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Savez-vous que….

Avant de commencer cette histoire, je vous demande à vous: réduisez vos attentes. Cette histoire ne sera pas très étonnante, seulement un exemple des situations en qui j’ai trouvé moi-même içi. Mais bien sûr, ça veut dire qu’elle sera aussi un peu drôle. Imaginez vous que vous soyez dans une pharmacie avec votre mère. Vous avez déjà pris vos affaires, et votre mère s’est assise sur une chaise proche des caisses. Une homme derrière un bureau d’aide dit quelque chose à vous (vous ne avez pas pu entendre) et vous pensez immédiatement qu’il a dit que vous ne pouviez pas vous asseoir sur les chaises (où quelque chose de cet effet). Immédiatement, votre mère se lève et vous deux apologiez. Mais, non. En fait, il a proposé à vous de vous aider (il y avait un queue très longue pour les autres caisses). Après, vous avez une bonne conversation sur sa fille qui étudie aux Etats-Unis et partez en riant.

In English now: to describe what happened, in the few days that my mom came to visit me in Tours, we happened to stop into a pharmacy. I was looking for some sunscreen, and while I went to go check out my mom sat on a chair near what looked like a help desk by the checkouts. A man behind the help desk gestured to us and said something I couldn’t quite hear, but my mom and I assumed he was telling us we could not sit on the chairs or something to that effect. We got up and apologized, and then the man explained that he was just trying to call us over to check us out because the line was long. I explained this to my mom as we walked over and we both felt a bit bashful about it. We ended up having a nice conversation with him in English about his daughter who is studying near Atlanta and left laughing.

My immediate interpretation of the situation was that we had just had a silly little encounter in a pharmacy, but after thinking about it a bit more I realized that it goes deeper than that. I noticed that Americans, and foreigners in general, have the overwhelming tendency to assume that they are in the wrong. I think this is an extension of feeling out of place or “not belonging.” This in turn manifests itself in the asssumption that they are imposing even if someone is, just as in my situation, trying to be kind. This takes me back to my reflections before arriving. One of the goals I set for myself was to be present and to do my best to not make negative assumptions about other people. I have since discovered that this is much easier said than done. In practice, the desire to fit in is very difficult to overcome, and often leads to reactive thoughts and behavior. There are positive aspects, like the motivation it gives people to learn language and culture, but I cannot say if those are worth the negative aspects of the feelings. I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to reflect though, and recommit to being more mindful about remaining positive.

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Pé Frio

Again, a bit late, but I have to say that I keep falling in love with this city and its people while it seems to dislike me. I have been—it can be said lightly ‘com pé frio—or unluck during my time in Brazil. From being sick when I arrived. To have my phone stolen out of my hand. And twisting my ankle, not once, but twice, I have had quite the experience in the Marvelous city of Rio de Janeiro. Despite this, I keep loving this city. Whether it is going to the tourist police and explaining my situation or going to medical clinics and talking through my issue in Portuguese, I am certainly having a  form of immersion and learning more about the inequalities of Rio de Janeiro, and the access to healthcare. While living in a foreign country is new to me—as would be expected—it is also new to be living in a big city. Drug stores on every corner, access to clinics within walking distance, and the knowledge that Brazil has one of the most impressive healthcare systems in the world.

It has also been a lesson that my language skills, while far from perfect, are good enough that I do not need to go to clinics specifically for foreigners and can converse with Brazilian doctors adequately in Portuguese. While it has not been a huge shock intellectually, it has also been instructive in that my base complaint about the narrowed blinkers of historians of U.S. history—namely that they think they can get by with only English language skills or principally by working in English—are not only shown their intellectual arrogance by their fellow historians in other fields and the global south who have to work in multiple languages to engage with the basic foundations of their field of study, but also by the traditional and professional doctoral degrees of medicine, who themselves need to at least understand English, if not understand it. The world does not work solely in English, and to work in a monolingual fashion allows baked-in assumptions of how the world works to remain unchallenged.

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Pack With Me!

As promised, here is a short video of what I am packing for the summer and the semester. More to follow about my flight to Madrid, the school I am taking classes at, and some fun info about Salamanca!

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DIVE

The most memorable incident that I recall recently occurred when I was taking the train from Nagoya to Tokyo this past Friday. I have made full use of Japan’s expansive train network, as of now I have used it to go to all of the 4 main islands. The nicest thing about it is its consistency. Besides the main lines always being on time in my experience, the actual rides themselves are almost always quiet and calm. The main lines explicitly have a rule against speaking on phones in the passenger cars, and it is also pretty frowned upon to talk to those around you. Hence, I was very surprised when I sat down and someone started talking to me in very good English. I am normally a very quiet person, but I do try to speak when spoken to and in this case, I thought it would be impolite to ignore the woman speaking to me. We talked for a while with her always dictating the topic, of which the most prevailing were her children and their futures, American and Japanese politics, and specifically within that the assassination of Shinzo Abe. Needless to say, I was wholly confused throughout most of the conversation and thought it was very strange, although I did not show this so it was fine. Now I will attempt to make sense of a situation that still somewhat baffles me to this day. 

We start with the letter D. I think I somewhat described what happened on that day just previously, but I can elaborate more. We started with general pleasantries, at which point she started by telling me about her ex-boyfriend, namely because we both had a similar major in university. She also talked about how even though he was American he could speak Japanese almost fluently and told me she still likes to practice her English. After this, the topic changed to her recent attempt at reigniting her modeling career after which it moved to talking about her children and how she wanted them to do well in life. She also spoke extensively on how she wanted them to try living in the US, although she lamented extensively about how they weren’t quite tough enough to exist in the corporate environment here. The discussion then later moved to politics and she began to speak extensively about the assassination of Shinzo Abe and how it was tied to a religious group called the Unification Church and how she viewed them as dangerous, although she did not elaborate too much beyond speaking about their extensive funding of government projects. I was already a little uncomfortable, as I don’t really like speaking in public,  and this definitely made it more uncomfortable, although she eventually left the train at an earlier stop. Interpretation is a bit more tricky, as at the time I had absolutely no clue what was happening. Even now I don’t really know, and I don’t want to disclose too much of the conversation as it covered some sensitive information regarding her family which I ought not share, although it is unfortunate that without hearing the whole conversation you can’t really appreciate how strange it was. My interpretation at the time was that she was someone who wanted to practice English and just felt very comfortable sharing things with others, maybe because she had had good experiences with the Americans she met before. I honestly think this matches my current evaluation, as I think it is the most charitable and probably accurate evaluation of the situation. Unfortunately, I think that this is impossible to verify, so I will likely never know. I do now think that she also probably just wanted to share some of her woes about her country’s government with a foreigner, which makes sense. This is one of the easier events to pin down, however, as most of these surprising events I only realize to be special or truly surprising after the fact. Unfortunately, I cannot attach any of the photos I have from the trip to compensate for the somewhat unresolved nature of this case; the files are all too large to attach.