I Stand Corrected (14 page)

W
estern brands of academic elitism have colonized China.

The first to arrive was a satellite school for Harrow, followed by other franchises of Britain’s best-known private schools. And newly wealthy Chinese are sending their children to American prep schools in the hopes of improving their chances of admission to brand-name Ivy League universities—a trend that has created the lucrative niche business of securing appropriate visas for Chinese parents to live in the States during the school year.

My son’s deliberate reversal of this educational trajectory caused consternation among my Chinese friends.
What possible reason could there be to withhold an American education from your only child?
they would ask.

I won’t deny that Gilliam’s academic career had its own kind of burlesque staging. It was cast not by my academic aspirations for him, but by his unremitting personality. The dictionary features misleadingly similar definitions for the words “personality” and “character.” In practice, they are different. Personality is a congregation of traits on the surface, while character has an interior foundation. There are subtleties to a personality, but character is fundamentally weak or strong and dictates virtually everything else. Even at its worst, an unappealing personality can never be as dangerous as a flawed character.

Where personality ends and character begins is a mystery
to me, but since personality is the totality of one’s traits, I was struck that it appeared so early in Gilliam. When he learned to talk, what he said and how he said it spoke on behalf of his suspicion of anything that couldn’t be proved. It was just a question of time before his unforgiving Cartesian logic would focus on his parents. This reason—more than any other—convinced W. and I to hand Gilliam over to the French when it came time for him to attend school.

The French system of education was created by Napoleon Bonaparte. It has changed little since. Homework is still done in fountain pen with blue ink, grades are publicly posted at the end of each week, and a mistake is worse than a mistake—it is a transgression. French students are on the same page of the same book on the same day, no matter where they are in the world.

Gilliam’s list of school supplies for first grade warned me of what was to come. After searching through the
Larousse French-English, English-French Dictionary
for the better part of an hour, I managed to translate only two of thirty items: a large band to tie his books together and a small chalk slate for his class in mathematics.

The Lycée Français in Los Angeles is situated on a hill and housed in what was once Clara Bow’s mansion. The school’s old-style Hollywood backdrop adds to its intrinsic out-of-place aura. W. suggested we not tell Gilliam he would be attending a school where—with the exception of the English class—only French was spoken.

“The boy doesn’t know what school is. He’s never been, so how would he know what happens there?” argued W.

“It’s lying by omission,” I said.

“It’s not lying. It’s taking a position,” insisted W.

“What position?” I asked.

“The one that gives us the upper hand for as long as possible,” said W.

“He’ll figure it out,” I told W.

“Yes, but not right away,” said W. “The important thing is to buy ourselves the time to get him to fluency; once he learns the language, the rest won’t matter.”

As soon as he got in the car at the end of his first day of school, Gilliam reported that, in case I hadn’t understood, the school was run by French people. He pointed out that we were not French. He asked if we were planning to move to France. I said no. Then why was he in a French school?

Honesty was my only way out.

“You’re there because it’s important for you to learn another language,” I said.

“Why?” asked Gilliam.

“Because the world is not just where we live,” I told him. “Because the more languages you know, the more chances you have to know the world. The more you know the world, the more chances you have to make it a better place and the more chances you give yourself at an interesting life.”

“Okay,” agreed the boy. “I’ll try.”

For Gilliam to become fluent in a language neither of us spoke fluently, W. suggested we spend as much time as possible in French-speaking countries. I had limited opportunities away from work during Gilliam’s school vacations, so my role in our travel
en famille
was telescoped into a few days at a time. The three of us would arrive at the designated location. I would settle them in, then turn around and go back to L.A.

Our first French language trip occurred the summer that Gilliam was between first and second grades. W. rented a house in southeast France from an old college friend. To say the house was rustic would have been generous. It was located in Combas, an absurdly small rural hamlet.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I told W. “We have no directions and the town doesn’t seem to be on a map. How will we find the house?”

“Apparently, Combas isn’t far from Nîmes,” said W. “We’ll ask there.”

Nîmes is located on the Via Domitia, a Roman road originally constructed to connect Italy to Spain. Its shield shows a crocodile chained to a palm tree. This is not as mysterious as it would seem when one learns that the city was settled by Roman legion veterans from Julius Caesar’s Nile campaign who, having loyally served for no fewer than fifteen years, were granted
plots of land to cultivate on the plain of Nîmes. The city had been one of the richest in Roman Gaul; its grand remains can be seen in the amphitheater in the middle of town, still used as a bullfighting arena. We rented a car and were pointed in the right direction for Combas.

Our rental turned out to be a seventeenth-century textile mill, one that had not been convincingly converted into a house. Instead of bathrooms, there were toilets behind closet doors, and the water pressure in the single makeshift shower was so anemic that it provided no more than a thick dribble. The first-floor hallway was as dark as a tunnel, and its ceiling wept with condensation that solidified into mineral stalactites.… The kitchen was an uneven, cave-like room that opened onto a garden with a wisteria-covered arbor, which harbored rabbits, neighborhood cats, and a loud magpie. None had the slightest qualm about joining us in the house when the back door was left open.

The village consisted of a cemetery and three narrow cobblestone lanes converging on a war statue marking its center. There was no grocery store, no bar, no bakery. Bread and eggs were sold in the mornings by a man from the closest town out of his van parked near the statue. So removed was Combas from the rest of the world that the townspeople would have been surprised if a family from Paris had arrived for the summer.

