to say to her)

‘You were warned’ she reminded me and showed me a letter about the school that she had faxed to Jacques. It said, in French, that parents must be prepared to support their child at home too. I had seen that as been positive towards French, having French books, dvd’s etc. in the home and helping with the homework, but not doing it, surely.

The directrice ended the discussion with the message ‘Get a tutor if you can’t cope!’ A tutor? Pay 20 $ an hour for extra help after we were already paying 3,000 a year for EFAC! Never! Plus I was a trained teacher myself, surely I could help my own children? I wasn’t even working and yet still it was just TOO MUCH!

A few days later Marc came to talk to Jacques and me in private. Marc was unusually worried. It appeared that the teacher had been insulting him, and his previous ‘lazy’ school in front of the other kids. The teacher had made some threatening remarks too. Jacques was on the case immediately, like a ton of bricks, writing a formal ‘I’ll sue you if you touch or verbally insult my son…’ letter, and making an appointment to see the directrice for the next day. The directrice listened, talked to the teacher, who denied it all, and the matter was put aside. Marc reported that the teacher had stopped picking on him.

We felt a mixture of sadness that the bilingual school, that seemed so good on paper, was turning out so bad, and anger that the teacher was belittling our son. I won’t dispute that Marc has a lazy day-dreaming side, as do many kids, but he is bright and interested. The worst aspect was that he had no choice in which school he was sent to, so should he not be punished for our choices. We began truly thinking that we should move the children as soon as possible since both Marc and Nina would have the same teacher next school year....

Louisa May Alcott and her school.

2007-11-28T14:08:00.000+01:00

I found sweetly-named Louisa May Alcott School (named after the author of Little Women, which which had just tearfully watched on DVD) on the map and it was just three ‘blocks’ away as the Americans say. I called to ask about a place for Gabriel. The school was just a few blocks away. I knew it was late but it was worth a try. The secretary asked me immediately where I lived, to which I politely replied ‘Geneva Terrace.’ and she shouted, ‘Call Lincoln, that’s your school’ and hung up. I knew each school had a strict catchment area, but before age five you could choose, simply because you paid for pre-school education. I had always thought Americans did good customer service, but this was the tenth in a line of grumpy and unhelpful telephone, gas and bank people in a week. I tried again and again and finally screamed at her ‘I have two kids at Lincoln, it’s for the third one who is only three years old!!!’ ‘Oh’ she said ‘I’ll connect you to Room 111’ she would not apologize, but at least I got through.

When I visited I had to hide my surprise at the tiny classroom, with beds for naptime squeezed between the tables and chairs, although it seemed quite jolly and organized. The fees were horrific - at 7,000$ for the year, it made an English Montessori look cheap. At least breakfast and lunch was included in the price. But I signed Gabriel on, I had no other choice and he was truly bored being at home with me all day unpacking boxes.

His first week was a success. There was another French new girl called Maylis, starting the same week and three children in the pre-school who had siblings in the Lincoln school. We soon started walking together after dropping off the big ones at Lincoln, and kissing our little ones goodbye at 8.30am. Before long we were going straight round the corner to Einstein’s Bagels or Starbucks or Caribou coffeeshops for more chat and a late breakfast. It was a relief to have found friends, and Elisabeth, Leaticia and Sybille were good company.

They had all lived in America before, and were making the most of their time in America. They had all had full-time jobs before and we enjoying their time as stay-at-home-moms. We shared notes on where to find things, complaints about EFAC, the lack of time to play outside (10 mins only) and the awful school menu of pizza, hotdog or hamburgers. At 3.10 we gathered by the tree outside the school to chat about our day, and if the sun shone we would spend some time in the school park letting the kids run off their energy. I began to think things were looking up…

Get Organized!!!

2007-11-27T12:45:00.000+01:00

Paperwork was a daily deluge at the Lincoln school. Previous schools had only sent general info with the oldest child or sent an email – here we had everything twice and numerous ‘Urgent!’ emails from the Class Mom. The PTA was very active with a monthly agenda already set up, while the Class Moms organized the school trips, indoor lunchtime activities and sent memos from the teachers. I declined to join them.

Marc was told to ‘get organized’ and set up a desk for his homework. The teacher called me in to explain the class books, so I would know whether Marc had the right one (he rarely did). There were at least 6 classbooks that ferried back and forth every night for homework. It seemed be asking a lot of a nine-year-old. Class meetings were held with impressive targets, aims and goals. To my horror I discovered the American system is three 12-week semesters with no breaks in between, give or take the odd long holiday weekend. The year ends in mid-June, with an excessively long 10-week summer vacation. Where were all the nice half-term holidays for short family trips and having visitors? How would we survive?

From Week 1 homework was a challenge. Big chunks of science chapters to copy or learn, a book to read and a review per week, grammar that made me think twice and tricky math worksheets often with no answers (mean for parents!). On top of that there was a monthly ‘speech’ contest, where Marc was marked for presentation and style.

At first I thought it was just that Marc and Nina’s English was weak and they would soon catch up. But as the hours of homework stretched to three or more each night I was as weepy and tired as them. We were not finished sometimes until 10pm. Plus I had no maid now and Gabriel must be entertained till Jacques came in, and dinner needed to be cooked…and when could they play or get some fresh air?

A few weeks into the first semester the 4th Grade parents called a meeting to protest about the high workload, so it wasn’t just me. I had not dared mention my personal struggles to any other parents. Parents loudly complained of ‘reading burn-out’, depression, kids faking sicknesses, over-tiredness and insomnia and suchlike. The teachers listened impassively. At the end of all the moans the Principal tersely told us that this was a Top SATS scoring school, and the children must work at home to complete the curriculum. The message was if you don’t like it go someplace else….so the parents backed down and shut up. But why not stay at school till 5pm if there was so much work to be done? Why ask so much of the parents? What would become of these burned-out pre-adolescents when they finally got to university and had no-one to help them with their work?

The EFAC families.

2007-11-26T19:04:00.000+01:00

EFAC organized a Saturday picnic for the first weekend in a local park where we finally could get to meet the two teachers and the other parents and hopefully find some soulmates. I mentally sorted the parents into three groups:

• French mother married to American chap, trying to keep French going even though they will never live in France (there were a few French divorcees in this group too…)

• French-French couples who loved America, had green card (or were applying) who wanted children to be bilingual for heritage or future education/job…

• French expats in USA for short-term usually first time, wanting child to go to local school, but still keeping up French for return to France in few years…

The French mamans married to Americans were friendly with me; we had the shared connection of being married to a foreigner. A mother of a boy in Marc’s class, Pascale, who lived nearby gave me her number and told me it would be hard in the beginning. The French expats were chatty and keen to compare experiences of finding accommodation and where to go at the weekend. We met Elisabeth and Laeticia, and their families, and discovered they had pre-school age children attending a nearby school called Alcott. I made a note to call the next day for Gabriel. I also met Sylvie, a German married to a Frenchman with a girl in Nina’s EFAC class. She had lived in Chicago four years ago and knew a lot about EFAC and the city. I hope the two girls would form a friendship, Nina looked very sad these days.

How did we fit it? None of the above, although I felt closer to the temporary French expats more than the others, knowing that we would not stay long and also needed the French simply for future French education. But already we were calculating how long we would have to stay….Marc would be 11 in 2008 and would start secondary education, if we stayed in Chicago he would have to study by correspondence, which we didn’t want. Or we could transfer him and/or Nina to the Lycee Francais, but that cost 12,000$ a year…and then there was the problem of Gabriel who could not attend EFAC until he was five, two school years away, and needed private pre-schooling. The maths was frustrating and there was no easy solution. We would just have to take it year by year and see how it went.

The First Day…

2007-11-25T19:06:00.000+01:00

We took a bus to school the first day, leaving at 7.30 am for the 8am start, that only the EFAC kids had. As we arrived sportily dressed American moms were prepping coffee and pastries outside on tables for the start of their new semester at 9am. EFAC had nothing.

Madame Tranchevant, Directrice of EFAC welcomed us briefly and ticked off our names, she seemed in a rush to get classes going. The French parents and children were chatting loudly and were in no hurry to start the day or introduce themselves either. To my dismay Marc was in a tiny dark old-fashioned room with about 30 children and a male teacher. I had been told classes were limited to 9 students. Nina was in a basement room. There were also three classes of about 9 students and a female teacher. It looked more like a crèche than a class. But apparently this was just for the first hour, and after that the children would return in small year groups. I hoped Marc and Nina would find their way from American classroom to French classroom…they had no idea where 203 or 207 was.

I left a tearful Nina and serious-looking Marc, and went back to the hotel with Gabriel. The day was long and we were glad to meet them at precisely 3.23 (that was when the bell rang). It was a sunny day and the pavement in front of the school was packed with mothers and fathers straining to see their child. A man on a bike sold ice-creams from a cooler box. When the bell rang about three hundred kids poured out the building, more than I had expected, and quite frightening en masse and all at the same time.

I felt suddenly very very lonely, I knew nobody and had no-one to share a smile or to say hello to. The American mothers stressed me out, rudely shouting greetings over my head like I was invisble, and snapping photos of their child posing on the steps for the scrapbook of their First Day At School. Nina looked very lost and out of place and her classmates practically pushed her down the stairs. ‘Well how was your first day? I asked ‘Pas bien’ she answered.

Hey they have twin towers here too!!!

2007-11-23T20:52:00.000+01:00

Chicago seemed strangely small. I was expecting New York size and found it was remarkably compact and easy to navigate. The architecture was stunning and we walked around heads in the clouds admiring the black staggered skyscrapers, even though they were not as amazing as the KL ones. Taxis, buses and trains were cheap and our hotel was just off the Magnificent Mile of shops and restaurants so we were well placed.

I wanted Marc and Nina to fit in physically in their new school, so we shopped in Gap for Marc (it took me a few weeks to discover the cheaper but similar styled Old Navy…)Nina chose an all-black outfit from an expensive department store for her important first day. What seemed like a bargain was not so much when at the till they added 9% sales tax…

After a couple of days waking at 6am with reverse jetlag, and overdosing on oversized blueberry pancakes or watching the American flatscreen tv in the hotel we went to visit our future home and school. The Abraham Lincoln (he came from Illinois we would later discover) Elementary School was the home of EFAC, or the French bilingual program we had chosen and we must register with the school as local residents. The suburb was leafy and beautiful, rather English looking, like Richmond or Fulham with lots of upscale coffee shops and gift shops. Our house-to be was a grey shingled semi-detached and Victorian style, spacious and just renovated, but our furniture was still blocked and we would have to start school from the hotel.

There was no-one to welcome us from EFAC. The American main school office was open and we had a file of papers to fill out. ‘Nina will be in 203 and Marc 207’ the secretary said, although it meant nothing to me. A few teachers popped into the office and one young Asian heritage woman shook hands with Marc and said she would be his teacher. Class lists of required items were handed out as was the summer’s homework.

Back at the hotel I began to panic, Marc should have read and reviewed a whole book by now. We dashed out to Borders bookshop and bought the book, but it was too long and set in America, with lots of different vocabulary which I needed to explain to him. I ended up speed-reading it to him over the next three days and doing the review for him.

Then there was the list of supplies to get ready. We hired a car and drove to a huge shop called Target, and in a crowd of pushing and grabbing parents searched for the school items required. A Sharpie pen, what the hell was that? An erasable pen? Did that exist yet (it does! Thanks Papermate!), a book stand (I didn’t know them that the books would be so heavy they had to supported..), a bottle of hand sanitizer and several Composition books and three-subject books which came in a variety of lines and sizes. We also stocked up on the mysterious fabric book covers that everyone else was buying…

Security overload.

2007-11-22T13:40:00.000+01:00

I could not feel any kind of excitement about going to Chicago in September, it seemed like a dream and we would find ourselves back on the Malaysian Airlines flight with the sweet girls in saris and the pilot announcing ‘Point Point!!’ (I think it translated as Ladies and Gentlemen!) and we would wake up in the balmy twilight with palm trees and mosquitos around us…and our condo and our wonderful maid, Aimee, waiting for us…

But in reality we were booked on the 31st August day flight to Chicago, right in the middle of a major security alert involving, by some nasty twist of fate, England and America. Security was on bright red and before our bags were even looked at, we had to empty out any non-essentials before check-in. That included kids toys, extra clothes (what if they are sick or spill something?), make-up, deodorant and of course the bottle of water the suspect was planning to blow up the bomb with.

It was tense at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and the kids were twitchy and over-excited at all the fuss. Nina cried and I screamed at her. In the departure lounge I was pulled over and body searched just as we boarded the plane, with my heart beating that I might be left behind while Jacques and the children left without me…

The flight was awful. The American Airlines attendants were grumpy, furious that Gabriel ran about with his socks on (he might cut his feet? On what? I asked nastily Did you drop something?). Rules and regulations were everywhere and I felt threatened and nervous. Getting into Chicago was as difficult as getting onto the plane, more security checks, pointless thumbprinting (what do they do with all those prints?) and a search for a taxi big enough for us and all our luggage.

Our house was not ready yet, and our furniture was somewhere between New York and Chicago in a container, so we went to a hotel in the city…we had four days to get over the jet-lag and acclimatize before school and our new life really started…..

Changes in Caunay

2007-11-20T16:39:00.000+01:00

We arrived in Paris from KL totally jet-lagged. We somehow managed to get on a TGV and were picked up by my sister-in-law, Laure at the station in Poitiers. Laure drove us directly to the house in Caunay, not to my parents-in-law's house, as we usually did. On arrival my parents-in-law ushered us in, along with my other sister-in-law, Nora and two cousins. Lunch was waiting for us on the beautifully set table. I was stunned, last time I had been here the house was simply a storage area. It was so peculiar to see furniture from three years ago I blinked. And who were the babies? Two big fat plump babies sat on the sofa? Nora and Laure’s I realized, remembering that we had missed their births and now they were nearly a year old. My mother-in-law had had an aneurysm in May and nearly died and we had missed all of that. I felt like I’d been to the moon and back. It was a sobering thought.

When they left I unpacked madly, it was like a drug, one more box and I’m done, no just one more, where are those knives and forks? Oh look the school work from Marc’s class…and so I spent my first week with the nights unpacking and the days sleeping off the jetlag.

The first week a storm hit and water poured through a hole in the roof, I was terrified and ran around looking for jugs and bowls to stem the flow. The electricity would fuse every time I used two machines at the same time, and we had to co-ordinate the microwave with the washing machine (or tv). I couldn’t find anything and all our linens smelt mouldy and disgusting. I wanted to wash everything.

I saw a lot of Gaelle, and we swapped children every few days. Nora on holiday too, without her husband, in her summer house. One of the best bits was cooking, I loved the shopping, everything seemed so much fresher and easier to find than in Malaysia and the cousins, who were always hungry, praised my simple cooking. Where in England would you find a ten-year-old child who asked his aunt ‘So how did you make this sauce then?’

My mother-in-law had taken the cousins away for the last few years and we all assumed that she would cancel after being so ill. She had planned to go for three weeks with six cousins. None of us dared say no although we all wanted to, for the first time in ages I did not trust her. What happens if she drops into a coma while on holiday I asked Jacques. As a compromise she reduced it to just one week with the four oldest cousins, Francois, Marc, Nina and Manon. But in the stressful run-up to the holiday I told the children: ‘Enjoy it, it’s your last year with grandmere, she’s getting too old for this kind of thing…’ Naturally this message filtered through to Odile and she telephoned Gaelle and me in tears, only to be told, yes it’s true, it is the last time. It was a tense moment as Gaelle and I stuck to our refusal to continue as before. We had to make a stand or she would walk all over us.

I had hoped for a joyful reunion with my mother-in-law after our 2005 conflict, and her near-death in May, but it was not to be. Gaelle and Nora each had their own stories to add to the bubbling soup of gossip, it seemed like I was the not only one being criticized, in fact my greivences with her were nothing compared some other things she had done or said… When Jacques arrived at the end of August my mother-in-law complained to him about me but he just ignored it. She sulked and refused to attend his birthday party. I did it without her. I knew she was a sociable character who hated missing out on things so she would be furious at being out of the loop. It worked and she came over at 9am on the last Sunday asking to talk to me in private, and we had a heated discussion over her KL behaviour and my summer of ignoring her. When it was all over I felt better and we hugged and laughed like we had done before.

I went back to England too, it was my mum’s 65th birthday and we organized a party for her. Although I still could not get over the events of last year we managed to remain civil and the party was a success, Jayne and I each cooked two courses and bought a shared gift together. I realized how much my children enjoyed being with their grandparents and that they didn’t need me around, and we tentatively planned that next year the children would have holidays on their own, using the summer house as a base we could see each other without causing too much friction.

No one came to visit me in Caunay, I didn’t want to have any visitors except the French family, we were all in a state of cultural shock and I was mentally exhausted after leaving Malaysia for good, and we knew we had to recharge our batteries for the next part of our life in the USA…

Mummy is crying…

2007-06-01T00:33:00.000+02:00

Our last few days in KL were blurry, as the packers ‘hoovered’ up all our possessions. I made a last few trips to the Craft centre where we did batik to try to calm down. We were doing as many batik pictures as we could before we left. As I left Marc and Nina to walk around the artist complex I spotted an artist. Her name was Shima and she had a huge rectangular Malaysian picture of beach houses, turquoise sky and soft sand for sale. It seemed to represent the best of our times in Malaysia and I made an instant decision to buy it, even though it was expensive for my standards, over 2,000 ringgit (about 300 pounds or 500 dollars). It was the first time I had bought from a real artist and I was chuffed to have found her, although I wished I had met her earlier.

I cried all the time, the first time with my calligraphy teacher, Ikuko when she presented me with a handmade Japanese scroll. Then at home the kids stopped playing to watch as I wept when Odile hugged me goodbye. It was the same with Victoria, Mahin and Liz. I could hardly bear to say goodbye to our maid, Aimee, who had found a new job with a Dutch family in KL, but had been so much a part of our life for the last two and half years. I had managed to be smiley and positive with so many people I had met in our three years, but saying goodbye to these surrogate family members was the hardest thing ever.

