The subject of the cover story of this week’s Le Monde magazine is the singer Christophe, who is 62 and has an album coming out in a month. I used to love his songs, particularly “Les Mots Bleus.” Reading the article triggered a wave of memories of growing up in Vietnam, and the languages that formed me. Vietnamese was the language of family and of humor. To this day, my sisters and I still tell ourselves jokes in Vietnamese, jokes that are absolutely hilarious to us but impossible to translate into another language. French was the language of poetry. At school, my favorite subject in French was poetry. We all had to keep a notebook of the poems we were to learn by heart. On one page we would carefully copy down a poem, and on the opposite page, make a drawing to illustrate it. Once a week, we have Récitation, where we had to walk up to the teacher, hand him/her the poetry notebook open to the appropriate page, and recite the poem in front of the whole class. We read a lot of La Fontaine, but my favorite poem was Jacques Prévert’s “Déjeuner du matin.” I loved the simplicity of the lines that belie the sadness of the last stanza.
A couple of days before Dad passed away, we helped him to choose the clothes he would wear on his final voyage. I presented to him a selection of ties, from which he chose a green one. Green, “comme des rizières,” he explained. These words have stayed with me ever since. Both the words, “comme des rizières (like the rice paddies),” in the imperialist language, and the landscape they described, were inextricably a part of him.