Thinking all the time about this country’s situation puts me in a blue funk. Here is a story to cheer me and you up. It’s one of my best.

I reached that mid-size Bolivian city in the lower Andes, on a research trip, the day before Bastille Day. I was an old undergraduate at Stanford at the time and still a French citizen. I reported my presence to the French consul, as required by law, as technically a member of the French Navy reserve. The consul was a Bolivian doctor who had studied in France and subsequently married, and then, divorced, a French woman. Bolivia being a landlocked country (bitterly so), the consul was not overwhelmed with naval business. He was glad to see me nevertheless and very cordial. He pressed me to attend the party he would give the next day on the occasion of the French national day.

It was a pleasant but schizoid event, starting with good French Champagne and ending with chicha, the soupy, local artisan corn beer. (Bolivians say that the fermentation of really good chicha starts with the spit of virgins. Just to make sure, they ask tiny girls to spit in the brew.) There was the usual mix of French expatriates and of Francophiles, most of the latter, probably silly unconditional Francophiles, plus some smart freeloaders.

The French expatriates often land in a particular town of a particular country at a particular time for no particular reason. They may have been heading somewhere else and gotten stuck along the way. They always include wives and former wives of natives who may have divorced them, or died. Coming from different epochs (such as before and after WWII), they form historical strata, each remembering a different France, and they entertain disparate and often incompatible visions of the fatherland. They have developed new habits in the country where they live and, without knowing it, they have drifted far from their culture of origin. That culture of origin, meanwhile, is itself changing, but in a different direction. Many expatriates disseminate more or less innocently patently false notions about the country where they were raised. Their French self is forever a young person, or even a child. Their own children are simply natives of their land of residence with a smattering of the French language and no real curiosity, forever strangers to their parents. Continue reading →