On our last day Hilary and Benoit invited us to eat with them just before we left for the airport. Jacques was staying for the summer to finish off his job and would be joining us in six weeks. That made me feel emotional too. Finally Jacques dropped me and the children at KL airport for our flight to Paris and I had to stop dripping tears and look forward to a summer in France….for the first time in our own summer house.

The Long Goodbye Party

2007-05-31T04:21:00.000+02:00

You can’t avoid a goodbye party in KL so a series of goodbye parties started with different groups of friends, a lunch with the ladies who had French Husbands, organized by Hilary at the Hilton, a Ladies Night Out and a goodbye buffet for four of us who were leaving the Cooking group. A last lunch with Ikuko, my calligraphy teacher, a night out drinking at the English bar down the road with Victoria, an afternoon gouter at Odile’s house to celebrate her third baby and reunite the mercredi group for the last time and a last sweet coffee with Liz and Mahin at our first condo...and as time ran out I decided we should throw a last party too.

We had an all-day Saturday event in the end, since someone was always busy. I invited everyone in my address book since I couldn’t bear to choose one person over another, even Marc’s tennis teacher, who came along rather bemused to be included. The morning started with a Garage Sale, where we got rid of nearly all our excess clothes, baby stuff and rubbish.

In the afternoon I did an English-style afternoon tea with scones and sandwiches. The kids played in the pool and their parents chatted about holiday plans. Close friends Christophe and Mazdida, Sasi and Bruno, Corinne and Alastair, Victoria and Jerome, Mahin, Liz and their families came along with many others we knew. Everyone came, even if they just popped in for an hour or so.

Nina’s classmates presented her with a picture, suitcase and warm clothes for her new life out of the tropical sun. We were presented with many gifts; the turquoise ceramics I loved, a red Chinese tea-set, a Japanese scroll, a Malaysian cookbook from the cooking group, a guidebook for Chicago, a stunning book on tropical style and the condo ladies (who I though never really liked me!) got together and bought a beautiful set of brushes for my beloved Japanese calligraphy. Victoria made me a unique photo montage picture. I was very touched.

Later on another group of friends came for the evening buffet. My closest friends Odile and Hilary were there, along with Jacques’ good friend, John and my French friends Miriam, Sophie and Christine. We cut two huge cakes, one an American flag, one a Malaysian flag (remarkably similar, both red and blue stripes, but one had yellow stars, the other white). Marc’s friend, Adam, stayed the whole weekend as did Nina’s friend, Laure, and I was grateful for their enduring friendship when they knew we were leaving.

Have a nice visa!

2007-05-30T04:30:00.000+02:00

The USA Embassy requested that we list all the places we had lived and/or visited in the last 10 years for our family visa. This was a mean chore. Jacques spent a whole morning doing his on an excel file, while I flicked through the photo albums looking for where we spent holidays …and trying to remember when I last visited America (in 1992 and 1980 as if it mattered). This was an excessive amount of information, like who was going to check all this information! But we turned it into an interesting summary of our travels so far.

We worked out that Marc had visited or lived in 16 countries over the last nine years. Arriving two years after him Nina totaled 14 and Gabriel managed to squeeze in 9 countries in just 3 years! In bold are those countries we lived in and the others we visited: Hungary, Egypt, Jordan, Switzerland, France, Germany, England, Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, China, Bali, Vietnam, Australia and Cambodia.

The KL USA Embassy, where we went for an Interview, made a big thing of security, with airport-style guards and x-ray machines, thumbprints and sneaky questions. It was not a good sign. Everyone inside looked terrified. Our tricky question was ‘Why were your children all born in different countries?’ So how does one answer that? Jacques smiled and said we had planned it that way and the chap laughed and banged down the official stamp and we were in.

But after coughing up a huge amount of money for the privilege of a 3-year working visa (where the Spouse could not work) we then had to pay even more because 4 of us had UK passports and there was ‘no reciprocal agreement’ as the visa-guy called it. What? Between England and America? When we went to war in Iraq to help you? I was close to shouting but didn’t want to get us a premature black mark on our new visas. With all that smart technology we could be refused at the airport gate before we left Europe. We grudgingly paid and outside watched delighted Malaysians clutching their newly stamped passports with joy. What were they expecting in the land of plenty? A lot of disappointment I was sure, they were too optimistic for their own good…I wanted to shout, Stay here! Don’t give up your beautiful country for America!

The Shaved Reckless Boys

2007-05-29T04:19:00.000+02:00

Jacques’ friend, John had had all his hair shaved off for an office dare. Jacques said he would like to see how it felt, just once while he could in tropical Malaysia. One Friday he went and had all his hair shaved off too, without telling me. I hated it. To really rub salt in the wound Marc begged to have the same haircut and Jacques took him to Little India on Saturday for the same crop. I was furious, especially the next day at school when French mothers asked me whether he had had a particularly bad attack of head lice….

The May school holiday trip to the Perhentian Islands trip was a few days later. Jacques taught the kids to snorkel and we swam with sharks and turtles. We asked ourselves why had we wasted so many long weekends doing nothing in KL when we could have come snorkeling. And the funniest thing, Jacques and Marc both had matching sunburnt heads….since you can’t snorkel in a hat. That will teach those daft boys I thought.

A couple of days later we flew to Borneo for the second part of the holiday. Jacques and Marc were still keen to climb Mount Kinibalu. The obligatory huts were all booked up, but they scored a last-minute place in mountain hut. Within ten minutes they were off up the mountain, dressed for summer and sharing a rucksack with only a light change of clothes. I spent a restless night wondering about their whereabouts as a tropical storm raged. They finally rolled in the next day, battered, exhausted and aching everywhere, totally unprepared for a hike like that. Marc had very nearly reached the summit, but gave up suffering from lack of air, a stomach bug and intense tiredness. They had bought matching wool balaclavas (for their chilly heads) gloves and barely slept all night.

On the last night in Borneo Nina was chosen to be the Sarawak Princess for the night, along with a girl she had met on holiday. Dressed up in the black national costume she was carried to the beach and treated to a dance by a local group.

The boys and Nina had all had fun and it was an unforgettable experience, and we all agreed that they would never have done it if we were not leaving Malaysia…

History lesson in Angkor

2007-05-29T03:59:00.000+02:00

Leaving meant a panic look at the ‘Things To Do’ list that we had compiled when we first arrived in 2003. Although we never learnt Chinese or how to dive we had visited Singapore, Bangkok, Shanghai, Bali, Vietnam, Australia and the western Malaysian islands of Langkawi and Pangkor. But Jacques still wanted to go snorkeling on eastern Perhentian Islands and see Malaysian Borneo in May, with the idea to climb Mount Kinabalu. I would have liked to have gone to Beijing or Japan too, but time was running out and we only had one two-week holiday to squeeze it all in.

And there was Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, which we both wanted to go to. Two of my friends, Anne and Corinne had raved about it but we had put off going because they said it was not good for young children. So we left Gabriel with the maid (and surveillance from three trusted friends, took Marc and Nina out of school for a brief 3½ day trip. It was odd just having Marc and Nina. I thought they would be happy to be without their pesky brother, but they still bickered and squabbled anyway, but at least they were interested in the history of Angkor Wat.

We had a stunning hotel and quickly found a chauffeur/guide, which was the only way to see the whole ancient site in such a short time. He drove us everywhere with patience, waiting while we scrambled up hundreds of steps to the tops of temples, admired the giant stones faces and visited the local silk farm. Marc and Nina handed out dollar bills to all the local children and came back with a collection of scarves, paper flowers, stone carvings and whistles. I found a market and shopped like I would never go to Asia again, buying a puppet, silk handbags, brightly coloured hammocks, turquoise pottery, art and my favourite, a heavy stone Buddha’s head.

A bilingual school?

2007-05-26T16:31:00.000+02:00

School was the next big worry. French or English? But even that was not so simple. The French Lycee (12,000$ per child) or the Bilingual French-English(3,000$) one? A British school or local American public school? After several emails and web searches we decided to go for the Bilingual school, but they only had space for Nina and we must wait for April 1st, when parents were asked if they would return for the next school year.

At the end of March a place did come up for Marc and we smartly paid the deposit. The French classes were limited to only nine children. The Ecole Franço-Americane de Chicago or EFAC was a private institution linked to The Abraham Lincoln Elementary public school.Marc and Nina would have a split curriculum and do an extra hour of French every morning (starting at 8am), and French studies while their American class did French and other subjects, like sport or art. It promised bilingualism and biculturalism and seemed like the perfect school for us. Marc and Nina would get a feel for real American life and yet still keep their hard-won academic French. I would find a local pre-school for Gabriel, and his French immersion would have to wait.

The school was situated in a surburb close to Downtown, called Lincoln Park, which we found out was a rather posh gentrified area, favoured by ‘eclectic and educated young families who eschew bland suburbia and enjoy lively city living, with a zoo, beach and ample green space within walking distance…’ or so the guidebook told us. There were an awful lot of cafes, Starbucks and clothes shops in Lincoln Park. So I knew we wouldn’t have the perfectly manicured lawns and nosy neighbours of ‘Desperate Housewives’, that I was currently watching in a vague aim to find out how I would fit in with American stay-at-home moms….in fact we probably wouldn't have any kind of garden, it sounded more like Chelsea or Notting Hill in London.

Using the GoogleEarth software we took a sneak peek at the school buildings and scrolled across to the zoo, lake and beach. This was the first time we could actually show the children what their new neighbourhood would look like, without moving an inch! We knew that we would have to live in the school’s catchment area, so we could imagine living in one of the tall townhouses nearby and walking to school each day. Maybe we could live without a car? It would be nice to walk around on a fresh spring day or an autumn days when the leaves changed colours...Our new life finally began to look like reality...

A new continent...

2007-05-25T17:16:00.000+02:00

Jacques' boss from England came over to visit the office and had some big news for Jacques. I was away at the time, on holiday in Langkawi with my mum and sister. Jacques rang and said he had been offered the American CFO job based in Chicago. I was totally stunned for a moment. Jacques sounded excited and wanted my reaction. ‘OK’ I stalled ‘But when?’ ‘As soon as possible' he said and chatted on about his new role, which he had wanted to do since he joined the company five years ago.

I told the kids straight away, not wanting them to overhear confusing conversations. ‘What will you miss?’ I asked Marc and we sat on the edge of the pool. ‘My friend Adam’ he said immediately. Nina said the beach and the tropical life. Then I told my mum, who said she thought it would be a good move, and at least we would be nearer to them. I thought how faraway we must be to them and that seemed one good reason to go to America, although I couldn’t think of any other reasons…apart from that we knew we would have had to leave Asia sooner or later.

It was soon confirmed and before we knew it we were applying for visas and working out what to do with all the furniture we had accumulated in three years. It seemed too soon though and my heart was aching as I broke the news. As news spread round the KL grapevine I found out I was not the only one. Liz, my Indian friend from the condo was off to Singapore, Audrey to Dubai and several families were returning to France.

The reaction to our news was very nationalistic. The Brits or anyone who had American connections said great things about Chicago and everyone knew someone who had lived there and loved it. The French were mortified we would go to country run by George Bush. Such was the strength of anti-American feeling among the French, after their President Jacques Chirac had refused to join in the war against Iraq, which in retrospect had been a good decision, but who was to know?

The children looked up Chicago on the map and Jacques optimistically told them wew would be living on a new continent, which sounded exciting.

All we could do was make a list of things to do before we left and begin to imagine our new life in USA…

Surprise guests

2007-05-25T00:05:00.000+02:00

To my surprise my mother said she was coming to visit in February, with my sister. My mum didn’t want to travel alone, after being seriously ill on an airplane, and Jayne didn’t want to travel alone either with her son, now 16 months old. I felt excited yet somewhat nervous, after last years run-in with my mother-in-law and my family I wasn’t sure how it would go. We hardly knew our one and only English cousin, Brayden, and I was unsure how he would fit in with my unruly and over-active trio.

My mum seemed happy to be in KL and with us. Jayne was battling with the west-east jet-lag and having a young child awake most of the night, but once she got over that she liked it. Our children absolutely adored Brayden, fussing over him and playing with him and there seemed to be a good bond between Gabriel and Brayden already. I have always been so grateful for the easy friendship between the French cousins (Marc and Francois & Nina and Manon). Later on realized it was not automatic or guaranteed. As more cousins popped out on the French side, now twelve in total including our children, the inter-cousins relations were not always warm and could even get aggressive or nasty. So we were happy Gabriel had found a friend and encouraged it.

But I found myself feeling jealous of the way Brayden ran to my mum, while my kids looked on, thinking how just a few years ago they had been the ones to cuddle up to her. I was having problems adjusting to my sister with a child and listening to her ‘first-time mother’ moans irked me since I was doing everything in threes these days and no one seemed bothered anymore. It felt like a lot of time had passed since I was in the same boat. Like when Jayne first fell in love with her husband-to-be - I had been married for five years, and I felt so old and boring. Now I felt I was on the way out of having young babies and toddlers, while she was just starting...

Little devil or angel….

2007-05-23T19:53:00.001+02:00

January is birthday month for the boys but they did not want to share a party this time. Marc would be nine and chose a pool party with pizza, which was relatively easy. Gabriel’s would be three this year and old enough to understand it was his special day. He would celebrate his day at school on the Thursday with a cake, and then we would have a party for friends at the condo at the weekend. We considered a clown, or a puppet show, or a dress-up party and made long guest lists of everyone we knew and then two weeks before the birthday he bit his one of his closest friends, Macauley…

Miss. Tim rang me at home and told me it was not the first time. I knew Gabriel had bitten a boy at the playgroup a year ago and had bitten his condo playmate, Anael, several times. But I had put it down to lack of language skills and being young. Now it was more serious. Miss. Tim reported that she had done a role-play and made Macauley pretend to bite Gabriel. She was sure this would help and Gabriel would feel sorry. To my horror when I picked up Gabriel he said ‘Macualey bit me!’ In his mind he had erased the real memory (it was true, he was the biter, I saw the marks) and recreated this false version. I talked to Macauley’s mum, my good friend Victoria and we didn’t know what to do. Gabriel needed pulling into line and the only option was to cancel his birthday party…

The next day I talked to Miss.Tim about him and she mentioned that he often referred to himself as a ‘devil’. I laughed and said it was a joke…with his name, blonde hair and cherubic look he had been our ‘angel’ since he was born. But over the last year we had begun calling him a ‘little devil’ at home, since he was often naughty in the family. Miss. Tim was shocked and told me it was becoming a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and we must stop right now!

But I couldn’t cancel his birthday party. He was the baby of the family and certainly my last child, how could I cancel this special day? After several chats with friends I came to the decision to have a Sunday afternoon tea-party with only close friends (i.e. only those who knew that Gabriel was rather naughty). I had long chats to Gabriel about biting and the badness of it and tried hard not to call him a devil anymore.

A few days before Gabriel and I went across the road to the appropraoty named Angel cake shop and he picked a big cake with a Batman design for the school and a chocolate one for the weekend. I told him if he bit anyone he would lose the cakes. The school party and the simple Sunday party were a success in the end. Nina organized the little ones into crafts activities and Marc played games with the older brothers and sisters. The kids all played nicely and no-one was bitten, thank goodness and Gabriel seemed to enjoy his special day. But it made us all take a good look at our angelic little boy and wonder would he live up to his name….

Downhearted down under

2007-05-22T05:38:00.000+02:00

We went to Australia for Christmas. I had heard great things about Australia. Two French friends had lived there and raved about the cool lifestyle and Brits loved it. We flew to Brisbane and then took a short flight and boat trip to Lindeman Island, where we would spend a week on a Club Med resort for Christmas.

Our first impressions were negative, after empting our snacks into the bin at the airport and losing our luggage. The service staff seemed particularly bad-tempered. Rules were rules and we were thrown out of our hotel room at 10am, forbidden to snorkel without signing a million forms, and not allowed in a bar after 9pm with the children (something we always did in Asia, where kids are accepted till midnight). But the kids were happy and enjoyed the Australian entertainment and Santa arriving on the 25th on a sea-plane loaded with gifts. I hoped that Christmas would be more ‘English’ and I was pining for roast turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce with Christmas pudding. But this was a true Australian Christmas and it was an open-air barbecue and beer in the sunshine. Most fellow holidaymakers from Europe were delighted to be on the beach on Christmas Day, but we wished we had gone to Bali or Thailand.

We flew back to Sydney and rented a car and did a road-trip around the Blue Mountains. Here we saw English-style houses and ate great fish and chips. The children loved visiting the caves, trekking in the blue-green forests and petting a kangaroo and koala at the zoo. In the local supermarket I bought Christmas crackers (glossy cardboard tubes with a small gunpowder strip that bangs when two people pull it open and a gift falls out). This is typically English but had the effect of making me very homesick!

Back in Sydney for the last few days we met up with friends from KL, Sasi and Bruno, who were also there on holiday. We ate Chinese food in Chinatown together and Sasi confided that she missed Asia and would not want to live in Australia. I agreed that it simply did not impress me either. Had I become a snobbish asiaphile? Or was it because we were so used to the soft kind of smiling friendly tourism around Asia? We had had high expectations and the reality didn’t live up it. But what was reality? Why were we not happy when millions of tourists loved Australia? Would we ever be able to leave Asia now and go back to normal life?

Dress up party

2007-05-19T05:48:00.000+02:00

The last cooking session of the year was in December and was to be a joint Indonesian buffet lunch. Three ladies would cook each part and we were promised a true feast celebrating the end of the Muslim fasting month. As I sent out the usual sms and email I added on the line ‘Dress code: Asian style’ as a little joke, thinking no one would take it seriously.

But it seemed like we all had a hidden wish to dress up as one of the local cultures and everyone came in ‘Asian style’. We had about twenty guests that day, a great turnout. Everyone squeaked as a new person came in, looking totally different, and the cooking was postponed for ages while we all admired our dress-up. Some ladies were in Indian saris, others in Chinese cheongsams, one was wearing the familiar batik uniform of Malaysian Airlines (she used to work for them I think), while most of the Europeans were in sarong beach style outfits. Everyone looked great, it felt like being six-years-old again and invited to a your best friend’s dress-up party!!

