Amidst The Stars

French, Lotus Roots and Peace

  Back in primary school, when the family still lived in Taipei, English had been Vicente's worst subject.

  His grammar had been all right, his writing scraped by. He didn't understand English sentences half as well as he did Chinese ones, but he'd managed to get eighties in spelling and grammar tests every year.

  But his listening and speaking skills had been atrocious. Just the results from his listening tests had dropped his subject average to the low eighties, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that his skills in speaking were just as terrible. Vicente had once received a review sheet of his oral presentation, graded an unthinkable 17/50. The only reason his parents never knew of his one and only failing mark was because they'd never asked him about it.

  English was difficult, but after moving to Arlingdale, he came to learn that French was even worse.

  At least English only had "the", instead of "la" and "le". English only had "a", French had "un" and "une". Then there were those little strokes or hat-looking arrow things on top of the e-s, the squiggles under the c-s and somehow a combination of "o" and "e". All those looked a little like the shēng diào of Mandarin but were pronounced so strangely Vicente wondered how actual French people could speak the language without their mouths hurting.

  Both he and Yao had to suffer through French lessons, so they usually did their homework together.

  It never went very well.

  "Je suise un garkon," Vicente repeated one day while doing his homework.

  Yao looked up from his worksheets. "You don't pronounce the 's', I think."

  "Je ui un garkon," he tried again.

  "You pronounce the first 's', but not the second one. That's how my teacher pronounces it."

  "Je suis un garkon."

  "Garçon."

  "Je suis un garçon." Vicente stared at his piece of paper. "But that's a 'c'."

  "Yes, but it has the squiggle under it, so you pronounce it like an 's'. I think." Yao gripped his pencil so tightly his fingertips turned white. "I know it's stupid."

  "It's really stupid." He moved on to scrutinising the next sentence he had to practice. "Mandarin is way easier."

  "You mean, like that time you mixed up kàn and kǎn, and the zookeeper thought you going to kill the giraffe?"

  The pronunciations for "look at" and "stab" in Mandarin shouldn't be so similar, that was for sure. "It's still not as bad as — as — " Vicente pointed at his French worksheet. "This." He read out the next sentence. "Comment ça va?"

  "That's how you say 'comment' in English. In French it's..." Yao had to think about it for a moment. "'Comment', or something similar."

  "Those sound exactly the same."

  "They're pronounced a little different."

  "Bon soir." Then Vicente remembered what his teacher had said in class the other day; to pronounce the "oi" as "wah". "Bon soir." It still didn't sound completely accurate, but it was close enough. He moved on to his list of vocabulary. "L'homme, la femme, le garçon, la fille, le chat, le chien, le cheval..." he looked at the next word for a moment. "L'oiseau?"

  Yao looked up again. "It's l'oiseau."

  "That's what I'm saying," he insisted, getting frustrated. "L'oiseau."