Permanently Impermanent

I timidly wrote to him a couple of weeks ago asking, completely out of the blue after almost two decades of silence, whether he would be willing to grant me an interview for my book about Weird Culture Kids. And to my biggest surprise, he agreed and did so with what seemed to me like a lot of enthusiasm. So a couple of days before our phone call, I set out to prepare the interview like a professional writer that I was not. Even though I have been carrying out these conversations and interviews with all sorts of people — friends, acquaintances, complete strangers— I wasn’t quite sure where to place Marco Garcia, my classmate at the lycée Fran?ais of Hanoi from the age of seven to twelve.

I wasn’t sure whether he was a friend or an acquaintance by now, given the enormous lapse of time that had inserted between our life then and our life now. I wonder whether I should even put him in the strangers category: not only did I have no information about the person that he is today, but also I struggled for what seemed like forever to bring back any memory of our interactions throughout those five years that we were in class together.

I found absolutely nada.

As always, Facebook is my friend and this time it was easy enough to look through our friendship and conversation history, because it was almost nonexistent. The only and last time that we spoke via Messenger was in 2008 when I wrote him, as a sixteen year old teenager, to say hello, to get some news and to plan a visit to Milan, Italy, where he was living at the time. He politely answered my message with some planning of his own. And that was it, the extent of our Facebook friendship.

So we were actually friendly, I told my forgetful self. He was, indeed, someone that I used to know. And just like that, with Facebook’s assurance, I scheduled our interview and professionally connected at the planned time and date on the call.

As with all of my other interviews, I didn’t send him the questions that I prepared beforehand because I wanted our conversation to be an organic one — one that you would have with any of your friends. Except that I wasn’t sure what he was to me now. The minute he connected and said “hello”, my worries disappeared. He had a voice that I didn’t recognize or remember hearing before, but oddly enough, it was a voice filled with a sense of warmth and genuineness. And just like that, we dived right into the interview simply because small talks seemed even more meaningless given the context that we found ourselves — two people of the past having a conversation in the ephemeral present moment.

Marco’s father was French and his mother Peruvian, but unlike other mixed kids who tended to speak two different languages at home, one with each parent, Marco wasn’t brought up in such an environment. His mother tongue was Spanish and it was also the language that was used in his household from as long as he could remember, whether through the lullabies he listened to as a toddler or the Disney animation movies that he watched as a kid. 

French was only introduced when he started attending the international French school as he was growing up. So with time, Marco also became fluent in French, his “father tongue”, not only because his whole education was done in the French language, but also because a huge chunk of his socialization was done in French at school and later at university.

Like all of my previous interviews, I asked Marco where he was from.

As if he had thoroughly prepared for our 'organic conversation', he answered confidently that he was of French and Peruvian cultures but grew up in the French lycées around the world. From the moment he was born until the age of eighteen, Marco was living with his family abroad. He was born in Lima, Peru but soon moved to Mexico city for his father’s job. It was there where he first became aware of his existence. After his toddler years, he left the North American continent to move to Asia. It was in the French school in Hanoi where we met and remained classmates for five years. After Hanoi, he went to France for a year before leaving again, this time to Milan, Italy, for three years.

His senior year in high school was spent in France where, for the first time, he truly realized that he was very different from the other kids around him. Unlike his previous relocations, this time, Marco no longer found himself in the international world of the French lycées abroad. He no longer sat in the same classrooms as other expat kids, all coming from many different countries and cultures in the world.

This time, kids like him were no longer the norms but the minority.

This was his first major experience of integrating in the French culture, a culture that was supposed to be innately his.

Compared to his previous adaptation periods, Marco remembers taking a longer period of time to adapt to France and his new school, specifically. In terms of size, his new school was much bigger than the international French schools that he was used to when living abroad. When compared to his previous experiences in the French international schools, this new school seemed like a maze to him: the building itself was much bigger, the student body much more important, though never as diverse.

Marco came from a small expat world where everybody knew everybody and momed into a local one where no one seemed to know anyone. Up to this point, the system of lycée Fran?ais abroad had been one of the main constant in his life — as if it was a third parent who watched over him as he grew into the person that he wanted to be. The person that he was destined to be.

Upon his return to the motherland for his senior year in high school, Marco realized that his reference point for all of these years was extremely helpful in some ways, but not all ways. In fact, it was a place where he was taught French history and French literature, but not the reality of living in the French society or the mentality of French people. He remember thinking how much harder it was for him to feel some sense of belonging in his new French lycée. As if his education system, along with himself, was robbed of a huge part of their identity, which was the 'abroad part'.