As we sat around on the floor cushions eating our spicy curries and rice, homemade peanut sauce with satay and other such delights from Suhita and her team we laughed at each other. At the end I announced that the next session would be Brazilian cooking and with a smile I added ‘The next cooking session dress code is Brazilian beachwear!’ The look of horror that crossed some of the faces was hilarious!

The one and only birthday party…

2007-05-18T04:45:00.000+02:00

My birthday is on Christmas day, which means I don’t usually celebrate it with friends. As a child I have only one strong memory of a birthday party at my Nanna’s house with all my cousins. I can’t remember ever having a proper birthday party with school friends. Generally it was just my parents and sister and we celebrated Christmas in the morning and my birthday in the afternoon with a cake. Later on I found myself working on birthdays (cooking in a ski-resort or teaching English in Japan). For my 30th I was at Jacques’ parents house and everyone totally forgot until I started weeping at 6pm. On my 29th and 35th birthday I was hugely pregnant and ready to pop, with Marc (born 8 days later) and Gabriel (24 days later). So it is an emotional day for me.

Having children certainly has helped, and they love preparing a surprise for my day, but understandably they are rather busy with their new toys to really pay much attention to my birthday. It’s not that I feel sorry for myself (well I do to be honest!) but that’s how life is. I can’t even blame my mother since she didn’t expect me arriving either that day!

So imagine how delighted and amazed I was when some of my KL friends decided to organize a mini-party for me. I would be 38, not a great age but memorable as the only year I really truly had a party arranged in my honour. My Filipino friend Maribeth booked us a table in the English-style hotel bar where her husband worked. We did it a week early since some of us were leaving for the holidays. Maribeth invited Hilary, Yuen-Chi, Sasi and Fred. I was close to tears when a surprise cake arrived, iced in pale lilac with my name, made personally by Maribeth's pastry-chef husband. The girls presented me with a bracelet made from yellow stones, which was good luck for my Chinese birth year of the Goat. It was the perfect gift, I am not a jewellery person but I loved the asian bracelets I found in markets and wore at least one a day. I was truly touched and we danced till 1am to the Filipino band singing along to Abba hits and my favourite song ‘I will survive…’

Wind of change

2007-05-17T01:51:00.000+02:00

As the year ended contracts finished and families were on the move again. Yossy from the ‘French Husband’s’ club had left for New Zealand and Yuen-chi was returning to Korea, Nina’s amour, Dorian, went to Paris, a French family from the condo went to Vietnam and a Chinese-Malaysian friend, Maureen, from the cooking group returned to Canada.

There were several goodbye lunches, dinners or parties. KL social life revolved around goodbye parties. They were a chance to meet old friends, who were all connected in some way, and find out how long we all had to go (like comparing prison sentences, someone joked!).We usually contributed towards a joint gift, chosen by the departing person’s ‘best friend’ - a cookbook, a local painting, or a set of Chinese ceramic bowls. It was an important part of the ritual of saying goodbye, closing the departure and allowing people to move on.

I noticed how many expats simply replaced one departing person with another, the fourth person for the mah-jong club, a tennis partner, the PTA mother and so on. But I found it hard to replace close friends so easily. Certainly the groups I was part of could not be replaced. The diverse mixed expat families from our first condo, the French mercredi club, and the ‘French husband’s’ club were unique. We had tried replacing lost friends with new expats or a friend of someone in the group but somehow the fragile balance of characters, background and connections was broken and eventually the group drifted away or re-formed somewhere else.

Mahes and me just before she left for Kiev
There was one person leaving who was truly irreplaceable, Mahes, my Malaysian friend. Mahes had battled with breast cancer most of the year, but was recovering well. Mahes was married to a Frenchman who had been posted to Darfur in Sudan and had three children. Her husband came back when she was diagnosed and stayed with her, but his compassionate leave ran out and he was posted to Kiev, Ukraine. Their departure was hard for me and Marc, who was losing his friend, Danton. I had never seen anyone as brave as Mahes in the face of such a horrible disease, and her wit and spontaneity always made my day. On her last day we went for a last coffee and shopping in Megamall, picking out warm clothes for her arrival in -30 degrees Kiev. Someone told me later that people only spend their last day with a good friend and I was touched that she chose to spend it with me.

As Mahes left we exchanged gifts, I gave her a painting of some Chinese bowls, as a reminder of our lunches together, and she gave me a bamboo wind chime, which I hung on my balcony to tell me when a storm was approaching. For the first time since we had touched down in Malaysia I began to wonder how long it would be before we were leaving too and I felt the wind of change began to blow in our family too…

Happy Halloween!

2007-05-15T05:45:00.000+02:00

Halloween is big business all around the world and KL was no exception. I loved Halloween and it was the time of the year when I really most English! This would be the third time my British friend, Vikki and I would organize a Halloween party for condo friends. The first year had been a trick-or-treat trail from my block to hers, ending in a scary fright when her husband aka The Hunchback of Notredame, opened their door, making all the kids take a giant step backwards! The second year was a party by the pool with games and trick or treating around the condo, which was safe and offered a fair number of sugary give aways.

This year we had a party room in our new condo that we could use, already dark and spooky to start with. We decorated it with blowing net curtains, fake spider’s webs and glow-in-the-dark skeletons. We prepped games, a feel what’s in the box (with jelly slime), bobbing apples and found some ghost screams and scary music on a CD. The kids loved it and the adults all brought a plate of something to share. It was a Tuesday night and I thought no-one would come, but in the end practically we knew everyone turned up, with kids fantastically dressed, and more came as the condo people heard the noise and came down to see what was happening. As the chaps came home from work they joined the kids with a glass of wine or a beer and it was great fun.

Sometimes it can be uncomfortable to mix English and French together. They tend to group off and ignore each other, but this time it was a true mix of chatter and comments on the kid’s costumes or laughing at the spooky room. It felt good and I was delighted to see a few new friendships formed and the French see that they could mix with the English-speakers without fear.

Exit Princess Nina!

2007-05-11T04:59:00.000+02:00

Nina was still doing badly at school. Jacques said it was my fault for socialising too much and reading while snuggling in bed with her. I accused him of never reading bedtime stories to her, as all good English parents do. We clashed culturally on what to do with our non-reader. I wanted a tutor while Jacques proposed seeing a psychologist. This sent me into a fury “She’s not mentally sick,” I screamed, while he calmly told me he had seen a psychologist when at school. ‘You never told me!’ I said, but apparently it was quite normal since he refused to work and said he hated his mother. For an English kid to see a psychotherapist is asking for social exclusion (no more birthday invites…) and I didn’t want Nina on Ritalin.

But after an informal chat with her teacher I was persuaded to try out a session. The resident school psychologist was a charming young French woman married to an American and she totally approved of bilingualism. We discussed the French-accent-when-she-spoke-English issue, Nina’s problems with friends and her decision to play dunce. She said she would interview and observe Nina and get back to us. I had a few sleepless nights worrying about her. What had we done to her? Was it the overload of languages, the expat life, the lack of extended family, having a maid or leaving her alone too much?

But in the end it was very simple. Nina was ‘stuck’ in maternelle, where she had spent three happy years, with delightful teachers, loving friends and a reassuring routine of singing, dancing and creative work. Now she had lost her girlfriends and was asked to sit still (the teacher said she was very twitchy) and do academic work in a very structured environment. Nina's reaction was to try to revert back to maternelle. So as parents we had to encourage her to ‘grow up’ and not treat her as a princess. She loved to dress up as a princess and did enjoy being the only female in the threesome.

The psychologist concluded that the French accent was just her way of fitting in with the French kids and said we should let it go. Nina had said that she felt ‘more French’ but she thought that was normal in a Francophone school.

Nina had to learn to make friends in a more sophisticated way and adapt to their ways. The psychologist told me that between age 7 and 9 is a very intense time for a girl and they need a ‘best friend’, to reflect their changes and assure them they are worth something, almost like a love affair. They must go through it before they reach puberty and fall in love with boys. This startled me, but it made sense and so we looked at Nina with a new view.

I think the reason she did not click with the girls was because she came over as quite immature, which I had put down to her not having much cultural input like MTV or pop music. But she needed to change or she risked being teased for being a baby. I had been proud to have kept Nina away from Britney Spears, pink iPods, Bratz dolls and wearing sexy clothes but we couldn’t keep her as a cute little girl forever, no matter how much we wanted to.

The perfect combination

2007-05-10T06:11:00.000+02:00

In autumn with the kids back at school I had more time for my pursuits. The Bilingual Support Group was still running once a month, alongside workshops and seminars. Gabriel was now at school five days a week and so when I met someone from an international school looking for a part-time TEFL teacher I jumped at the chance. It was once a week, teaching Asian mothers from an international school, Mont Kiara. Although they all understood some English they needed specific English; how to talk to their child’s teacher, understand a report card or talk to their child’s doctor. I prepared all the materials myself and it was a great class, with a mix of Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian and Korean. The only downside was that the school had an American curriculum and I often had to ‘translate’ my worksheets into American English and spellings.

At the same time the bi-monthly cooking group needed a leader. I was asked to do it and did so with pleasure. It was a simple matter of arranging two cooking sessions per month, with a variety of cuisine. We all agreed to do ‘Ladies Night Out’ at least once a semester. There was a great informal atmosphere with stories shared and a strong group feeling, we all loved getting dressed up and going to an outdoor bar, a typical thing to do in KL. The Anglophones swigged their beer or knocked back strong cocktails alongside Muslim or Hindu non-drinkers sipping lime-juice, showing the cultural differences of the group. The Japanese were very timid and worried about staying out late, rushing back before midnight.

Cooking group field trip to market and indian lunch

Through the cooking group I met Ikuko, a shy Japanese lady who was curious about learning some English through cooking. I noticed she found the fast cooking commentaries difficult and one evening at a party I found out she loved Japanese calligraphy. Rather cheekily I proposed to teach her English in exchange for calligraphy lessons. She agreed and so every Friday I would go to her house and we would do one hour of calligraphy, followed by a cup of green tea and then English. Often we went for lunch afterwards, or to visit a certain shop or buy supplies in Chinatown.

Ikuko had two teenage daughters, one of whom was studying in Canada, the other at the American School. Her house was so calm and quiet it was an oasis. She forbid my handphone (of which I had become addicted, like most Asians, to checking my sms’s every few minutes). Although my calligraphy work was not brilliant I loved the serene practice, the smell of the ink, the soft brushes and her guidance. My goal was a framed piece and in the end I produced a series of four characters – winter, spring, summer and autumn.

This was the perfect combination, a little art, enjoyable teaching, the diverse cooking group, and my lively Bilingual Group discussions, along with plenty of café lattes and chat with the mothers at drop-off time. I didn’t have to worry about housework and I was always there at 3pm to meet the kids and take them to activities or to play. I could easily do this for a few more years I thought….

All work and no play...

2007-05-08T19:33:00.000+02:00

The new school year started. Marc was in a mixed level class or a classe mélange this year, eight children from his year mixed with nine from the year below. Marc was happy, his best friend Adam was in his class. But I found it a bit strange and wondered how the teacher would organize it. Jacques didn’t seemed worried at all and said it often happened in France that the class was split like that, and it was better than a big class of thirty or more. The teacher had transferred from Bangkok and frankly didn’t seem super-happy to be in KL, with expats it always depends where you have lived before. At our first parents evening she found Marc ‘brilliant, but lazy’, a description that apparently matched Jacques as a child (the things you find out about your husband!). But when she left the older kids to work Marc was often distracted and had problems to work independently (he made paper airplanes or chatted with Adam). We must crack down on that she said. ‘No making airplanes?’ I enquired. ‘Non’ she said very seriously. ‘No fun, only work.’

Nina had a lovely teacher, who was in her third year of teaching the important first year of primary – CP. Nina was in a small class of fifteen with two girls who she knew, Laure and Souad while Elodie was in the other class. Two new girls joined the class, Alix and Maisane. The six girls soon became friends, but Nina was never sure which one was her best friend. Nina tried to play with Souad, but was miffed when Souad chose to play with a boy over her. Meanwhile the other girls were hanging out in the corner of the playground, gossiping and saying mean things about other girls….Nina was torn between chasing boys and being in the girly corner. She hestitated so long she was excluded in the end, and missed her four friends deeply from last year. I could not work out which direction to go either, these new friends mothers were either working, lived absolutely miles away or had restricted play time due to older siblings. Although we would meet up at birthdays or at the Saturday catechism class and say ‘We must get the girls together…’ it rarely happened.

At the condo the French girls were cool with her, although they played together at parties. On the good side she had the daughters of my two friends, Odile and Hilary to chill out with on Wednesday afternoons and weekends, and even though they were a year younger the friendship worked and they often came for sleepovers.

When we met Nina’s teacher she told us she was worried. Nina seemed to be playing stupid to get more attention. The teacher had selected four kids for extra reading practice while the others did English and Nina was in that group. Unlike the other three Nina did not have dyslexia, was familiar with French and able to read (when she wanted to) so why was she acting like this? On top of this Nina started speaking English with a pronounced French accent! The teacher said to keep an eye on her and encourage her to read and write more at home.

But how does one cultivate a bilingual bookworm? We certainly had plenty of books and magazines in both languages at home. But both children lacked the incentive. Was it because I always read to them, were we too busy swimming in the pool or doing outdoor activities or, even worse, did they perhaps have some cognitive problems with text. Should I get a tutor? See a specialist? The fear of failure loomed as I re-read all my parenting books on reading and literacy again….

The cousins in KL

2007-05-07T21:48:00.000+02:00

The cousins visit the Elephant Sanctury in Malaysia,

from left - Francois (9) Marc (8) Manon (7)
Nina (6) Baptiste (5) & Gabriel (2)

How to get your family back?

2007-05-07T20:52:00.000+02:00

Luckily the cousins got on well and they had a great time, exploring Malaysia and having fun together and I did not regret inviting them. I cried when the cousins left, I loved them dearly, but I could barely embrace Odile and she knew it. It just was too much with my own family problems and my tricky mother-in-law.

I was depressed after they left. The kids still had a month to go before school started and to make matters worse a white toxic fog descended on KL, blown over from Indonesian forest fires. It matched my mood. We couldn’t play outside and Gabriel’s school was shut. I was robbed in broad daylight in Chilli’s Mexican restaurant. Losing my credit cards, glasses and personal items was another blow, and I had to ring my mum to cancel my UK credit card. It was an early Sunday morning and she answered straight away but she was short and cool with me. In desperation we booked a holiday to Vietnam.

Our family holiday in Vietnam was one of the best ever, we were so glad to get away and it was much better than we imagined. We trekked in the northern mountains, sailed around Halong Bay and laughed at the water puppets in Hanoi…and I reflected on how hard it was to juggle extended families. The conclusion I came to was that somewhere along the way we had all changed (or matured) and new rules were needed or all the good work we had done over the last eight years would become a huge black hole.

I accepted that I had over-reacted with my mother-in-law, and not been a nice hostess, after spending months at her house, which was not always easy for them and having her organize Gabriel’s christening just a few months before. But her comments stung, especially since she had traveled and lived as an expat wife too. I thought she would understand that we move in a different world, getting what we want, eating out at restaurants, holidays and buying whatever takes our fancy. This can lead to us being rather spoilt and shallow. I thought I was still the same person, but Odile certainly didn’t like the woman she saw. Had I really become a caricature of ‘expat wife’? I looked at the christening photos of me in shiny satin blue dress with matching scarf, shiny blue shoes and hat, and realized how they must have all wondered what was happening to the simple Suzanne they once knew?

I didn’t want to become like one of my paternal aunts who cut off contact with her parents after a silly family row. But I felt like I was being punished for not being in England, as if by moving away I had made the decision to leave the family. I didn’t see it like that at all. My parents had moved away too, and were in many ways punished by their families for their selfishness, they were never able to be as ‘good’ as the son or daughter that lived nearby. They should have understood.

By the time the kids went back to school in September I had cooled down after talking to several understanding friends, who had had similar family problems. In fact I was amazed at how many people weren’t speaking to a parent or in-law. The summer ended with the knowledge that we could not live a glitzy expat life in Asia and be a close part of two very diverse families in two countries. I learnt that no family is perfect and things can change without us realizing, I had to accept that perhaps I was not as important to them as they were to me and life went on for them, without us.

There was a positive outcome. I had several long tearful, sometimes angry, phone conversations with my parents and my sister. Apologies were made and relations returned to some normality. Jacques and I decided to renovate a small property in our village in France and use it in the summer, to have some independence and allow the children to see their grandparents. We agreed that the children must not lose touch with their family at all costs.

How to lose your family in 40 days…

2007-05-07T04:20:00.000+02:00

The summer started badly. We were not going to Europe this year, after our May trip it was too soon to go back. Somewhere along the line we had had the idea to invite the cousins for a month, along with my mother-in-law, Odile. My sister-in-law, Gaelle, (along with Laure and Nora) was heavily pregnant and we though it would help Gaelle if she had some quiet time, without three of her four children.

But it didn’t go exactly as planned. A few weeks before the cousins arrived I had heard that my sister had organized a last-minute christening for her son in Nottingham. I was not consulted, or even invited, and since I had the French family visiting I couldn’t just go off and leave them. I flew into a rage, I felt totally excluded and furious that our family meant so little to them. Jayne was supposed to be Nina’s godmother, how could she not invite her goddaughter? I immediately stopped contact, except with my Dad, who seemed apologetic, justifying by saying it was a last-minute decision and her friends had pressurized her to do it before he was walking and talking. But even my dad couldn’t calm my rage and I ended up cutting off contact with him when he emailed me about what a great day they all had (without me…).

It was the first family rift in many years and I felt sick at the idea that our children would not see their English grandparents again. But I refused to talk to them. Odile and the cousins arrived in the middle of all this and I tearfully told the sorry story. Unusually she was not sympathetic and I felt even more alone. In the beginning I tried hard to meet her requests, finding her a dressmaker, a shoemaker and taking her to buy the Asian fabrics she loved.

