by Imran Hashim
In frustration, I take out the list of student associations the woman gave me, hoping to find someone who can tell me where the pool is, or, as it’s beginning to dawn on me, if there’s one in the first place.
• The Sorbonne Communist Party (no)
• The Young Socialists (no)
• The Guitar Club (no)
• The Chess Club (eek)
• The Student Proletariat Revolutionary Committee (scary)
• The Anti-globalisation League (?)
• Anarchists Disunited (???)
The rest of the list is made up of various student unions (maybe) and so I call one of the numbers listed.
A gruff sounding voice picks up on the other end. “Allo, National Federation of Student Unions.”
“Hello? I’m a student at the Sorbonne and I was just wondering if you know where the varsity pool is?”
“Are you a member of the Union?” the voice asks.
“No, I’m not. I just want to go to the pool.”
“There’s no varsity pool here,” he says laughing, and then as an afterthought, “Would you like one?”
The question catches me by surprise but I reflexively say yes, of course I’d like one.
“Okay then. Join our union and we’ll add that to the list of demands for our next mobilisation. You can lead a pool subcommittee. Where should I send the form?”
I panic—I just want to go swimming, not instigate civil unrest! “No, no don’t send the form. It’s okay. You know what, I don’t think I need a varsity pool after all. But thanks for offering. Au revoir!”
Oh God. Does this mean I have to swim in public pools?
We all had to submit our thesis topics last week, and as I was at a total loss for ideas, I decided to do something relating to international organisations. I informed M. Blois of this, and he has arranged for me to meet with my research supervisor—a certain M. Patrick Dudoigt, who is supposedly one of the biggest French experts on International Law. I arrive at his office, which is tucked away in a far corner of the Sorbonne complex, and knock on the door.
“Entrez!” I hear a man’s voice beckoning me to come in.
I open the door and enter, but M. Dudoigt doesn’t seem to be in. Instead, there’s that guy I met at the IR departmental tea. Brown hair, blue eyes, light stubble over cheekbones chiselled by angels—all still there.
“Heyyyy…you.” I’ve forgotten his name. “I’m here to see Monsieur Dudoigt. I have a 2.30 appointment. Have you seen him?” I speak in a low voice, the kind you would use in a place of high culture like the library, the opera or any Hermès boutique.
“Mademoiselle Thong?” he asks.
I nod silently. How does he know my surname, and why the sudden formality?
The Gorgeous One walks up to me, gives me a firm handshake, and then goes behind the study desk to take a seat.
“Yes, I was expecting you. Please, have a seat,” he says pointing to the chair in front of him.
Wait a minute. This doesn’t make sense. Could the Gorgeous One…?
“Monsieur Patrick Dudoigt?”
“Oui, c’est moi,” he says with a chuckle. He seems to find the situation amusing. Little does he know that bits of me are just dying inside.
I take a seat, and the rest of the conversation lasts just under 15 minutes. It goes something like this:
Dudoigt: So, Mademoiselle Thong, let’s talk about what you’re interested to work on for your thesis.
Me: I am really interested to do something relating to international organisations and how they function.
Dudoigt: Hmm… I see you’ve prepared a list of possible subjects you wish to tackle, yes?
Me (starting to hyperventilate): Yes… I was…(squeak) cover some topics that (squeak) interesting…like the reforms (gasp) of the UN Security Council…or the politics of classification (squeak squeak).
Dudoigt (Reads my printout to avoid having to understand the words coming out of my mouth): Uh-huh... okay, next…mmmm…
Dudoigt frowns.
Me: (Squeak squeak.)
Dudoigt: It looks to me like you have a great diversity of interests. UN Security Council reforms, UNESCO World Heritage Sites selection process, institutional relations between the OECD and the IMF—these are all fascinating topics but what exactly do you want to say about them?
I panic. What does he mean? All I want is to land a glam job with the UN, UNESCO, OECD or IMF. I don’t actually have anything to say about them.