Gilliam came equipped with a universally recognized icebreaker among children: a Game Boy. Within an hour of its being unpacked, everyone in the village under a certain age had congregated in our kitchen. That afternoon, I heard Gilliam’s exuberant French swell and recede, depending on the level of gaming brinksmanship around the table. After the stone houses had absorbed the evening’s cool air, the same gaggle of children appeared at our front door to invite Gilliam for a game of boules by moonlight.

Just at the time his whereabouts began to worry me, I heard him struggling with the thick wooden front door. He was holding a half-eaten baguette, his knee was scraped, he had a large clump of mud hanging from his hair, and his white polo
shirt had acted as unprimed canvas for several large, oil-haloed stains of Nutella.

“What have you been up to?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said with a Cheshire cat expression of someone who had become a possessor of the town’s secrets.

Four days in Combas was what I was given before business called me back to L.A. Gilliam and W. stayed on. By the end of their summer, when Gilliam talked in his sleep, it was in French. He returned to me in L.A. relaxed from country life, proficient in French, and newly devoted to Tintin comic books.

Georges Remi—a Belgian cartoonist better known as Hergé—was Tintin’s French-speaking creator. He provided countless ports of call for Tintin, but no nationality or family. Unencumbered by the expectations of parents or the requirements of adulthood, Tintin is free to roam from one adventure to the next in Egypt, Peru, Scotland, Tibet, and even the moon. Accompanying him is a scrappy white terrier and a familiar roster of traveling companions. There is Captain Haddock, the bearded sailor who manages to function despite his precariously high levels of alcohol consumption. Several stories feature twin detectives almost identical: Thomson and Thompson. With the exception of Bianca Castafiore, an opera diva, few women join the adventures. In light of the single-sex odysseys, I was especially impressed that no matter how dangerous Tintin’s situation—whether he’s kidnapped, trapped, injured, under fire, lost, blackmailed, falsely accused of drug smuggling—his manners remain impeccable and his clean clothes beautifully pressed.

Gilliam’s boyhood life was more regulated and less action packed than Tintin’s. But it was almost as peripatetic, and the personalities in Tintin’s world were all too recognizable in our own orbit of oddball friends.

Despite its small size, Belgium has managed to produce its fair share of cultural personalities. They—along with Gilliam’s required fluency in French—were our reasons for the following summer in Belgium. Our chosen lodgings were in a converted castle on the outskirts of Bruges owned by a consortium of Belgian aristocrats who rented parts of it out. Rebuilt after
the Second World War, it featured unused sitting and dining rooms on the ground floor and a warren of dark apartments above. To our relief, a French-speaking family moved into an apartment across the hall shortly after we did.

As was always the case, I had been given a limited period of time on foreign soil before the demands of my office returned me to L.A. While I was preparing to leave for the airport, Gilliam vanished in a game of hide-and-seek. When I asked one of the other boys to look for him in the garden, he called out,
“Guillaume! Guillaume! Viens ici, ta mère va partir!”

My son emerged from the foliage; trotting not far behind were two other children from the newly arrived family. When I bent down to say my farewell, Gilliam kissed me in the Gallic manner: three times on alternate cheeks. He didn’t return my “good-bye”; instead, he offered a French salutation that rolls easily from one good-bye to the next.

“À bientôt,”
said the boy.

PART SEVEN
Where the Chinese Dream Lives

Money can buy a lot that is not even for sale.
—
Chinese proverb

C
ountless
à bientôts
were exchanged between me and my son over the course of his adolescence and young adulthood. One would come at the end of the summer in Beijing while I was writing my guide to Western business etiquette.

I’d been given three months to complete it, and that deadline required me to write two chapters weekly. Those two chapters were translated from English into Chinese by my publisher. The editor assigned to the project sent his margin notes in Chinese the following week. Gilliam’s translation of the notes to English enabled me to adjust the two chapters according to the editor’s requests and to return them—along with two newly written chapters—the next week.

Every day in China—with the exception of state-sanctioned holidays—is considered a potential workday, and so each morning at five, my paramilitary-like routine began at the kitchen table, where I wrote that week’s two new chapters. A break came at nine, when I took the only form of exercise available, given the city’s lung-destroying pollution: an hour of swimming laps in the compound’s indoor pool. A late breakfast was followed by a much-cherished ritual made possible by Gilliam’s technological cleverness. He was somehow able to download
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
from his laptop and hook it up to the screen of our outdated and otherwise unused TV. After cleaning up, I continued to work on the new chapters
while Gilliam translated the editor’s comments on the previous two chapters. When Gilliam complained of hunger at midday, we struck out to explore an unknown section of the city.

Gigantic glass-and-steel buildings stood at attention on the inhospitably wide Second Ring Road circumnavigating our neighborhood. Those buildings appeared inaccessible and—on the whole—unfriendly. That impression hardened into factual dislike when I learned that the developers of a space-age-style building designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Zaha Hadid had tried to ban the locals from participating in an annual craft beer festival on the grounds that the neighborhood’s “homosexuals don’t fit with the site’s architecture.” The stupefying declaration was such an achievement of distorted logic it required not only devoted prejudice but a blind eye.

My own architectural interests were located in what was left of the old city. And so our walks often led to the dwindling labyrinths of narrow streets, known as
hutongs
, formed by rows of
siheyuans
, courtyard residences that are the architectural opposites of the gladiatorial examples of China’s determined modernity. With their beautifully carved roof beams and intricately painted pillars,
siheyuans
, some dating to the fifteenth century, were owned at one time by aristocrats, high-ranking officials, and wealthy merchants. Now they are multifamily dwellings connected to one another by interlacing lanes.