But we clashed on our daily plans, Odile wanted the kids to have swimming lessons and do homework, but I could sense the kids were bored and wanted to go out and have fun, and she refused to change her strict plan. Then it became a fight over who was running the show. In my house, I felt I had a right to decide if my kids worked or not, but she wanted it her way and expected me to bend. Odile saw I was not the pliable daughter-in-law I usually was in her house, and it became a battle of wills. I refused to be under her command and set the agenda, telling our maid to follow me, not her. There were several petty fights, for example, Odile would not accept apples and oranges in the house saying the children must eat tropical fruit. I said this was ‘excessive’, then she refused to take the cheap taxis and took public transport in the steamy humidity just to prove how lazy and wasteful of money I was and so on we battled…

Soon she accused me of being spoilt, selfish, obsessed with my expat ladies lunches and matching my dress to my shoes (I tried to explain that there was not much to wear in a hot climate and shoes were so cheap so we all had several more pairs than usual and besides that what expat wives do…). But I lost it with her when she enquired why Jacques worked so late at the office? Did he, perhaps, have someone there? This was the limit. Such a sensitive subject such as the boss running off with his skinny Asian underling was off-limits (it happened too often to expat wives) and I could hardly bear having her around. I decided not to speak to her either, but of course I had to, since she was staying with me, but I was cool, spent lots of time with my friends and I did the bare minimum.

Sad farewells

2007-05-04T03:44:00.000+02:00

Most expats stay on average two years, like we usually did, but this time we were not moving. But other families were not so lucky. It began with a few phone calls, ‘Can you come over….I have some really bad news…’ and the inevitable confirmation of a move back to France, England or to another country a few days later. The wives felt useless, nothing they could do could save their husband’s job, and all they could do was to busy themselves shopping before they left Asia, and try to be imagine going back to normal life again.

We were hit badly in June. Marc lost Benjamin from our new condo, the oldest of three boys, who often played with our kids. Nina was devastated when she heard that her class twins, Julie and Marie, would be departing a year earlier than planned for France, along with her French-speaking friend of two and a half years, Alya, who was returning to Tunisia, her parent’s country.

Nina had also become close to Nadia, who had been at the school only eighteen months. The girls did ballet together on Fridays. Nadia’s mother was Malaysian, educated in England at Oxford and her father was a Greek/German, who was brought up in an expat family in several Spanish-speaking countries. They had a wide circle of diversely multilingual friends and Jacques and I felt positively boring only speaking two languages together! They were aiming for at least four languages for their two adopted children - Bahasa Malay, English, German, French and maybe Spanish too.

Nadia was very good at languages and adapted well to the French school, even though she had little French input at home. The law in Malaysia stated that Malaysian parents could choose any pre-school they liked, but by age seven the child must go to a Bahasa Malay local school or a private school which had classes in the national language. The exception was if you were married to a foreigner, which gave you the right to an international school place. They could have left Nadia in the French primary school but her parents reasoned that the workload in French would be too much, and they transferred her to an American school. It was another loss for Nina.

Another diplomatic family from our first condo went back to Algeria and another moved out to another condo. Some of these departures were happy, but for us they were heart-breaking. We hurriedly arranged Goodbye parties for Anne and her three children, Youssra, Falak, Alya, Julie, Marie and Nadia and we sensed that life would be empty without their daily smiles and chats. I felt quite sad, I had lost about eight friends in the space of a few months. Although I was only close to two or three of them I would miss their places by the school door, the pool and at the birthday parties.

Goodbye Party for Nina's classmates

To make matters even more the French school was moving location, so next school year Nina would be starting Primary in an unfamiliar school and without her close friends. On the good side, just before school ended, I found out she would have a lovely teacher, Catherine Hervé, who I already knew.

The postponed Baptism…

2007-05-02T19:44:00.000+02:00

Gabriel was now twenty-nine months old and still had not been baptized. Marc had been christened at nine months and Nina at sixteen months, but we still had no plans. We had not wanted to overlap with other family celebrations, in Gabriel’s first year there was the summer wedding of Jean and Nora. The next year we had my sister’s February wedding in England. Finally we had a year free of weddings. Marc and Nina were doing catechism, the Catholic classes that prepare children for their First Communion and they frequently asked me when Gabriel would be baptized.

We had christened Marc in England and Nina in France, so where should we do Gabriel? I had originally thought of Chorleywood, in England where we previously lived, with maybe a joint christening with my sister, who lived nearby but it seemed such a long time since we lived there and we would need someone to organize the whole celebration on our part. Jayne had a young baby to take care of and my mother had been sick and I didn’t want to throw planning a christening onto her. Then by chance we heard from Jacques’ mother that the church in our village, Caunay, would be open on the 1st of May for a special service. Village churches are closed these days, but the prêt or minister goes round each village, opening the church once or twice a year. I felt this was a sign from God. Jacques had proposed to me on the 1st of May in 1996 and it seemed like a lucky day.

Within hours the prêt had provisionally agreed, since he knew several members of the Hauwaert clan, and agreed to email us the church documents. Jacques’ mother found a small chateau that we could hire for the whole Sunday, with a garden area for the kids to play and a kitchen where we could prepare food. A few days later we informed the family and asked my English friend Rachel to be the godmother, alongside Jacques’ brother as godfather, Jean. Rachel had visited us several times in Chorleywood and we all liked her, plus she had studied French and spoke it very well so she would not feel out-of-place in the ceremony.

We flew to France the week before, and whizzed around finding a caterer, patissier for the cake and rooms in the local bed and breakfast for my parents, sister, her baby, Brayden, now six months and Rachel. I was nervous how it would all work especially since I would meet my sister’s baby for the first time. But when I picked them up at the airport on a sunny Friday there was a nice atmosphere, and later we ate a huge dinner at Jacques parents in the evening, with everyone reminiscing about previous christenings. A family friend, Nicole, the mother of Nina’s godfather, helped decorate the church and prepare the tables. In all we were about twenty-five.

Gabriel ready for his Bapteme, with Nina and cousin Manon

The Sunday ceremony was beautiful, very simple with poems and passages from the Bible chosen by us. The sun shone through the stained glass window and Gabriel, dressed in a cream linen suit, accepted to have water and oil poured on his head. The cousins gathered around holding lit candles and participating in the service. Jacques and I spoke about our links to Caunay and how we wanted Gabriel to be part of the community. The day flew by and after a long lunch we stayed till ten at the chateau, sipping wine and enjoying the spring air. I gave each guest a bag of blue almonds or dragees, as was the tradition in France, and a lily-of-the-valley flower or muguet, which is given for good luck on May 1st. I flew back with my family on the Monday and spent a pleasant week in England with Nina and Gabriel. I felt very proud of both families and how we had managed to have three perfect christenings with no problems, but that was an illusion, as I was soon to find out…

The French enclave

2007-05-02T05:44:00.000+02:00

After nearly two years in our condo our Chinese-Malaysian landlord asked to re-sign our contract. We called to confirm this in February and to request two more years. ‘No problem’ he said, but then just after Chinese New Year he called back to say that his brother needed to move into our apartment and we must be out by the end of March. Some family issue had obviously come up. There was nothing we could do and we reluctantly began searching. We checked out a few apartments in our condo but they were tiny, dark or overlooked train tracks. I visited several apartments in nearby Bangsar, where Gabriel went to school but found nothing better than what we had.

In the end we plumped for the condo next door, called Sri Kenny. We would not change our daily travel plans or local shopping and most importantly I could see my condo friends easily. Mahin, Soraya, Liz and Vikki had become important friends in my life and I would miss their daily chats, food gifts and get-togethers if we lived far away. We signed for a five-bedroom first floor apartment with a spacious balcony and view of palms and tropical trees. Jacques did not like it at all, he said it was bad feng shui (the Chinese art of organising your room for good energy or 'chi'). Under the apartment was an open garage area, and Jacques said it was bad luck to sleep over an empty space. But apart from putting Marc in the Master bedroom (thus giving him the bad luck!) we were stuck with the layout.

Sri Kenny was what expats called a French enclave. There were about fifteen families living there, and I knew most of them from school. Most of the husbands worked for the same company and they socialized together. The French wives were often on their first expat post and couldn’t, or didn’t want to, speak English. I was eager to chat with them in French. I had a French friend, Anne, living in the condo, with three boys similar in age to our kids, and so we would plan to meet by the pool after school. They were friendly in the beginning but I knew straight away I would never be fully accepted. Without Anne I was gently excluded, they would chat about their lunches, poker games and shopping trips without even thinking of inviting me. Anne had decided to put her oldest child, Benjamin in an English-language international school, and this fact bothered the French, who couldn’t imagine anything else but the Lycee Française. Equally they found me strange too, for putting my ‘English’ kids in a French school and were curious as to how we managed. Anne was part of the French group, and liked certain families, but like me, as a group she felt uncomfortable.

The French had their own life and schedule and sat on the left side of the pool, with the English-speakers on the right. All the French kids took the school bus (I was the only one who drove as several didn’t have cars or disliked driving on the right), and they went for coffee after drop-off together. Later at 3pm they waited for the school bus and paired off. The kids did their homework and assembled by the pool at 4pm for a swim and gouter or snack. They stayed till 6pm, since they ate late. Meanwhile the Anglophone community, the Brits, Australians and others who spoke English went down to the pool at 3pm or earlier, and stayed till 5pm when they went back to eat an early dinner. Anne and I would often dash from left to right, keeping up two separate conversations!

Nevertheless we were counted at part of the French enclave and listed on their private email circle. In most condos families got together for Sunday barbecues, and we were priviledged to be invited to such a gathering in May, strictly in French. Families gathered with beautiful salades, fruit tarts, homemade pizza, quiches and fresh baguettes from Deli France to accompany cheese and wine. It was fun though and the kids had a great time running around, but when I looked across the pool I saw some English families having their own party, with a guy grilling charred steaks on a barbecue and ladling out the alcoholic punch and beers to loudly laughing invitees. I had the distinct impression they were competing! As the French noticed them a few said maybe we should invite some of them next time? A worried look came over several faces, but with a wish to improve their English for free they decided that next time they would invite them too…

Bilingual Support

2007-04-27T17:29:00.000+02:00

Having two days free, with Gabriel at school, meant I could set up a Bilingual Support Group at the ibu association’s house. At the same time I was asked to do a talk about Bilingualism at the Alliance Francaise in KL.

This was to be a bigger more formal talk than the last one I had done. The Director asked me to do a PowerPoint presentation lasting about an hour, followed by questions. ‘In which language?’ I asked. ‘Well, if we do it in French our students won’t understand it all, and I think most French expats understand English, so can you do both?’ I agreed that it would be a shame if the beginner students could not follow, but then a dual language talk would be a) too long if I had to say everything twice, b) daunting for me to do a simultaneous translation. I had never spoken in public in French and did feel comfortable in a formal situation. In the end we decided to do the talk in English, but with an on-screen translation for French speakers and handouts in both languages. That seemed acceptable. I took the basic themes of the book and edited them to simple one or two sentences for the PowerPoint. My French friend, Odile, translated it into French for me, adding all those dammed accents and Chinese-hats that I would have forgotten, and making it fit beautifully to my text.

A week before I had a mild panic that nobody would come and sent out emails and sms’s to everyone I knew. The French school handed out invites, noting the importance of learning more about Bilingualism. Although it was a rainy Thursday night around thirty people came, including most of my KL friends, filling up the room with their pre-talk chatter and cheering me on. Most people were English-speakers with a French connection, and several parents and teachers came from the French school. We sold many books afterwards and with the glass of free wine, provided by the Alliance Francaise, people stayed late to discuss, compare stories and chat.

Suzanne's Talk on Bilingualism

From that came the spin-off Bilingual Support Group, which began in March. The monthly meeting had a theme, such as Mixing, The Early Years, Parent’s Roles and Trilingualism. The group was a wonderful mix of languages, stories and experience. Mothers told of problems with husbands who refused to let them use their first language, teachers who had banned on language, children who were mixing, had delayed speech or could not speak to their grandparents. I gave advice as needed, and also urged the group to give solutions as well. This worked well as two German mothers passed on information on German-speaking playgroups, or the Malaysian mothers advised how where to buy books or DVD’s in foreign languages. Seeing the relief on their faces as they saw they were not the only ones struggling with bilingualism or multilingualism was very moving for me. I was delighted to give them handouts, suggest books or websites and help them find their way through the early years of Bilingualism. The third Tuesday of the month, when I did my talk, was soon my favourite day of the month.

Gabriel goes to school

2007-04-26T17:20:00.000+02:00

Gabriel was growing fast, now two years old and beginning to find his place in the family. His sunny personality and big smile still attracted passersby to stop and talk to him, but he knew how to upset his siblings and get his own way at home. He began to talk, a little, and was secure in his world of parents, big brother and sister and adoring maid, Aimee. His days were easy, a late breakfast on the balcony, followed by either a English or French-language playgroup or accompanying me to the mall, lunch with me or the maid, a long nap and then fun when the big ones came home at three when we went to the pool or to play outside.

One Friday in January at the playgroup he had brought along a toy elephant, and another boy began to play with it. In a split second Gabriel sunk his sharp little teeth into Daniel’s arm. As the other mothers gasped at the bleeding wound and bruise I had no idea what to do. Marc and Nina had never bitten. I couldn’t believe he could be so violent. I apologized to the mother, gathered up Gabriel and ran off. As Gabriel grumbled he had not had his snack I drove home fast with tears in my eyes. I knew I would never return to that playgroup. Later after talking to friends I decided he was either bored or needed some social training and my neighbour recommended a local English-language Montessori school where both her boys attended.

Although we had thought Gabriel would go to the French school when he was two and a half or three years old we decided to try out two or three days a week, and stop the playgroups that he would soon be banned from. I was getting bored with the social networking, endless chats about toilet-training and fussy eaters anyway. The Malaysian school year starts in January so he was able to start immediately. The school was run by Malaysian Miss.Tim, who seemed to genuinely love her job. The school was a rather scruffy house on a busy street in the suburb of Bangsar. It was not the green oasis I had hoped, but they had a slide and climbing frame, bikes to ride, and a white rabbit in the playground. Although the school was officially following the Montessori method the academic side was low-key. Some Asian schools pushed children to read and write at a very young age, which was something we did not want.

Gabriel’s evolving strong character was noticed by Miss.Tim in the first week. She told me he refused to sleep upstairs with the others for a nap, instead he brought his little mattress downstairs and slept next to Miss. Tim’s office. With his school uniform and backpack he looked much older and I felt rather weepy dropping off Gabriel at school. I felt nostalgic for our lazy days when he was a baby and the dawning realization that soon all my children would be in school and I would have to find something worthwhile to do all day!

2007-04-26T00:15:00.000+02:00

My husband is French too!

2007-04-25T23:58:00.000+02:00

A new group of friends had formed around New Year. In Marc’s class a new girl called Eva had arrived. Eva was half Scottish and half-French, her father worked as a top pastry chef in the Hilton. Nina had made friends with a new girl in her class, Elodie, who was a beautiful mix of Phillipino mother and French father, who also worked as a top pastry chef at the Shanghri-La hotel in KL. Thinking they would have something in common I introduced Scottish Hilary and Phillipino Maribeth to each other at a school event.

Maribeth then introduced us to Youssy, an Indonesian woman also married to a French pastry chef, with a boy in maternelle. Maribeth was studying French with Sasi (or Mem) a Thai lady married, naturally, to a Frenchman, who had a boy in Nina’s class. We then met Yuen-chi, who had been one of the Vietnamese boat-people as a child and lived in Canada, married to a Frenchman and had a daughter the same age as Nina and Elodie. Our last member of the group was Audrey, who was a Chinese heritage Malaysian with French hubby and a daughter a year younger than Nina in the French school.

Although it was a diverse mix, Scottish, English, Phillipino, Indonesian, Thai, Malaysian and Vietnamese/Canadian, we bonded quickly. They had all lived abroad before in places as diverse as Dubai, Korea or America, and we usually moved every two years so we knew we must make friends fast before time ran out. Very quickly the group became a regular weekly fixture. We began having coffee together and comparing notes on our class teachers and the French school. Once a month we would eat at one of our houses, Maribeth was famous for her spring rolls, Sasi her spicy soups or I would make a quiche and salad. The group then graduated to sampling the posh hotel lunch buffets (with discount because the father worked there), or meting up in twos or threes to try out local Thai, Japanese or Malaysian restaurants. We even did Girls Night Outs, sipping cocktails or watching a band in the hotels.

We had a certain camaraderie, a safety in numbers against the stuck-up French-French families, that we all disliked, and we would welcome each other with smiles at the school gates. At school events it was wonderful to arrive at a class show or cultural event and find one of the group had saved me a seat. Six or eight people seems to be the ideal number for a group, and we could pair off or meet as a trio without any rivalry or hurt feelings. Although I felt closest to Hilary in character, I enjoyed greatly Sasi and Maribeth’s company.

However there were certain days when I felt split between my group and making efforts with the French. At one class coffee morning the maman’s split linguistically. I was in the middle, torn between talking in English (to Sasi and Maribeth and Yuen-Chi) or speaking French to the French mothers. We all had a few French friends through our children, and we took pride in them and tried hard to maintain contacts with ‘Friendly French’. However in a crisis we knew who to turn too. We were there for each other, when we felt homesick or when we didn’t understand the homework, when our kids got bad reports or our French husbands drove us crazy!

Bali and the tsunami

2007-03-30T02:26:00.000+02:00

The year ended with a Christmas trip to Bali. It was quieter than it should have been after the terrible terrorist bombings. Hotels stood empty and the beach was full of women trying to sell massages or sarongs. We had a fantastic Christmas day in our resort, with Santa surfing in on the waves and delivering gifts for all the children. On Christmas Day, which is also my birthday, there was a show that our children performed in and Marc stood up and asked if he could sing happy birthday to me, and everyone sang along, as I blushed bright red on the stage!