Me: (Gasp) I want to say that…for example, the UN Security Council…it is just…it MUST be reformed. Because otherwise… otherwise, the international relations will be out of control and there will be no world peace.
OH… MY… GOD, I can’t believe I just said that.
Dudoigt (deep in thought, and suddenly): I have an idea. What if you work on something you already know quite well.
Me: But if I know the subject well, I won’t be learning anything new.
Dudoigt: That’s the challenge, Annabelle. Can I call you Annabelle? That’s a beautiful name. The challenge of sociology is to look again, and see with fresh eyes. Why don’t you do something related to Singapore? We don’t have enough research done on your country.
The phone rings.
Dudoigt: Sorry, let me just take this phone call...Allo, oui Julien... No, I didn’t forget. I’ll see you later. Yes, I’ll drop by your office. In five minutes? Okay, see you...ciao! (Turns to me) Excuse me. Actually I have to go for a lunch appointment soon. Any questions?
Me: squeaksqueaksqueak (starting to talk super-fast to cram all questions in) breathless breathless squeak squeak?
Dudoigt: Okay, so you find out what you can about Singapore and international organisations, and as the semester goes on I’ll tell you more. So sorry (beautiful eyes oozing sincerity) but I haven’t eaten and I’ve got this appointment...
Me: No, no worries. I’m sorry. (For what, I’m not sure.) Thanks so much...
Dudoigt: (shakes my hand) Bon courage! And let’s have coffee some time, in a less…intimidating environment. That will help us to see with fresh eyes, yes?
I nod dumbly.
Dudoigt: Okay then, au revoir!
Me: Au revoir! (Leaves office.)
Why, oh why am I so pathetic?
Is it me or was he over-friendly with me?
I can’t believe I just thought that! What is wrong with me??
Joy and excitement! Two days after I put up my ad for conversation exchange, I received a call from a certain Thierry Lefort who wants to do conversation exchange with me. And we’re meeting tonight! Finally, a real French friend! I’m really looking forward to the conversation date, which of course, is not a real date (am not delusional) but still, it’s kind of a date, so I have legitimate reason to be happy. Can’t wait to practise my foreign tongue on him (just joking, God!).
I look at my watch. Yikes, it’s already 7.15pm. Now let’s see. Moisturising routine. Check. Waxing. Check. Annick Goutal on pulse points. Check. Little black dress. Check. Charles & Keith Mary Janes. Check. Virtuous Asian temptress. Check, check and check! I smack on some lipstick and look at myself in the wardrobe mirror. A Chinese gal rocking a layered, shoulder-length haircut with side swept bangs looks back at me with bright, determined eyes, her full lips curved in a smile. Her face may be wide and roundish, and her size could be described as petite-plus at best, but still, this girl has never looked better in her life. Her smile widens. This girl is definitely ready for some French conversation.
When I arrive at the restaurant, a casual neighbourhood Italian joint in the Bastille area, I can feel my heart beating faster than usual. Thierry sounded great on the phone—his voice had a nice deep timbre to it, so much so that I’m almost expecting Russell Crowe to show up for dinner. So when Thierry approaches me and introduces himself, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed. While I have gone through a whole afternoon of plucking and pruning, Thierry has decided to come dressed as a Neanderthal. He has on a faded
pair of jeans and a grey hooded sweater, which is pointless since there’s no way the hood could ever contain the big, brown, Einstein mane that comes to his shoulders. And he has a wild beard that covers half his face. It’s as if he couldn’t decide between being the Lion King or a werewolf, got greedy and went for both. I quickly remind myself that we’re just here for conversation anyway, nothing more.
Thierry seems very curious about me and, over dinner, asks me a lot of questions about my life before I moved to Paris.
“Tu étais professeur à Singapour? That’s great, I have a lot of respect for teachers,” he says, before taking a big bite of his quatre fromages pizza.
“Oui, j’étais professeur,” I say. “I love teaching, and I love the kids. But life as a teacher in Singapore really takes a lot out of you. I was working 12, 14-hour days, and weekends too. You take your work back with you—marking, lesson planning, setting examination papers, answering student emails. And on top of that, there are all these administrative tasks. It just never stopped.”