Despite his rather difficult reintegration into the French society, he succeeded and ended up staying in France for almost a decade now. He admitted to not be thinking about his childhood often but now that he was actively doing it with someone else, he felt a somewhat familiar sense of longing for the past that he hadn’t felt in a long time. We discussed at length whether it was because we were carefree children that made our memories as sweet and loving as we remember it today, or our past was truly that exceptional that made it much harder for us to detach ourselves from. We agreed that there was a bit of both.

Marco suddenly told me that whenever he thought of Hanoi— which was less and less— , he pictured the concrete courtyard where we used to run around despite the excruciating heat that seemed to be the only season in Hanoi when he was living there. Little did he know, I, too, felt a lot of joy simply because we talked about things that I no longer thought of. Things that we once loved. People that we once knew on varying levels. Marco observed that ever since leaving Vietnam, he had never been in such a diverse classroom. We talked about our Korean and Australian and Italian classmates. We pronounced names we hadn’t pronounced in many, many years.

It felt like we were visiting an entirely different life that we once lived.

Reminiscence is always a pleasant exercise, especially in the company of someone else, I thought to myself.

“Are you going to have an expat life?” I asked Marco, as if we were children again, dreaming about the different “when I grow up” scenarios. As if life was that easy and you could just decide.

He told me that he was expecting this question to come up but more in the form of “do you miss your life abroad?” I smiled and thought that just like myself, he was also preparing for this supposedly organic talk. And like the smart cookie that I remembered him to be when we were in class together, his answer was twofold: 1) yes, I miss traveling but 2) no, I don’t miss the expat life.

What a typical answer for a weird culture kid — always seeing things from different angles while never going for the easy option. Of course, he elaborated his answer and the tone of the conversation suddenly shifted. I can feel the authenticity in his voice which instinctively revealed the fact that he must have pondered this question hundreds, if not thousands, of times before.

“I believe that children need some form of continuity in their life, especially when they are growing up. And I would want my children to have that,” he shared with me his most innate thoughts, as if over our two hour conversation, he now had become a father with several kids living under his roof.

“Did you wish to not grow up as an expat kid?” I asked him timidly. For some unknown reason, I was afraid to hear what he had to say.

“No I don’t wish that because those are the best years of my life. I just wished I could have stayed longer because five years in a place, especially one that you loved so much, didn’t seem enough.” 

Is any amount of time ever enough to live in a moment that you so thoroughly enjoyed? 

We discussed at length Marco’s desire to extend time at a place and the sense of discontinuity that he felt while growing up. He described to me the perceived difficulty that he attached to the act of building something - anything - meaningful because he knew that he was leaving some years later.  As if everything in his life — from his relationships to his morning routine— had an expiration date. I imagined how unfinished his every adventure must have felt every single time. The forced endings and lack of closure must have triggered and developed the importance that he put on continuity in his life today.

Most definitely because of his experiences growing up, the person that Marco is today had forged a rather firm belief that everything with value must be given time. In his exact words, value is the prize that you get because you have invested a lot of your time in it — whatever “it” is. His relationship with time fascinated me though I sincerely hope that he didn’t think his childhood was of no value.

I wanted to tell him that the five years that he was living in Vietnam was actually a very considerable amount of time. Without those five years, we would never have this conversation today. Without those five years, he wouldn’t have that many things to miss. Without those five years, he would not have that many memories to carry with him. After all, how much time is enough time to say goodbye? To love a person? To forget a place? What if we overspent our time on something and spoiled it instead of leaving it while it was still at its best?

Before I could attack him with all of my unanswered questions, he volunteered what sounded almost like a secret. He shared with me that while growing up, every summer, regardless of where he was in the world, he would come back to France and visit his grandparents who were living in a small village at Bagnères de Luchon, a municipality in the south of the hexagon. This place was extremely important for him because it was the only place that remained stable throughout his formative years. The benefit of living in a village, he joked, was that everything stayed the same: same roads, same mountains, same people at the tennis club.  

He affirmed that this place, ultimately, was so important because it gave him a very pleasant impression of permanence.

And forever an impression it will remain, I thought to myself.

At that moment, as if the Universe wanted to remind us both that nothing in life is permanent, our conversation got to its end sooner than we both expected.

I hang up, quite confused, feeling like I just dialed the past and asked to speak with Marco Garcia — a name that I, myself, haven’t pronounced in many, many years.

I’m glad we got to speak that day. He sure sounded like someone I’d like to be friends with.

Again.