The next morning we heard on the BBC news that there had been an earthquake and saw first reports from Sri Lanka. After we returned from a snorkeling trip later on we realized the enormity of the situation as reporters spoke of a tsunami hitting the north of Indonesia, Phuket, where we had been just a year ago, and some parts of Malaysia. We imagined what our families must be thinking and quickly called to reassure them. Prayers were said and clothes and money collected for the refugees. We spent New Year in the small town of Ubud, the atmosphere was solemn and the tourists walked quietly as if not to upset the locals. It felt like something had unleashed the god's fury and the Balinese loaded their shrines with fruit and incencse to appease the angry spirits.

Three days later we were sat on the beach and Jacques' cell phone rang. It was the French embassy in KL. They wanted to know if we were all ok. Jacques asked if they were calling all the French expats. ‘Oh no!’ The lady replied, ‘You have been reported missing by your neighbours…’ Then the line went dead. We flew back in to find all our neighbours waiting for us. One had been sure we had gone to Phuket, like we did last year, and no-one could really say for sure if it was Phuket or Bali, in the middle of Christmas shopping they had not really had time to ask specific questions. The Algerian diplomat had phoned the French embassy on our behalf. We were very touched by their kindness, but saddened to hear that a new family in the condo from South America had cancelled their last-minute trip to Langkawi and flew into Phuket the day it happened. Luckily they were on the fourth floor and survived although seeing the carnage on the beach shocked their nine-year-old daughter terribly.

A book, a talk and a visitor

2007-03-29T02:00:00.000+02:00

My book was published in May 2004 and I had a talk booked at the international mothers group, ibu, for the beginning of November in a local bookshop. My father was visiting and brought over some extra copies of the book. It was on a Tuesday, a busy day for coffee mornings and activities, so I was expecting a small crowd, but more and more women arrived and in the end there were about twenty. I was nervous and it was hard to distil a book into a thirty-minute lecture. I explained the seven strategies and the types of child bilingualism. It sounded rather boring and more like a university talk and the all looked rather sleepy, so I concluded earlier than planned and asked if anyone had any questions.

That opened a floodgate of queries, comments and discussion. It was a wonderfully mixed crowd, some Malaysians women married to foreigners, and several expat English, Dutch, German, French and Australians curious to know more, or who wished to bring up their children bilingually after seeing the success Malaysians have had. We discussed schooling, parenting and how to have more input in the weaker language. At the end I sold four books and promised to start a monthly group in the new year, so we could meet regularly and discuss more. It seemed they wanted to talk and share advice and experiences. After Dad and I went to celebrate with lunch at a local Japanese restaurant in Sri Hartamas.

Grandpa stayed two weeks in KL with us. He was bitten badly by mosquitos but apart from that loved Malaysia. He adventurously tried reflexology, rode on an elephant at the sanctuary, climbed over a hundred steps to visit the Hindu Batu caves temple and sampled all the cultural foods he could. The kids loved having him around and after school would rush to tell him about their day. One evening I found him reading through Marc’s French homework with him, I was touched because it must have been rather disorientating to see the children studying in French rather than English, and although he might not have understood everything he was making an effort and that’s what matters in the end.

Love and war at school

2007-03-27T17:53:00.000+02:00

School restarted in September and Nina got lucky though with a newly arrived teacher, Delphine. Nina was now in the top class of maternelle, or Grand section, and absolutely loved school. Within a few weeks she had fallen in love with a new boy in the class, Dorian. He was trilingual and had a Spanish-speaking mother, Gina, who was married to a French man and Dorian had attended English school before starting at the French school. When Delphine put on a class show displaying folk dances and Nina and Dorian danced together like Ginger and Fred.

Dorian became a frequent companion on trips to the park or museums, gallantly buying Nina an orange juice in the café one time and bringing her a pink silk scarf from a trip to Paris. Unfortunately Dorian played more with Marc when he came to our house, and the two boys would sneak off together to ride bikes or play in the pool, leaving sulky Nina all on her own. One weekend he invited himself for a sleepover, and Marc and Nina fought to have him in their rooms. In the end he bunked with Marc. But after a few months Dorian declared his undying love for two other pretty girls in the class. When asked which one he would marry he announced that he would marry all three, like some of Muslims do in certain parts of Malaysia. Nina was horrified and refused to share him, and dropped him like a hot stone.

Marc was in CM1, with the same teacher who taught Nina when we first arrived in 2003. I had not got on with Madame Chapeau then and it didn’t seem like this would be a good year for Marc either. I met the teacher in the playground one day after school just after the year had started. I bonjoured her, as one does and she replied ‘Hello’. I asked in French ‘Is everything OK with Marc’ and she replied ‘He is mixing up his English with his French’. The conversation continued with me speaking French and her replying in English, as though she didn’t understand my French. I was furious.

A few weeks later Marc had a punition, or a punishment, and had to write ‘Je n’ai pas droit de parler en anglais en classe’ (I am not allowed to speak English in class) fifty times, because he had spoken English to his friend, Adam, in class. Marc told me she often punished children who chatted in English in class. It was a problem because about half the class was bilingual and although they could speak French they chose not too, which annoyed Madame Chapeau even more. At the class talk for parents I found her aggressive and often rude to parents, but she was friendly with several influential parents and teachers and I knew if I complained to higher powers it would get me nowhere. But I disliked her nevertheless…

On top of this Marc’s English marks plummeted and I had to talk to the English teacher, a French woman. She explained how she had two levels: ‘just arrived in KL beginners’ and ‘bilinguals, those who have a foreign parent or have lived here a long time’. She preferred teaching the beginners. I got the distinct impression she was sick of all the annoying bored bilinguals who could talk the hind legs off a donkey but had terrible grammar. She said Marc spent his hour making paper aeroplanes or scribbling messy stories that she couldn’t read. I tried to talk to Marc, who didn’t care at all about his English grades, and said that English lessons were ‘nul’ or worth nothing anyway….

Aimee goes to France

2007-03-26T18:56:00.000+02:00

Jacques decided not to go to France for the summer holiday, but I desperately wanted to see the family and Jacques mother had booked two weeks holiday with Marc, Nina and three cousins. I didn’t want to leave our maid, Aimee, alone for six weeks with nothing to do, and Jacques thought she could help his parents, prepare the meals and accompany Jacques' mother on the holiday. It would be helpful to have a traveling partner especially with a lively 18-month old toddler. I thought Aimee might enjoy seeing France and I promised to take her up the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I had to do all the paperwork at the French embassy, where I bumped into two school mothers who were also taking their maids back to France. They assured me it always went well and their maids were happy to travel. Finally after much packing and gift buying we boarded a night flight for Paris via Dubai.

We finally arrived in Paris around lunchtime. Usually we took the direct flight and could catch an early morning train from the airport, but we had to take a bus into the centre to Gare Montparnasse. Our bags weighed a ton, the kids were grumpy, Aimee was jet-lagged and disorientated and I felt like I had four children. We were so slow that we nearly missed the train and ended up sat in the corridor on our bags, because our reserved seats were the other end of the train and you could not pass through. Aimee must have wondered what on earth was France like. When we arrived at Poitiers, looking disheveled and giggling with over-tiredness I was truly wondering if I had done the right thing. But when we arrived at the house in Pouillox everyone was waiting for us. In the sunny courtyard Jacques’ mother had prepared trays of cool drinks, tiny jam and lemon tarts and savoury snacks. It was heaven. The cousins re-established their friendship instantly and Gabriel was admired and cooed over and Aimee met everyone.

Aimee adapted very well to France and although she didn’t speak French she always managed to second guess what was needed. Aimee did not like the cold mornings though and didn’t own any warm clothes. Odile dug out a bag of secondhand clothes and we managed to kit Aimee out. Coming from a large family Aimee told me she liked having so many people around. She made her speciality fried rice and spring rolls, and fussed over the cousins, plaiting their hair and playing with them.

Only one time did she feel out of place. At the end of the holiday we went camping with Gaelle and the cousins at the beach. Aimee had never slept in a tent and was curious why all these rich people were sleeping outdoors when they could have gone in a nice hotel, or barbecuing sausages and washing their dishes under the tap when they could have gone to a restaurant? The beaches were crowded that year, so Gaelle and I decided to go to the plage naturist or nudist beach, where it was easy to find a space and the kids could run around without their swimsuits.

Aimee was horrified and shocked to see nude men and topless women, and looking at it from her eyes I was too, especially after coming from Malaysia where nudism is not at all tolerated, and Muslim female bathers wear suits that cover everything but their feet and hands. I told Aimee that I wouldn’t strip off, it was really for the kids to have more space. But Aimee sat fully clothed and uncomfortable under the parasol until we left. After that we either went to the usual busy beach or left her behind in the campsite.

At the end I took the kids and Aimee to Paris for a few days. We did all the tourist things and went to Disneyland for the day. She said it was much better than she imagined. It was her birthday as we flew back to Malaysia via Dubai, and the kids joked that she had her birthday in three continents; Europe, Middle East and Asia. Odile and I had given her some euros to spend in duty-free at the airport, and she came back with a huge bottle of Estee Lauder perfume, which she said would remind her of France.

The Four Years theory

2007-03-23T04:08:00.001+01:00

We had a few goodbye parties to attend in June, our condo Chinese-American neighbour, Min and her family, were posted to Vietnam after seven years in KL, and Nina’s French/English friend, Isolde, was transferring to the British school to join her older sister. Nina’s teacher, Therese, was going back to France. At a goodbye potluck dinner organized by Nina’s class rep for the teacher the mothers chatted about leaving and how much longer they had to go. It sounded like a prison sentence… ‘I’ve got two, maybe three years, if we’re lucky…’, ‘This is our first year and I hope we get sent back next year...’ ‘We’ve been here six years and it’s too long, I hate KL now…’ or the new arrival: ‘I could stay here forever I love it!’ Therese had lived in KL for five years and was dreading the return to a tiny apartment in Paris. She was adored by parents and children and was tearful when accepting her goodbye gift of a painting by a local artist and said she would never have such a great class or life again. She was probably right.

Parents finally came to the conclusion that four years was the idea posting; one or two years were too short to really settle or find friends, but once you had done five years it was truly painful to leave or you became bitter and stopped enjoying Asia and all its chaos. The mothers agreed that we all got so used to our maids, not having to work, the lively social life and the year round sunshine that after a while it seemed impossible to go back to where you came from. It was even worse if your children were born in the country and had lived most of their childhood there, since it was all they had ever known. Parents felt terribly guilty moving their children around the world, although many had no choice and when the husband was called up off they went. Some of the English families I had met had been living abroad for years and never intended to go back if they could help it. However the French often seemed to do a short two-year posting then back to France for a while, then out again somewhere else.

We had never spent more than two years in one place anyway, which would probably explain why we were never really attached to any country. Four years sounded just right to me, enough time to get to know lots of people, feel at home in the city, to know just where to get a certain fabric or ingredient and enough time to learn something new.

Livret Scholaire

2007-03-21T16:09:00.000+01:00

The school year ended and final reports were sent out. This was Marc and Nina’s first major one, and I hadn’t realized it would be undecipherable. After spending an hour trying to decode the document I ask my French-speaking Algerian neighbour, Soraya, for help. She points out the important lines, and assures me that all is well if Marc is going up to the next class. The Livert Scolaire or school book is organized in cycles, Cycle 1 is the maternelle or pre-school classes – petit, moyen and grand, going up to the year when the child is six. Cycle 2 is the following three years - CP/CE1 and CE2, taking the child up to age nine.

Marc and Nina’s report are graded : A reports compétence acquise, B denotes compétence en cours normal d’acquisition, C is compétence à renforcer and D signals compétence non encore acquise. An A means you got it, B shows that the competence in the subject is developing normally, a C asks that the understanding is reinforced and a D is not yet understood. Marc has an even sprinkle of A, B and C’s. Thankfully there are no D’s. Maths seems to be his best subject. French his worst and the comments state that his English is ‘interfering’ with his reading and writing. Nina has mainly ‘acquired’ what she should have and scores high on oral languages, except for some issues with sound recognition and articulation. Marc is not paying attention in his English classes (boredom maybe?) while Nina is an chatty and active participant.

The seven-page document lists every possible testable item on the curriculum from sport, singing to class attitude and autonomy. Some items I simply did not understand, like these examples from the French language section: ‘sait utiliser le classement de BCD.’, ‘distingue dans la phrase simple le GNS du GV.’ Grammar figures highly, there are several paragraphs about verbs, conjugation and vocabulary. There are some areas that I find particular French; the ability to speak ‘correctly’, to logically organize thoughts, and to write perfectly, that is, within the lines, respecting the margin, spaces and connecting letters. This would be asking too much of an English child of the same age, who is just beginning to do joined-up writing...never mind speaking correctly.

I read through the book amazed at the things Marc and Nina should have learnt. In panic I turn to the last page and see the phrase ‘passage a CE1’ and ‘passage a GS’ .Yes! Marc and Nina have made it to the next class! But there is also the sobering thought that the work will get harder and Marc certainly will have keep up with the class…. and somewhere along the line I am going to have do a crash course in French grammar or how can I ever help him?

Je suis anglais……

2007-03-19T16:36:00.000+01:00

We arrived at the Club Med resort in Cherating at the end of the holiday. I loved the east coast of Malaysia, with it’s painted wooden houses on stilts, open-air batik workshops and traditional villages spread out along the perfect coastline. Club Med had excellent all-day childcare for Marc and Nina, who did activities like the trapeze, archery or bungee-jumping and played team games, while we swam, did our own sports activites or just chilled out in the bar. The staff and guests were friendly in a genuine way. It was popular with expats from KL who could drive there. As fate would have it, Nina’s two best friends from school, Isolde and Alya, were there, along with Marc’s friend Danton. We also bumped into Christine from the Mercredi club along with her three children, two of whom were the same age as ours. It was sociable and we ate together at large tables for lunch and dinner. I managed to complete two dares, one from Ghania to climb the wall and the other from Mahes to do the bungee jump. I did them both and although my heart was racing it felt good.

Every night there was a show, preceded by short welcome to new guests and a run-down of weekly activities. The Club Meds in Asia had clients from several countries and needed to be multilingual. Alongside the Chef de Village (who was in this case a French-speaker) was an English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese speaker from the staff. The five simultaneous translations were fast-paced and as far as I know correct (I could only verify the French-English one). The language group in the audience would look attentive when their speaker came on and then chat rudely through all the others. The Japanese lady ended all her sentences with a bow and said ‘Hai!’ to which the Japanese responded ‘Hai!’ like kids at school acknowledging their teachers instructions. The Chinese one always started with ‘Ni Hao’ or ‘Meoww’ as Nina mimicked it. After a few times we found ourselves mesmerized by this multilcutural mélange and the kids starting saying ‘Hai!’ in all the right places…

On the last evening the children from the Mini-Club did a ‘talent show’. The multilingual Algerian GO in charge introduced the kids one by one, trying to use the right language. She had heard Marc speaking French to Danton and chose French. She asked: ‘Marc, tu vien de quelle pays?’ (Where are you from?) Marc replied ‘Je suis anglais’ (I am English), with a perfect French accent, to our amazement. Why didn’t he say he was French and English? Why say he was English in French? Did he mean to say it in English but having been asked the question in French felt it was polite to answer in French? Could a seven-year-old know what he was saying? We puzzled over it, watching bemused parents say ‘What? Is he French or English?’

Then Marc, looking all angelic and sweet, said he would sing the classic French song ‘Au Claire de la Lune’, but he sang the naughty version, to the same tune, that his cousins had taught him:

‘Au claire de la lune,
j’ai pète dans l’eau,
ça faisait les bulles,
c’était rigolo,
ma grand-mère arrivait avec des grand ciseaux,
elle me coupe les fesse en quatre mille morceaux…’

Which is roughly translated as ‘In the light of the moon, I farted in the water, it made bubbles, that was funny, my grandmother arrived with the scissors and cut my bottom into four thousand pieces…’ and he was smartly sent off stage by the GO to giggles from all the French-speakers.

Marc’s Malaysian/French friend, Danton, was next and when asked the same question in French he said that he was from Switzerland. I wondered why he had said Swiss when his father was French? It turned out that Danton was born in Switzerland. We all laughed, joking that next time Marc would probably say in French that he was Hungarian…but it brought home an issue to both families. Where are our children from? The country where they were born? Where they have a house? Where they have lived the longest? Or where they currently reside? Now that’s a tricky question…

South and East of KL

2007-03-18T23:34:00.000+01:00

For the spring break we went to Singapore and Cherating Beach. We drove to the border town of Johar Bahru and left the car in a parking lot because cars were taxed by the day in Singapore, and took a taxi to the city. We had brought along our maid,Aimee, first as a babysitter, so Jacques and I could go out at night in Singapore with colleagues from Jacques office and secondly so she could see Singapore. She had never been anywhere except Malaysia. I wanted her to feel she got more out of her employment than just washing dishes and changing Gabriel’s nappies. Aimee was very nervous at the border, convinced they would throw her out, although she was legally allowed in, but it all went smoothly.

Aimee was a good travel companion, always patient with the kids, easy to have around and she genuinely seemed to enjoy our day-trips to the science museum, an indoor ski-slope and to Sentosa Island. Singapore bugged me though, it seemed over-populated and culturally over-rated to me. The famous shopping on Orchard Road was nothing compared to Megamall or One Utama in KL and I couldn't find any bargains. The ubiqutuous public signs that banned spitting, eating chewing gum, peeing in lifts and not eating on trains fascinated Marc who wanted explanations. I disliked the proper-English speaking and driving taxi drivers who moaned about the British tourists. I missed the spontaneity of KL taxis, the not knowing which language or music you would hear or what the driver would talk about. People tutted as we dashed through traffic rather than waiting for the red-lights. I realized how much I loved Malaysian life and how at home we felt there. Jacques looked for the Singapore he had loved ten years ago as a young student working on an intern project there, and couldn’t find it. It seemed to be full of Brit expats and tourists en route to Australia wanting a safe Asian experience. We did enjoy a British-style comedy night and taking Marc and Nina to the night zoo. We all loved eating breakfasts of black coffee with condensed milk and French toast in the local canteen near our hotel.