“Was the school understaffed or something?”
“Given all the ambitious goals we had to achieve, I’d say we were. But it wasn’t just my school. All the schools were like that. I felt myself getting burnt out. I didn’t have a life any more. And then there were the times when I wondered if my work mattered, if I was even making a difference.”
“Really? Why?”
“I taught in a neighbourhood school—it’s like just an average school for average kids. Sure, once in a while, you make a breakthrough with a difficult student and you help to turn things around. But what about the rest of them? I don’t know how to describe it… It made me feel so guilty, yet powerless at the same time.”
“You must care about your students,” he says.
“When I left for Paris, my class sent me off at the airport with a banner that said ‘Au revoir, Miss Thong!’ That was so embarrassing.” I giggle at the recollection as I twirl my seafood pasta with my fork. “But I was also really touched. It was like…I meant something to them. But of course they had to spoil it by quickly losing interest and flocking around my sister. She looks like Zhang Ziyi, you see.” I roll my eyes, but only a little bit.
Thierry laughs. “Really? But you don’t look like Zhang Ziyi,” he says.
“You’re right—but there’s no need to be rude,” I say, deadpan.
He laughs again. “No, I mean you remind me of someone else. Who is it now?” he says tapping his hand on the table. “Oh yes, Barbie Hsu!”
“Barbie who?” I say, somewhat alarmed.
“Barbie Hsu, the Taiwanese actress. You don’t know her?”
“No, I don’t follow the Taiwanese entertainment scene. Do you?”
“My girlfriend’s Taiwanese. She made me watch a few episodes of Meteor Garden once. She’s a die-hard fan of the show.”
I’m surprised, to put it mildly, to hear that Thierry has a girlfriend. I mean, he’s such a slob! He must have some redeeming qualities, I guess.
“So what made you come to France to study?”
I tell him I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of France. “And besides, the opportunity to study at the Sorbonne, that’s really something. How about you? Did you study here?”
“Yes, I did,” he says.
“Which university did you go to?”
“I didn’t go to the university,” he says, scratching his brown beard uncomfortably.
Oh God. I’ve done it again.
First Didi, and now Thierry. I’m a callous monster and don’t deserve to have friends. But no, I can salvage this.
“Yeah! You’re right, man! I mean who cares about degrees anyways? I’ve always thought that there’s so much more to life, you know,” I say in a tsunami of empathy. “You know?”
Poor Thierry. His hazel eyes look deep into mine and betray his confusion. Maybe it’s difficult for him to follow my graduate train of thought.
“Oh, I have a degree. In engineering. But not from the university.”
“Oh?” I sit back. Okay, now I’m confused. “From where then?”
“From X. It’s a grande école. Anyway, it’s not important.”
But I’m intrigued by this “big school” called X and press him to explain. Thierry tells me that the French tertiary education is divided into two streams. One is the centralised university system practising “open enrolment” while the other is more selective and autonomous (if not private) where enrolment is merit-based. In other words, the universities are for the masses while the grandes écoles are for the scholarly elites.
“Is there a grande école for political science?” I ask a tad shakily.
“Yes, it’s called Sciences Po. You’ve never heard of it?”
This comes as totally shocking news. The Sorbonne is not France’s top university? I—together with the rest of the English-speaking world—have we been tricked all this while?! And then it dawns on me. Just now, he was embarrassed for me and was trying to shield me from my own mediocrity. How the tables have turned.
“Anyway, the system is very stupid,” he says, looking at my stumped expression. “They should destroy all the fucking grandes écoles and use the money to improve the universities, so everybody can have a better education.” And with that, the subject is closed.
I can’t sleep and so I get dressed and go to the 24-hour Internet café down the street to google this big Sciences Po school. It seems their alumni include the last three presidents of France and Prince Rainier of Monaco! Not to mention Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the head of the European Central Bank and all sorts of other important people like the President of Sri Lanka. And all the Sorbonne has are dead missionaries and a genocidal commie hack! Argh!