Aimee became quite chatty as we drove back up the east coast of Malaysia, the rural villages reminded her of home she said. One night we stayed in a cheap hotel by a black muddy beach. The kids rolled like piglets in it and were filthy. Back at the room we had no hot water, only a tap, and a small basin to ladle water onto our bodies. Aimee efficiently cleaned the kids in this way, saying that’s how they did it back in the Philippines. Later we sat on cushions under an outdoor thatched canopy eating ice-cream and she told us how her mother died when she was five and how she was brought up by her eldest sister. In her twenties her husband had died and now her only son, John, lived with her paralysed sister, who appreciated his help around the house. She had spent only two or three years with him before starting work as a maid overseas. I asked her when his birthday was, She said June. ‘What day?’ I asked, as one always asks other mothers. ‘I don’t remember’ she replied looking sad, ‘I am never there, but I always send a gift’. Nina asked what she would send for his birthday, and she replied ‘a pair of sports shoes’, but she must ask her sister first for his size, he was a growing teenager now. I felt terribly sorry for her and her family life and wondered how she could care for our children and still smile with all that heartache.

Happy Anniversaire!

2007-03-15T19:49:00.000+01:00

We celebrated our first year in Malaysia at the beginning of April. It was stormy every afternoon and torrential rain poured down as we tried to drive to Megamall to eat in our favourite fish restaurant there. Along Jalan Bangsar cars with no visibility (or working windscreen wipers) crashed and slipped on the wet road. Motorcyclists sheltered under the narrow bridge, risking life and limb to avoid being soaked in water from passing cars. April, it turned out was often stormy and it was the rainy or monsoon season. I missed the fresh spring air of Europe, Easter eggs and daffodils and I had to occupy myself organsing Nina’s 5th birthday party.

Nina, like Marc at age five, had never really had a real birthday party. Unlike Marc she had Ideas and Plans. She had been plotting since January and had decided we would host a Fancy-Dress party with everyone we knew. Feeling guilty for having done hardly anything for her fourth birthday I mistakenly agreed. I was thinking of a simple pool party with condo families and a few friends from school. Nina was thinking of a catwalk fashion show with music and had already invited half her class.

In the end the weather was the real dampener and the pool party idea was out the window. The guest list was over thirty, never mind all the extra brothers and sisters, maids and drop-in guests would might come along too. So we strictly sorted the guests into two groups. We decided to invite all the mainly English-speaking condo families to our apartment on the real day of her birthday, a Monday, for a dress-up tea-party. I guessed that not many would turn-up on a Monday school night anyway. We also hired the ibu house, where we held our French language Mercredi group. For that day we would invite about twenty French-speaking friends and classmates. They all said they would come too - either Nina was a really popular girl, or it was a dead time for other parties. I booked a last-minute clown in case it was stormy and the kids ran riot inside the small house.

Nina and I ran around in mild panic, buying Indian knick-knacks from Little India to fill over 50 party-bags, party-hats and balloons. We ordered two giant 2kg chocolate cakes from Secret Recipe, one for Monday with the inscription in pink icing saying Happy Birthday, Nina! and one for Wednesday with Bonne Anniversaire Nina! The girl rang later from the shop to ask if I had made a spelling mistake…should it not be Happy Anniversary, Nina? She was rather bemused about our bilingual cake-order but promised it would be correct.

I was wrong about the Monday afternoon party; nearly 20 children came with their mothers, maids and even a few cousins who were over for the day. The rain was heavy and the mothers and kids were happy to get out of their apartments. Thank god we had enough cake. Nina was dressed as Snow White and our maid, Aimee, ran up a pink Princess Throne for her to sit on. Around twenty dressed-up kids played together and we did a catwalk fashion show to the tune of Abba’s song 'Nina Ballerina'. It was a huge success. Two days later we did the same, Nina welcomed her French guests sweetly and they watched the clown show, gobbled all the cake and had a great time too. The sun shone on the Wednesday and the children were delighted. “Next year a small party with four friends!” I said to Nina as we tidied away all the mess. ‘But it was just perfect!’ she said dreamily and I had to agree with her…

Meeting Malaysian mothers

2007-03-12T20:39:00.000+01:00

Within the French school I began to be aware of a certain group of mothers, who although they had a strong link to France and it's culture were often on the fringes of French society. They were embassy families from French-speaking countries in Africa, like Senegal, or the French-speaking Middle-Eastern countries, like Tunisia, while some were Malaysians married to Frenchmen. These mothers got together regularly for coffee, lunches, Tupperware and jewelry parties. They were friendly to me, always saying hello in the mornings or at school shows and inviting me to their get-togethers. These ladies often moaned about the French and their concerns of racism and exclusion within the school. I agreed they had a point, but being Caucasian and ‘white’ I had my feet in both camps. French-English political or cultural differences are very different from the sensitive French-Algerian issue or the French colonial past. So I kept my distance from the group in general. They were a very glamorous set of ladies, beautifully dressed and made-up, wearing perfectly tailored clothes and matching accessories, but to be honest I didn’t feel very comfortable with them and their ‘ladies-who-lunch’ lifestyle.

At school Marc had two good friends, Adam and Danton. I liked them a lot. When they came to my house they were extremely polite and always ate their food without asking for ketchup or coke. They didn’t whine or act spoilt like so many of the French expat kids did. The boys played wonderfully together, building lego, trains and making imaginary worlds. Both boys were bilingual, even trilingual, having fluent-English speaking Malaysian bilingual mothers and French fathers. Both boys came from families of three children, Adam being the oldest child and Danton in the middle. Marc’s friends lived miles away in the suburbs of KL though and I was terrified of driving there and always got lost. The streets were numbered and I could never find the right Jalan 6/13 or 9/20 and would end up doing several illegal U-turns before arriving, shaking with fear. Since after-school play was not possible, we usually invited the boys for weekend sleepovers or got together in the holidays as a family.

Danton’s parents worked with refugees within the United Nations organization and Adam’s parents worked at the University in sciences. The French fathers had lived in Malaysia for a long time and were integrated in the community. Adam’s mother, Mazida, was a Muslim, although she did not wear the veil and traditional dress of Malaysian women she was serious about her religion. Danton’s mother, Mahes, was of Indian origin and had lived as an expat in several countries before returning to Malaysia.

Mazida and Mahes were not like the other ‘not-French’mothers at school, they were remarkably down-to-earth and too busy working and getting on with life for moaning. We would chat about education, Malaysian versus British, British versus French, and how we could help our children. We worried if we had made the right decision choosing the French school, and we found the homework and school structure bewildering and challenging. We would sometimes ring up each other to check on spellings or strange requests in the French communication book.

Going to Adam’s or Danton’s home was always a pleasure, it was a real cosy family home, a permanent base full of family memorabilia. It was such a pleasure to sit at the kitchen table or in the living room and sip tea and eat Malaysian food. Marc loved spicy food and we would often join Danton and his family for a local Indian breakfast of curry and roti (flatbread) on a weekend in a café near their house in Petaling Jaya. With Adam we would visit at teatime and eat sweet Malaysian cakes and pastries while the men would discuss French literature and politics and the kids ran around playing happily.

Le club de mercredi

2007-03-08T17:57:00.000+01:00

Expat schools have new children arriving all the time, as parents take up new posts in Asia. Nina’s class began with twelve children in September, but by the end of January 2004 it had doubled. Nina found some new friends, French twins, Marie and Julie, and a Malaysian/German girl called Nadia. Several of the French mothers had younger siblings and suddenly I wasn’t the only mother who was lost and I could actually give advice about childcare, parks and places to visit with a baby or toddler.

Several of the French mothers had joined my weekly international mothers and babies group, 'ibu', which I recommended. At the ibu house I recently had met two French expat women who were involved in ibu. Odile was married to an English chap, with two children similar in age to Nina and Gabriel, worked part-time in the office. Julie was married to an Indian, had a four-year-old daughter, and sold decorative Balinese items at fairs. We met at the ballet-school where our daughters practiced on Mondays. Talking together we thought there would be enough French-speakers to form our own playgroup. We hired the ibu house for Wednesday afternoons, a time when the French school is closed, following French tradition of no-school on Wednesdays. We advertised in the ibu magazine and at the French pre-school.

The first meeting was very busy. Odile, Julie and I received about twelve mamans and their children. We put on French music and served a French style snack or gouter of baguette with nutella chocolate spread and asked everyone to introduce themselves and say what they wanted to get out of the group. Most just wanted to speak and hear more French, especially for their English-dominant children. Over the first month the group stabilized to about eight regulars. There were four mixed-marriages - me, Odile, Julie and Corinne, who was French and married to a Scot. Christine, Blandine, Cecile and Sylvie were French expats with young children. We also welcomed Fara, a Malaysian who was friends with Odile and Julie, and didn’t speak French but wanted her four-year-old daughter to speak it. Over fifteen children, ranging from baby to nine-year-old, played very well together and the mamas were free to sip ice-tea and chat about good places to visit, eat and take the children.

I felt very priviledged to be accepted at such a group. My French was improving dramatically as we shared stories of homesickness, sleepless nights, strange tropical illnesses and great holidays. The conversation was not demanding and I could easily partipate.

We met at the ibu house until the summer, when issues of membership fees and paying for the rental/snacks surfaced, and three organizers were tired of tidying up all the mess and toys afterwards. So we began to meet in a local park or play-area, at our houses, by the condo pool or in the garden and the hostess provide the gouter. It was a successful group and kept going for over a year with regular monthly lunches sans enfants, attending our children’s birthday parties and social events together too. Over the year Cecile, Julie and Blandine all had babies and we were conscious to be there to support them without their families. However in spring 2005, Blandine and Slyvie left KL for new postings, Julie opened a shop, Fara was too busy with other activities and the group disintegrated and became more occasional lunches or three or four of us meeting at a pool with the children.

Birthday Etiquette

2007-03-06T20:22:00.000+01:00

I had booked a birthday package for Marc at the Petronas science museum located in the Twin Towers in KL. He could invite 20 friends, have a private tour of the museum, a fast-food lunch and a science-magic show and a cake at the end. Party bags with a science theme could be packed by the shop staff. It seemed like the perfect party and cost less than just renting the sports-hall we’d had for Marc’s 5th birthday in England. But we had problems with the invitees. I sent a brief invite out before Christmas, with a RSVP before the school closed. No-one replied and I thought the families were simply busy with Christmas preparations. By the time we went back to school in January I was panicking. I had invited all twelve children in Marc’s CP class plus another ten from the condo. I worried that it would be just our family eating twenty portions of fried chicken and ice-cream.

As I sat down to call each parent for a definitive RSVP three days before the party I was terrified. How do you ask someone nicely in French if they are coming or not? I didn't know many of the parents socially and hate telephoning in French anyway. I tried to sound not too desperate for party-friends, but to tell them that I needed to give the museum a party list that was already late. To my surprise the parents were not at all apolgetic that they had forgotten to contact me. They said things like: ‘Sorry, he’s playing football, and we don’t want to miss the practice’, ‘Oh we have too many parties in January, sorry she can’t come’ or ‘Sunday morning, KLCC?…we’ll see how we feel…maybe yes, maybe no.’ I was disappointed and crushed. The condo kids finally confirmed after a few more urgent calls. I finally called the party-organiser to say I could not get exact numbers but he said it was normal in Malaysia not to commit and that they would probably come last-minute. In the end nearly all the kids did turn up and luckily I had pre-packed 20+ party-bags. We had a great time.

In England we make a great effort to invite children in advance (so they can cancel sports and other activities in time), we always RSVP even if it is to say no thanks…and we would never just pop in on the day like that. But this is Malaysia and class parties were nearly every week and very much open-ended. Some parents would select parties for their children or restrict their children from parties in shopping malls or indoor play-areas, saying they could only attend house parties. So my concern about Marc not being popular and parents being rude was more to do with the expat culture than his rating in the class.

A few weeks later at the end of January we had Gabriel’s joint birthday barbecue party by the condo swimming pool. This was a much less stressful event, although more people came than we expected, and wolfed down the barbecue lunch and birthday cake with great speed. There was no need for kids entertainment, they all swam, played and ran around till a storm came at 3pm and sent us all running for shelter.

Nina’s godfather was visiting us on Gabriel’s birthday, which was very special for us. We were deeply grateful that our condo neighbours and new friends stood in as honorary aunts, uncles and cousins. However I couldn’t help feeling a little sad that no other family had been there for Nina’s 4th, Marc’s 7th and Gabriel’s 1st birthday. On all three birthdays we had waited till 4pm to call the grandparents and my sister, opened the cards and gifts sent by post and printed out photos later, but it’s not the same as having family there in person. So when my sister announced that she was pregnant with her first child (due in September) I wondered how we could reconcile faraway expat life with the simple business of sharing a birthday cake with our family members.

Christmas in the tropics

2007-03-02T04:48:00.000+01:00

As Christmas approached we got a new maid. We needed someone full-time, and a live-in maid was cheaper than a part-time one. We had a spare room and I was having problems ushering out all the children in the morning and wanted someone to look after Gabriel while I did activities and school-runs with the other two. Jacques found an agency and chose one that looked cheerful. Imelda was in her late-thirties, but looked like a teenager (as Marc remarked to her one day). She was from the Phillipines, which I liked because my maid in Egypt had been sweet-natured and kind, and she was the youngest of twelve, which meant she was used to family life. Her CV said that she could speak English, could cook and had experience with babies. In the end Imelda (or Aimee as she called herself) came a few weeks early and we were rather unprepared and just about to leave for Thailand.

Christmas in the tropics is so different, even though there are the decorations and parties it is hard to believe it is that time of year. Without the chilly autumn air and dark evenings we still felt like we were in summer, although the calendar said December. We decided not to go back to Europe for Christmas, my sister was getting married in February and we would go back then. We bought a tiny plastic Christmas tree from Carrefour and some tacky house decorations, I had left all ours in storage in France and we had nothing. The condo had a potluck party and Jerome, dressed as a rather sweaty Santa, handed out gifts to all the delighted children. My only moment of sadness was when an English guest at the party brought in a fully dressed turkey with roast potatoes and cranberry sauce, and I felt suddenly homesick when I tasted it.

This Christmas was our first without either family and we decided we should go away. It could have been lonely, but we were occupied driving by car up north to Thailand and then finding our way to the island resort, Phuket. The atmosphere was so good there we really had fun. On Christmas Day Santa arrived with gifts for the children, riding on an elephant. There were parades and shows each night. The children still believed in Santa and were amazed to find gifts by their hotel beds. ‘How did he know?’ they asked each other. Later when we phoned home and reported there were more big things at home (bicycles) and they agreed it was totally normal for Santa to have left something back at the condo.

My English condo friend Vikki offered to look after Aimee while we were away. There were many horror stories of maids running off with the security guards, stealing the wife’s jewelry and even leaving children alone in the house. We left with some trepidation, but when we came back all was well and the house was spotless. Aimee settled in quickly. She had lived in KL for nine years, so knew her way around. She was a widow and was working to support her twelve-year-old son who lived with her sister.

We were back in KL in time for New Year and awaiting a visit from Nina’s godfather and his girlfriend in January. We could also start planning Marc’s 7th and Gabriel’s 1st birthdays. Marc wanted a science museum party. Gabriel happened to be born a day after Vikki’s son, McCaulay, who would be two on the 18th. We decided to do a joint barbecue party by the pool for the little boys.

Indian dress-up day

2007-02-27T18:58:00.001+01:00

It seemed like we had a holiday every month in Malaysia. The country celebrated the three major religions and so we had Chinese New year, Buddha’s birthday and Wesak day, along with Indian Thaipusam, Deepavali and the Muslim celebration of Hari Raya at the end of the month-long Ramadam fasting. Malaysia also did the more Western traditions of Halloween and Christmas too, decorating all the malls with giant Christmas trees and baubles, and you even could buy Easter chocolate bunnies in springtime.

The school made the most of these festivals, incorporating with their cultural studies and reading stories or doing related artwork. The school would hold a dress-up party before the festival, with traditional foods from the religious celebration. Our first such day was the Indian Deepavali (also known as Divali in England) or the festival of lights in autumn. In class Nina made a candle lamp and Marc wrote about it. The day before the festival the kids came home with a note in the cahier de jour, a day-to-day planner for teacher-parent communication. Habillez-vous on style Indian demain! Dress up as an Indian tomorrow !

This amazed me, firstly it was the night before, and I had no time to visit Little India to stock on a child-size sari for Nina and Indian pyjamas for Marc. Secondly I found the idea of the kids dressing-up as Indians rather odd, when the school had several mixed Indian-French families, who might find it insulting. But Nina insisted that ‘everyone else will be dressed-up!’ and not wishing to humiliate her as the only child not in the mood I agreed. Sorting through our fancy-dress box we had nothing Indian-like, only a fairy, nurse or pink butterfly costume. At six pm I dashed over to Liz, our Indian neighbour in the condo. She was helpful and told me Nina would need lots of bangles to jingle on her arms and a red spot like a married lady. She found some brightly-coloured saris and shirts. Although they were too big for four-year-old Nina, they gave me an idea. At home I found my turquoise-blue cotton beach wrap decorated with tiny beads that we wrapped around her sari-style. I glued on some extra sequins for effect. We borrowed Liz’s collection of bangles and with a dot of red lipstick on her forehead she was ready for the day! Marc was not so keen on dressing-up and just wore a t-shirt with an Indian elephant.

The maternelle or pre-school part of the school was enchanting, tiny Indian princesses danced around the classroom, covered in shiny silks and jangling jewelry. The boys were dressed-up too, in miniature Indian suits and pyjamas and looked fantastic. Three Indian ladies came to make a beautiful Mandela design of coloured rice on the floor and later there was a dance and some Indian sweets and cakes to try. The classroom assistant in Nina’s class was an Indian-Malaysian and she drew henna patterns on the children’s hands. I was impressed at the way the school integrated the culture of Malaysia. I checked the calendar for the following festival, so we could have our costumes ready for the next time…

Small differences…small talk

2007-02-21T18:10:00.000+01:00

There were a few differences between the French and British systems:

1) Stodge or salad? French children eat a proper lunch every day, and I mean proper, with a starter of fresh salad followed by a restaurant-style tempting main course, such as chicken with creamy mushroom sauce, la puree de pomme de terre (a kind of smooth mashed potatoes) and green beans, and a dessert of alternating fruit or light sweet such as yoghurt, compote, or ice-cream. Sometimes they would have a slice of camembert cheese and French bread. Parents even had a testing rota, to check all was well and volunteers would man the canteen. This was in stark contrast to the school dinners in England where Marc ate ‘pasta, rice and chips with gravy’ almost every day with a stodgy pudding with custard. In England they let children from age five choose their lunch, which seemed to be asking for trouble. The French put an airplane-style tray in front of the kids who were sat at the table. When I asked why Marc didn’t choose any vegetables in England he said that the lady never asked him, and that all his friends thought green things were yucky anyway. Many kids in England take sandwiches (at least you know what your kid eats) but this was not even an option at the KL Lycee.

2) What we did this week: The lycee sent home all the work done in the week on Fridays, to be signed by the parents. At first I found this heavy book bag day annoying at first, and since I didn’t understand the work done it wasn’t much help to me. Eventually I could acknowledge the fact that you could at least be aware of your child’s horrific spelling or maths before the school report. In England we only knew that Marc has never got more than 50% in a spelling test in Year 2 until we had a Parent-teacher conference. There was a simple grading system - tb (trés-bien or very good), b (bien or good) or ab (assez-bien or just good enough) and the mysterious vu, which I translated as ‘seen’ but apparently means ‘ok’. However we did not count for fun, because not enough tbs or b meant trouble or potentially re-double and so we must be vigilant. A missed accent or a badly-written sentence were punished. The grading was taken very seriously and there was none of the generous ‘he tried hard’ marks that we might have scored in England.

3) Parent contribution: There seemed to be very little parent-initiated fund-raising, as opposed to England where they were always trying to update the playing fields, or buy books for the library or suchlike. There were the official PTA members, of course, and they reported by email the ins and outs of the school board. Here in KL we didn’t have to organize a Christmas Craft Fair or bring a bottle for the raffle or drop off second-hand toys for the stalls. But even though we saved on direct fund-raising we had to pay for the yearly supply of paper, files, pens, pencils etc and even the class set-texts. So although I might have saved on tombola tickets I lost out buying trendy stationary and endless pencil sharpeners and felt-tipped pens.

4) Greetings! You must always ‘bonjour’ and ‘au revoir’ all the teachers, staff and fellow mothers as you cross paths. I mistakenly saw this as friendliness, it was not - it was just etiquette. You should kiss (twice on each cheek) a mother or teacher you knew socially too. Once you knew the teacher well you could tentatively use the informal ‘tu’ and their first name, but formality was a safer option. In England I usually only talked to the teacher and staff if I had too, although most staff would say a cheerful ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ as we dropped or picked up kids. The English tradition of small-talk on the lines of ‘Bad traffic jam today/terrible weather/how’s the car…’ with other mothers and teachers was not important. It went straight over the French mamans head, even worse they found it shallow and boring.

So with this insider knowledge of the two education systems I strangely felt proud and dissatisfied with the both French and English schools at the same time. Whereas one offered a delicious lunch, the other had stationary in the classroom, one you had to say hello, the other you talked about the weather. On some days I delighted in the French way of dong things, other days I was exasperated as I signed off every page of the weeks work or tried, without success, to engage my fellow mothers in conversation. In the end, I learnt to stop moaning about the monsoon weather or heavy books, and try to discuss the pros and cons of the French class/teacher/teaching style/comments in the class-book and compare it to the UK. When done well this would earn me the right to more than a morning ‘bonjour’…. and a step in the right direction to find a few French friends.

Cooking for fun

2007-02-20T18:29:00.000+01:00

Suhita, my Indonesian friend from my condo, had had a brilliant idea. Not knowing how to make a certain dish she asked if she could watch her neighbour make it. She learnt a lot and visited more neighbours in the multicultural condo where we all lived. American, Chinese, Iranian, Algerian, Indian, Thai and Swedish ladies all passed on their secrets of herbs, spices and special sauces. This quickly became a regular meeting with word spreading fast. Every two weeks expat wives would meet at someones house, but not for coffee and idle chat – it was a cooking lesson by a real native. There was no membership fee, just the agreement that once a year you would cook for the group. The ladies gathered at 10am and lunch was served at 12 prompt, because several mothers had children in pre-schools that finished early. In 2003 there were about fifteen members. Membership was only granted to certain nationalities though, and there was a cap on three people from the same culture. Suhita called it ‘Cooking for Fun.’

My neighbour, Liz, took me to the first cooking session, a French-speaking African lady who made a chicken stew traditionally served in her village and told stories of how they would catch the chicken for the pot that day. I joined that day after chatting over lunch to ladies from all over the globe. I looked forward to the bi-monthly sessions and over the first few months learnt the how to mix the five essential spices for a Chicken Korma, how to make an Iranian custard-like pudding, an Indonesian spicy salad and had a Japanese sushi demonstration.

What was so nice about the group was that there was no competition between the women. We mostly had children in different schools so we did not talk about teachers and class-stuff. We genuinely admired each other’s cooking and the fact we could talk and prepare a full meal, in just under two hours. I also loved visiting all the houses, from tiny apartments on the twentieth floor with window-less kitchens where we ate on the sofa with plates on our knees, to vast palaces in the suburbs with maids chopping vegetables and the hostess setting the table with real china and silverware.

I had my name penciled in for 2004, but as luck had it my Algerian neighbour couldn’t do her slot and I offered to fill it at the last minute. I had a mild panic as I thought what to do. I was listed in the members list as English/French and thought they might like to learn something traditionally from both cultures. The only recipe that I could do with my eyes closed was my mum’s English scones and fruit crumble. As for the French the easiest thing to do was quiche. So in the end the menu came out as a mis-mash of cultures:

v English Scones with clotted cream and jam (to be served with morning coffee at 11am)
v Salmon and Courgette Quiche (which was my specialty)
v Green salad
v Apple crumble with Bird’s custard

I raced around over-buying and prepping a quiche that was ready-to-eat in case the one I made in front of the ladies burnt, or worse. I made an extra batch of scones and a crumble just in case too. I stayed up till midnight weighing ingredients, organizing the table and folding napkins to perfection. I had had twelve RSVP’s, but only had dinnerware for six. Liz leant me extra chairs, cutlery and plates and was on hand with her hot water thermos, which was a blessing.

On the day I had a rigorous timetable, set by Jacques, which worked to the minute. I actually enjoyed telling them about how to make the breadcrumb-like mix for the scones and crumble and instructing them how to drip the eggy quiche mixture like my mother-in-law does. They asked hundreds of questions and wrote over my printed recipes many times. As we sat down at 12.01 for lunch and I saw the group chatting and eating with much pleasure I breathed a sigh of relief. Over for a year…now I could enjoy cooking for fun.

To redouble or not…

2007-02-14T17:48:00.000+01:00

Before flying back to KL I had rushed to buy school supplies in France. The French Lycee in KL had given us specific class lists for Marc’s entry to the Primary section, underlining the fact that some things cannot be found in KL. So off we went to Super U to stock up.

We started with a huge cartable rigide, a satchel-like school bag that French kids carry on their back. Not knowing French cartoons character were in or out Marc hesitated for ages, eventually choosing a Titeuf schoolbag, which seemed a popular choice for 6 year-old boys. We found an ardoise blanche, a mini-whiteboard for letter practice. I searched for ages for a chiffon, until I realized it was just a cloth or rag for cleaning the whiteboard. We looked at the reams of graph paper with tiny squares for writing perfectly, and I sensed that Marc would be doing a lot of letter practice. Marc threw in much-needed erasable pens that had not reached KL shops yet, and we searched for the mysteriously named taille-crayon avec reservoir, which is just a pencil sharpener with a container to hold sharpenings. We also needed a beginner’s French dictionary and thesaurus. I threw in a world map blotter too, with the names in French, which I thought might be useful for Geography.

Marc started CP or cours preparatoire in September. The French system allows a relaxed curriculum until the year children are six, then it kicks in. ‘Academic’ is the keyword and children are given nine months to learn how to read or write or redouble or re-take the whole year again. I had never heard of re-taking in England, unless for a special circumstances like a child was sick for a long time and missed too much work. Jacques explained to me that in the French system if you failed a year you had to redo it. That explained why some of his friends left school aged 19 or 20 or finished university at age 22. Although it was a bad thing for the child, it made sense for the teacher, because the children were a homogenous group, rather than having the extreme differences in ability that a UK teacher might have in their year-group.

The year started well, a small class of twelve and an excellent male teacher from Paris who was well prepared (he even had his own website with coursework on for those who might miss a day). Marc already knew how to read and simply had to ‘transfer’ the knowledge across. However we soon discovered what I call the ‘i/e’ problem. In English the letter ‘i’ sounds like ‘eye’ and ‘e’ is ‘ee’, but in French the ‘i’ is a ‘ee’ sound and ‘e’ is like an English ‘i’. So spelling became a nightmare, with me saying ‘i’ when it should be ‘e’ and vice versa. Marc has never recovered from that period and still mixes up his e’s and ‘i’s…

Marc had a copy of a poem or a poesie to learn each week. Not a simple little children’s poem about bunnies or tigers, but a proper rhyming fifteen-liner with deep meanings and tricky vocabulary. Here we hit our first tip of the iceberg regarding homework. I just couldn’t do the poem. I didn’t know what it meant and had no idea of the right rhythm, rhyme or inflections. On Fridays Marc would do his haltering English-accented poem and systematically got a bad grade. After a tactful Parents meeting in November, when the teacher pointed out Marc’s handicap Jacques stepped in and took over poesies. Jacques seemed to enjoy it, and it was simply a matter of repetition he said. Five lines repeated five times every day. He explained all the unknown words and it made sense to Marc. Jacques could remember poems from his childhood so it must work, I thought, although I was sure that learning poems off by heart went out with the 1970’s education act in England…

Nina was blossoming in Moyen or middle section of the maternelle school. She had lost her shyness and now the teacher couldn’t stop her talking. She was enthusiastic and gave her all in class. Nina needed friends now and got on well with a little English/French girl called Isolde, and a Tunisian girl, Alya, whose family spoke French. There were new girl twins in the class too, Julie and Marie, and Nina quickly became friends with them too. Between the mothers we started a play date system and the girls came round regularly to dress up, play Barbies or swim. They all talked French together and when they were gone Nina would continue to talk in French to her Barbies or dolls. She seemed so at ease in French we could hardly believe that three months before she would barely speak a word. It finally seemed we had made a good decision on the choice of school.

Another mixed-marriage in the family

2007-02-10T19:05:00.000+01:00

In France my parents-in-law had decided to take Marc, Nina and their three cousins on a two-week beach holiday. The village de vacances had a club for the children, which would keep them all busy with games and activities. This was to help out my sister-in-law, who had four children and worked with Jacques’ brother all summer long selling clothes at beach markets. It would help me too, and I planned to visit my mum, who had been sick. The children were excited to go off alone and I was sure they would practice lots of French. When I picked them up after the holiday they were glowing with sunshine and they had had a fantastic time. Nina’s French was dramactically better and she was chatting non-stop to Manon, her cousin just a year old than her. Marc was relaxed and had enjoyed his time with his close cousin, Francois.

In August Jean and Nora got married. They chose the church near to Jean’s house, in the small village where we had lived three years before. It was a traditional marriage, the bride was in white, the house decorated with bamboo and coloured ribbons for good luck and the family had organized a vin d’honneur after the ceremony in the garden of Jean’s house. Musicians played as the couple walked the short distance to the church and Nina and Manon held up Nora’s train. It was perfect, except for one thing, there was no-one from Nora’s family present, although she had a few friends there. Nora’s family were in Kosovo and either could not come, or would not come. She had one married brother in Switzerland, but he could not come either. It was hard for them to travel and visas were hard to get. Luckily French weddings are not so formal and everyone can sit where they want, if it had been an English wedding one side of the church would have been the bride’s family, the other the groom. I thought to myself that I was an honorary member of Nora’s family.

As is the tradition at the church door the groom enters the church with his mother, and the bride with her father. Since Nora had no family present Jacques father, Rene, was chosen. Nora seemed very uncomfortable with the idea and arrived at the alter looking tearful. I thought to myself it would have better to have dropped the walk in the circumstances, but no-one seemed to have thought about Nora. The service proceeded with Nora replying to the wedding vows and praying in perfect French, amazing since she had only starting learning French three years ago. The celebratory village drinks were a success, the sun shone and everyone was in a good mood.

Later we ate a wedding dinner at the same ferme-auberge or farm-restaurent where we had celebrated Nina’s christening. The food was excellent, as always, and the guests were chatting loudly and toasting the couple. But as the evening wore on and I ended up in the back room feeding baby Gabriel I saw Nora. She looked suddenly sad and I asked her in English what was wrong. ‘I miss my family’, she simply said and I knew exactly how she felt. We smiled and hugged and she went back to being the charming newly-wed she was. I hoped that she would be able to invite some of her own family for her next family party. In the darkness I sat and thought about how when we fall in love with someone from another culture we never think about the actual wedding will be, or how we will feel without our clan around us.

My sister, my kaka…

2007-01-29T21:35:00.000+01:00

The kids soon picked up a few words of local Bahasa Malay and would greet the security guards at our condo with salamat datang! (goodday!) or they said terimakasi (thank you) when we were served something or in a shop. The kids loved to chat with taxi-drivers who we used daily to go to and from school. The taxi drivers would ask them how many languages they spoke and when they said two the chap would laugh and say his children spoke four languages! It was true, local kids all spoke the national language (Bahasa Malay) plus English, then they had a local home language, either Chinese or Hindu and usually another family dialect too. It was impressive. being bilingual was nothing in multilingual Malaysia!

Marc and Nina learnt that the word kaka meant big sister. They had heard some kids in the condo calling their Indonesian maid ‘kaka’, and laughed and laughed, since that meant ‘poo-poo’ in French! Marc joked he could call Nina ‘big caca’ and she could not be angry, because he meant ‘big sister’!! They were just at the age when they loved the playground slang and their favourite mixed version was ‘You are a big caca!’ so this linguistic novelty amused them greatly.

Gabriel was now nearly six months old and with his sunny personality I could take him nearly everywhere; for dinner in a restaurant, to someone’s house or to an organised event and no one would mind. That was a huge bonus after England where children are not always welcome. Gabriel was easy to travel with and everywhere we went people stopped to talk to us. They would smile at Marc and Nina, ask their names or give them a sweet. But it was Gabriel who people loved, a big fat bald baby with huge blue eyes and a smile too! They pinched his cheeks, or tickled his legs and arms and picked him up to cuddle or cooed over him while he slept. When we visited the zoo in June people even asked us to pose for their photos next to the orang-utan or the elephants, or would crowd around us for their group shots!

The summer term or trimestre wound up with a show in a local auditorium. Not knowing any other parents yet at the school I sat next to a woman who looked friendly. She immediately introduced herself as Mahes, the mother of a boy in Marc’s class. Although we only exchanged a few words throughout the performance it was a relief for me to have someone to talk to and I felt we had a lot in common. She was Malaysian, of Indian heritage and married to a Frenchman too. The theme was French songs from the Seventies, which of course I did not recognize any at all, but our boys did their songs and then Nina danced Tata Yo-yo with the little ones. Both children looked happy and proud to be on stage and had no problems to sing along in French. I was reassured for the next school year.

As the holidays approached expats prepared to leave for the long eight-week summer holiday. Having only just arrived it seemed too soon to go back to Europe already, but the news that Jean and Nora would get married in August was an occasion too good for us to miss. We also thought we should spend a good part of the holiday in France to help Nina adapt more to her new school language and spend some time with the cousins there. My mother-in-law offered to take five of the cousins on a beach holiday and so with bags over-loaded with Malaysian souvenirs we set off for Paris….

Expat Wives Club

2007-01-23T16:34:00.000+01:00

Once I had got to know the expats of Sri Bukit Tunku Condo life suddenly got busy. We would cross paths at least once or twice a day, dropping off and picking up kids, waiting in the street for a taxi, or in the local mall. Suhita was the queen of the expat wives and she organized regular coffee mornings in her house. There would always be a person selling something; handmade scarves, artwork, ceramics or made-to-measure shoes. One morning Mahin took a few of us to the local Chinese market where she shopped to show us which vendors were good. I was overwhelmed by the smell of rotting meat and repulsed by the cages of frogs and chickens. But we fun and came back with several bags of rambutans, giant watermelons and custard apples.

KL is a small city, compared to most Asian cities like Bangkok and Shanghai. The expats were, in general, grateful to have posted there. They usually only had a two-year contract so they made the most of it before being swept off somewhere else or back to England or France. Expats met each other through the school network, the condo where they lived, or a country club or national clubs. Expat wives especially need to get together, because lacking family and friends they need support and a social life. We also want to discover things together and perhaps take up a new hobby or sport since most woman were not allowed to work in Malaysia.

Clubs existed for all nationalities and interests. You could learn tennis, bridge, mahjong, calligraphy or how to speak Bahasa Malay. I joined the Association of British Women in Malaysia (ABWM) first. Thinking I would meet fellow Brits I went for a Welcome Coffee and Lunch, only to find half of them were in their fifties and were living a very different life from those with kids. The others were all in the posh British school and after a cursory ‘What class are your children in?’ and discovering my children were at a French school, left me alone. I kept the membership for a year and went to few events and craft markets, and suchlike. I wrote articles for their magazine, but I never felt at home there.

The French had their club too. They met weekly for guided French-language cultural tours of KL, aqua-aerobics and lunches around town and they also had a regular walking club, which seemed a good idea. Since my French was still not perfect I preferred to practice with one or two people, rather than in a big group. The French woman at school said ‘bonjour’ as we dropped off our kids but they did not seem very friendly either. So I put that off for a while.