So, to recap—in the short space of three weeks, I have left the comforts of home, family, friends, broadband Internet and a respectable teaching job in Singapore to:
a) Live in Little Africa
b) In a tiny apartment with no electricity
c) To study in a university with no facilities alongside French kids from Marseilles and scholars from the Mongol Steppes (no offence to Gula)
Well, all I can say is, this boyfriend I’m looking for had better be worth it.
Chapter 2
I’VE GOTTEN OVER the shock of last Saturday night’s nasty revelation and have since convinced myself into thinking that a Master’s from the Sorbonne is not so bad after all. As a matter of fact, I’m very fortunate to be studying at the Sorbonne for the following reasons:
a) There is a level playing field: my language handicap is compensated by my competitors’ intellectual disadvantage.
b) Given my poor mastery of French, I’ve no chance of getting a degree from this scary elite school anyway. I’d be ridiculed by future French and Sri Lankan presidents in class and end up a bitter, vengeful Pol Pot figure.
c) Instead, I will be hailed as a top intellectual as per Sartre & Co. outside of France, since the rest of the world remains clueless about the existence of these “big schools”.
Incredibly, I have 21 hours of classes per week! I distinctly remember having only 15 when studying in Singapore. But I guess as handicapped students, we all need the extra coaching. That’s just as well, because with the exception of General Sociology and French Constitutional Law (which I will ace as part of the Legally Blanche programme), the subjects sound terribly abstract and profound.
Speaking of Legally Blanche, I’ll need to develop a Legally Blanche Lifestyle Programme (henceforth known as LB-LP) with 10 inbuilt beauty secrets optimisers. In fact, I will do this now as LB-LP needs to be put into place ASAP.
LB-LP: Semester 1
1 Hygiene and moisturisation. This includes taking showers, brushing teeth, removing split ends, cutting nails, plucking eyebrows, waxing and having breakfast (though not simultaneously). Note: Breakfast not included for night-time H&M.
2 No idea yet in terms of specific activities, but could include reading about Mother Teresa, Princess Diana or simila
r paragons of virtue for inspiration, and giving money to the poor (lots of those here in Paris! I thought this was a welfare state? It is all very confusing to me).
3 This includes all sorts of activities necessary to sustain life in the civilised world, e.g. washing, ironing, cleaning and maintaining my apartment, marketing, paying bills, calling parents, running errands. I hope seven and a half hours per week are enough!
4 This should not be done in a wanton hedonistic fashion, but as a means of finding a boyfriend.
5 Preferably achieved by doing yoga or meditation. I only have two hours a week for this! I hope I don’t get burnt out by this hectic, high-stress and demanding lifestyle.
I give my schedule a final look-over, and burst into a round of gleeful Japanese-girl claps. An industrious morning spent planning for success—I couldn’t be prouder of myself. Now, let’s see what I’m supposed to be doing right this very moment. Today’s Monday, 9.55am…
Oh crap. I have French class in five minutes and I’m still in my pyjamas. Argh!
I draw my head away from the journal on the library table, trying to will the words on the page from melding into one another but it’s a losing battle. I’ve been reading this article on the intellectual roots of modern sociology for the last half hour but I’ve only gotten to the end of the second paragraph. The article is only nine pages long, but there are three dictionaries of epic proportions spread open to help me understand it (French, English-French and the Dictionary of Sociological Terms).
My Parisian education is off to a slow start, and the readings are just the beginning of my problems. Then there are the professors who turn up for class half an hour late, or don’t turn up at all. In their defence, it’s because there’s so much administrative confusion going on. It seems that some of them still have not been given their teaching schedule. And one of my classes will be starting a month late because the secretary forgot to book a room. At first I gave the French the benefit of the doubt; I figured that outside of super-efficient societies like Singapore, this must be how the rest of the world worked, but was disabused of this idea when an Indian exchange student, tearing at her hair by the fistful, told me that things weren’t as bad even in New Delhi.