The club that suited me best, in the end, was ibu, an association of international women with young pre-school children. They met five days a week in a converted house in Bangsar. They ran baby clinics, first-aid classes, daily playgroups and so on. It was wonderfully cosy and gave my week some kind of focus. I offered to help out on the committee and signed up Gabriel for a place in the playgroup.

Multilingual Condo mix..

2007-01-22T16:36:00.000+01:00

In May we found our neighbours. The manager of the condo told me there were several expat families living there. But where were they? The pool and park were deserted and I hadn’t seen a single child since we arrived. One morning as we waited outside the condo for a taxi to go to the airport an Indian lady came to greet me, saying she was living right opposite me. Liz had a son, Rubin, aged four, and a baby girl, Sheeba, just a few months older than Gabriel.

The holiday was great, but unfortunately four-year-old Nina fell into fishing net on a floating fishing village and gashed her inner thigh, needing 12 stitches. On our return I was desperate for help and rang Liz’s doorbell. She was instantly on the case, calling her doctor for a nearby hospital and helping me get there by taxi. We became friends, walking to the mall together with our babies in their pushchairs, or chatting by the play area or pool as out kids played together. Our husbands were away often on business, usually for three days or sometimes a week, and we were glad to have someone to talk to and rely on, if need be. Liz would make me Indian breakfast – flat pancakes with potatoes and onions with sweet milky coffee. I would reciprocate with croissants and jam from Deli France. When I praised her home cooking she offered to invite me to her Cooking Club so I could learn how to cook Indian food.

Soon I was introduced to Liz’s closest friend, Min. Min was a second-generation Chinese-American married to a Danish man. They had two children Andrea, aged seven and Greg, five. Greg and Rubin went to the same pre-school. The next day I bumped into Vikki, from England, with two children, Gabriel, who was three and MacCauley, 18 months. Vikki was friends with Suhita, who was Indonisian, and married to a Swedish chap. They had two children too, Kieran, six and Chloe who was three. Gabriel and Chloe were at the same pre-school too. Then there was Soraya, from Algeria and her family, Falak, five, and her sister Youssra who was seven. Youssra was at the French school too. The last person of the expat gang was Mahin, who lived right next to the pool. She has seen us but was too shy to say hello, and finally we met one Sunday when she sent her daughter, Nilgouin, out on her behalf. Mahin was from Iran, and had lived in KL for years, and her three teenage children had spent nearly all their lives there.

One Friday in the park Vikki said to Suhita that we should have a condo party….Suhita was the social organizer of the expat families. Within a few hours a potluck party was planned and on the Saturday night everyone met by the pool, and each family brought a dish. The night was balmy and tropical and the kids played wonderfully together. An English/Thai family joined us, as did an Australian married to a local Malaysian. We ate spicy food from India and Thailand along with Malaysian chicken and beef satay sticks and peanut sauce, Chinese sweet cakes, Swedish delicacies, Iranian rice and kebabs and we brought some French salads. As we chatted and shared our new and past experiences of Kuala Lumpur, we thought how lucky we were to have found such a group of diverse and multilingual friends. Within the group of ten families there were eleven languages and twelve nationalities.

We asked curiously why it had taken so long for us to meet? They looked at us with amazement, “Didn’t you hear about SARS?” they said. We shook our heads, it had been mentioned in England briefly in the newspapers, but we had no advice, even when I had signed on at The British Embassy. “We’ve been forced to stay inside for several weeks to avoid the virus,’ they explained “and the authorities banned going to public play areas, malls and condo pools.” The party was the first time they’d been out in weeks. That explained why the condo had been so quiet and we thanked god we had not caught SARS in our naiveté….

Immersion into KL…

2007-01-17T18:54:00.000+01:00

The first week in Malaysia was like a holiday - sunshine, the condo swimming pool and eating out in restaurants every day. But I also had to pull the house together and make a home. Jacques had arranged for a temp girl from the office to spend two weeks with us, helping me to find my way around. Monica was a chatty Chinese heritage Malaysian student studying law at night school, and she was great at showing us the ropes; how to get a taxi (to add one ringgit extra when you put the pushchair in the taxi boot…), where to shop for basics and how to run fast and get under cover when a storm came. We had an Indian lady who came in to clean and iron, although she spent most of the time chatting on her phone and moaning about her legs…

The apartment was hugely empty, and much bigger than the London one, but lacking all the furniture we had before. The apartment was furnished with the basics; a table and chairs, sofa, beds and one bedside table each. Due to the SARS crisis the shipping company said our cargo would be late….probably not until June. We had nothing for Gabriel and had to rush out and buy a cot, pushchair and some summer clothes. In the nearest department store the baby clothes were made of synthetic fabrics, which seemed cruel since Gabriel was already sweating profusely. The only cotton ones I found I grabbed, in size 3-6 months, only to find out later that our plump Gabriel was not an Asian size baby and these items were like doll’s clothes. Our summer clothes were in the shipment so we had to buy clothes for school for the Marc and Nina. I had a mild panic wondering what chic French mamans would dress their kids in, would our kids look out of place?

The children had a few days to relax before they started school. They were deeply jet-lagged. When I went to Japan I had spent a whole week wide-awake at 3am, reading a book till I fell asleep at 5am. But this time I had three lively children full of energy at 1am and I had to amuse them! They wanted to play. My saviour was the 24-hr cable TV and they watched Cartoon Network till they dropped off eventually. The next day we were unable to wake up, not having to go to work or school, so would sleep till midday, which made the jet-lag last even longer…

School eventually started and we made our way to the maternelle or pre-school part of the school. Marc would only be here for a few months; because the year when children are six they start formal schooling. So Marc had a few months to chill before serious work. Maternelle was in a separate house with three classrooms about five minutes drive from the main school building. It was painted egg-yolk yellow with a lizard mural, and surrounded by tropical forest, monkeys were playing near the playground and the canteen was outside in the garden under a tent. Children had to take off their shoes on arrival, as did parents. I made a note to buy slip-on shoes. Marc had a male teacher downstairs who did not seem very interested but found a place for him. Nina was upstairs with a female teacher. She ushered Nina in and we were sent off.

For an international school the staff were remarkably insensitive to the new expat children. Nina was culture-shocked and very disorientated. She wet her underwear, cried, demanded to be with Marc (she was put in his classroom in the end) and barely talked a word. The teacher reported all of this in front of the other mothers, which had to be the height of rudeness. Marc’s teacher wondered aloud why he didn’t know his address for a letter project (he just moved here!!!). Luckily we only had a few weeks till summer holidays, which started the end of June and the school was busy preparing a summer show. Nina was chosen to dance, while Marc was in a circus show. This at least made them feel part of the community. They were also cared for by the Malaysian English teacher, Yew-Lin, who helped them communicate and held Nina’s hand in the playground to comfort her.

The weekly school newsletter advertised maids and when I spotted a Philipino maid looking for work we jumped at the chance. Lili came for an interview, and we agreed she would work five afternoons and two mornings. She could start immediately. I fired the Indian cleaner, who didn’t seem at all bothered, and Monica left to go back to her temp work.

By the end of the month we had a regular rhythm to our life, school started at 8am, followed by me shopping at the local mall and having a late breakfast at Deli France, where the staff loved Gabriel and played with him while I drank my latte. In the afternoon I would leave Gabriel sleeping with the maid to pick up Marc and Nina by taxi at 2.30pm. We would end the day with a dip in the pool or play in the condo play-area, or play in the house if there was an afternoon storm. We would eat out with Jacques later or sometimes join him in the town. And so life began in KL…..

An angel arrives….and off we fly

2006-12-11T21:31:00.000+01:00

Gabriel was born exactly to schedule – on the 19th of January around midnight. He was a big fat healthy baby and we all breathed a sigh of relief as now we could really start the planning for our new life in Malaysia. We chose the name ‘Gabriel’ because we both liked it, and it was a classic name from both countries. Although it was pronounced in English with the emphasis on the Gabriel, whereas the French pronounced it more like Gabriel. I also realized belatedly that when the French say Gabriel it is sounds like the English girls name Gabrielle…but too late. Trying to find a name that fitted in both French/English cultures, and matched with Marc/Nina/Hauwaert had driven us mad in the days before he was born!

Just after Gabriel was born Jacques started his new job in KL, while I held the fort in England, with the help of my mum and Jacques mother who came to stay with me. As always when you have a new baby the other siblings look suddenly so big and grown-up. Marc had just had his 6th birthday and Nina was not far off four, but they looked so huge in size and ability to do things compared to the new baby. They were helpful and sang, made funny faces and kept an eye on Gabriel while I cooked. Gabriel smiled when they sang the classic French lullaby ‘Faire Dodo’, and that became his favourite song.

We decided to send a few things ahead of us to Malaysia and store the rest in France. Toys, kitchen stuff and summer clothes were boxed up and sent off in a container. When the boxes left we really felt like we were leaving. We picked April 6th as the day we would fly to KL, which was just before the school Easter break. They would start school a few days after we arrived in KL, when their jet-lag had won off, but then would have a two-week Spring break in May to compensate. We planned a goodbye party with a Chinese theme for 25 children. We hired a sports hall with a bouncy castle. I handed out invites with a Chinese mask for them to decorate and we made a Lion for a dance. Jacques came back from KL with sweets and little party-bag gifts of KL T-shirts and a mini Chinese drum. The party was great, and all the kids had a good time, although its not often you throw a goodbye party in England, so some children were not sure whether to bring a gift or not. We said no gifts, just come along and have some fun. In class each child drew a picture of for Marc and we pasted them into a book.

Friends gathered round to say goodbye and I felt a heavy sadness at leaving the mothers from Marc’s class who had shared the excitement of the first day of school together and the mother of one of Nina’s friend who had had her fourth baby the same time as me. We had a last pizza together and they presented me with a beautiful photo album. I knew I would miss their school-gate chatter and celebrating our kid’s birthdays together. Would I find friends like that in KL I wondered?

The last few days were a blur. My sister and her boyfriend, along with my parents and Jacques parents all pitched in to pack up our house. The van left around lunchtime and we spent the afternoon at my sister’s house, stunned at what was happening. As we arrived at the airport for the 10pm flight the tears came and we all got emotional. The kids clung on to their grandparents and aunt and we had to practically pull them away to catch the check-in deadline. With Gabriel fast asleep and blissfully unaware in his sling we checked in our numerous bags, the baby car seat and the pushchair. Luckily with the Iraq war going on and the SARS virus just beginning to send panic around the world the flight was unusually empty and we had more space than usual.

We spent all night and all of the next day on that airplane….hours and hours punctuated by eating, several films, or a quick nap when Gabriel dozed. Finally we arrived around 5pm local time in the middle of a huge storm. The plane shuddered as it landed, and we gazed out amazed to see palm trees bending in the winds and lighting flashing overheard. We stepped off the plane to walk through the modern gleaming new airport, listening to all the chatter around us in Bahasa Malay, Hindu and Chinese…what a wonderful mixture. The air was steamy and warm and we quickly took off our London layers and climbed into our waiting taxi. ‘Welcome to Malaysia!’ the signs said, and as we approached the city we saw the shining lights of the Petronas Towers and knew we had arrived.

KL school choices....

2006-12-07T20:48:00.000+01:00

Jacques brightened up visibly by the idea of living and working in Asia again. It was a dream come true. He had lived for a short time in Singapore and had visited Malaysia and loved it. Jacques went off for a trip to visit and came back talking of tropical palm trees, bananas and mangos growing in the gardens, cheap and delicious Asian food and swimming pools in every condo. Kuala Lumpur, or KL as the locals call it, seemed a good place to live and the expats living there were positive too.

Jacques also visited a few schools in KL. The expat schools were all private and fees depended on their reputation. There were two British- curriculum schools, an American, Australian and an International one with an American syllabus and a French one. The French one interested us the most. The Lycée Français de Kuala Lumpur or LFKL had fees that were acceptable and they had places for both children. Pupils should ideally have one French parent, but it was not stipulated that they had to speak fluent French. Since Nina was still refusing to speak French and we thought it would give her more exposure to French. Marc spoke French already and he would not have to do much academic work till September because up to age six the emphasis is on play and non-academic skills. We knew that our kids would be lucky to ever get a place in the prestigious and wait-listed Lycée Français in London. Getting a place in one of the European bilingual schools I had read about while researching my book was a daydream too, since neither of us was in the diplomatic service. This was a rare chance to put our children into a French school, without going back to France.

But what would happen to their English if they went to a French school? We reasoned that Malaysians spoke English very well. Jacques reported that nearly all the films in the cinema were in English. Cable television had all the English-language channels and there were huge English-language bookshops and many activities for kids in English. It was the French language that was in danger. French would be under-used, without the proximity of France to England and visiting our cousins regularly. I felt sure I could keep their English going myself and the school would support the French. We did think about changing from OPOL to the Minority-Language-at-Home strategy, where I would speak French to Jacques and the kids. But that concerned me that I might alienate Nina, who could not yet communicate in French properly, and how could I talk to Jacques too? I would much rather adapt to a new school language then change our family strategy. It was a big risk to change the school language though, but we agreed on it and Jacques paid the deposit and enrolled them both in the Maternelle section, Marc in Grande and Nina in Petite section of the LFKL.

Malaysia…maybe?

2006-12-06T17:06:00.000+01:00

Marc had a wonderful teacher in Year Two, a young bright lively woman who could easily control the male-majority class of five and six-year-olds. Miss. Butler read chapters of Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and other stories to the rapt kids each day. This would lead to Marc having a long-term love of Dahl’s writing and poems. His spelling and reading level improved and he was praised for his building and technical skills. Miss. Butler didn’t see Marc’s two languages as a problem and he thrived in her classroom.

Nina was settled in her pre-school too. Her teacher had a French mother and we chatted about France regularly. One of Nina’s friends had a French mother too, and praised us for keeping the French going because in her family the dominant language had been English, and the French sidelined. At the weekly playgroup I had a French friend, who was married to an Englishman, and we compared notes on our children. Finally I felt like the children and me could relax about being bilingual and stop worrying what people thought. We took pleasure in the small things in life…inviting friends over for tea, walks on the local common grassland, going to visit my parents and meeting up with my sister who lived nearby.

Life seemed rather too settled that autumn. There was no project on the horizon and even though Jacques kept looking at job vacancies he knew he needed a good two years experience first. But he still had an itch to be somewhere exciting again. Jacques was tired of the long commute into London and after getting the financial systems up and running in Europe he was looking for a challenge again. I was preparing for the new baby, which was predicted to arrive mid-January, but still would join him if an opportunity came up. We had decided not to buy a house and were still renting, which gave us the chance to be more flexible if something came up, and we were vaguely talking about moving in late 2003, after the baby was born, if something good came up….

At the end of October 2002 I went to Spain for a conference on Bilingualism. I called Jacques to wish him a happy wedding anniversary and he asked me what I thought about moving to Malaysia. The CFO of Asia was leaving and they needed a replacement fast. Jacques was an ideal choice, but would he move his two kids (in good schools) and wife (now 6 months pregnant) halfway around the world? Jacques needed my positive answer and support immediately. His senior was skeptical that his family would agree to such a major move. Unfortunately the other chap had had problems settling his family in Malaysia and was returning back home to Australia. We had to prove we would not do the same thing and would stay at least two years.

In that moment when a new job offer comes through you are spinning from sudden realization that what you wanted has just come true, alongside a strong feeling of regret that you have to leave the carefully crafted home and life you have right now. Stood in the public phonebox in Vigo I thought of the great school teachers, the groups of friends our children had, my family, my studies at Birkbeck University…. all pulling me to stay. While on the other hand the thrill of living in Kuala Lumpur tempted me too, with its warm tropical climate, the exciting cultural and linguistic mix of Muslim, Chinese and Indian people, a maid to help with the kids, a bigger house and holidays exploring Asia. By the time I arrived back in cold and miserable England I was thinking maybe yes…..

Tooth Fairy or Mouse?

2006-12-04T23:45:00.000+01:00

After many days of fiddling and wobbling Marc’s tooth fell out at school. We were all excited for him. It was one of those wonderful child-development milestones, like the first step, word or smile. I told him that the Tooth Fairy would come and pick up his tooth from under his pillow at night, and in exchange leave him some money. The Tooth fairy has been around as long as I could remember and all children love the story. However Jacques came out with a story about a Souris or Mouse, which seemed to have the same magical powers as our fairy, but was not so pretty and ran in to grab the tooth, instead of flying like the fairy!

Marc was amused to find a letter in the post (from my parents) with a drawing of the fairy. But a few days later another letter arrived from the Mouse, who enclosed an euro along with a cute drawing of herself. Marc was mystified, was it the Fairy or the Mouse? Who collected the teeth anyway? Would he always get two different kinds of money and two letters? Regretting the fuss we had made over this tiny tooth we backtracked and decided the Tooth delivers in England only and the Mouse is only allowed to do her job in France, lest we have any competition or better rates in euros than pounds!

We had had this problem before at Easter too. In England children are given chocolate eggs before Easter from friends and family, whereas in France the Easter eggs are mysteriously ‘dropped’ by the cloches or church bells, which ring on Easter Sunday. Who should Marc believe? Was it the giant pink Easter Bunny he had seen at the school party, or the cloches that dropped eggs all over the gardens in France? Marc was now near to six years old and asking hundreds of tricky questions regarding God, how babies are made and so on... Since neither of us would ‘drop’ his or her cultural traditions for Easter we worked out a solution. Easter would be a combination of eggs before Easter and also an egg hunt in the garden, because I liked that bit! The kids gained in every day.

However this didn’t answer Marc’s questions of why we can’t actually see the Fairy/Mouse/Bunny/Santa or even God for that matter. ‘Children believe in them’ was all we could offer up to curious Marc. I felt sorry for my son, struggling with such huge world concepts and not even sure who was right – Mummy or Papa! At least we both agreed that Santa/Père Noel brings the Christmas presents……