The first time I felt it properly was on a field trip during my first year in the master’s program. We were in Nice, France. Around me were my classmates, who had been my classmates for one month by then, and we were all friendly enough. I could say salut now, and mean it, and recognize faces. That was new. At the start of the year I hadn’t had any of that.
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Gare de Nice Ville
A spontaneous excursion to Ventimiglia, Italy
Then one day, a lecture started in French.
I knew, rationally, that this would happen sometimes. The program is based in Paris. Of course some of the teaching happens in French. And most of the time, instructors would switch to English the moment I walked in, which was its own kind of uncomfortable: I was the reason an entire room was operating in its second language, and I could feel the effort of it.
But that day, in that room, I was the only one who couldn’t follow. And there isn’t really a graceful way to exist in a room where everyone else is having a conversation and you can’t hear it. You can smile. You can look out the window. You can pretend to be interested in your notebook. I wrote a long journal in Vietnamese in my margins that day, which ended with something like, nobody can read this, which is the one advantage of being the only one here who knows this language.
Reading it back now, it’s pretty dramatic lol. 21-year-old me was trying really hard to look unbothered.
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The school campus
The whole M1 year worked like that, in waves. I’d build up a little bit of confidence: a few friendly lunches at the cafeteria, some classmates I genuinely got along with, a group chat I was added to, and then I’d get thrown into a situation where the group naturally defaulted to French and I’d be right back to square one. Not excluded, exactly. Just invisible. A person everyone liked well enough but no one could quite include in the running joke, because the joke was in French and by the time I’d translated it in my head the group had moved on.
I told myself a lot of stories about this, most of them unfair to everyone involved. That I should have learned more French before coming. That I was being oversensitive. That my classmates should have noticed. That I was the problem. That the program was the problem. None of these were right, and most of them were exhausting to carry around.
What I actually needed, I think, and only realized much later, was one other person in the same situation. Another student who also couldn’t follow the French. Someone to exchange a look with across the room when a lecture switched languages. Someone whose presence would mean I wasn’t the entire weight of the problem. I didn’t need the program to solve anything. I just needed not to be the only one. Well.. ain’t that a cruel thought, to wish that someone could go through the same thing I went through. But then again, if there were two of us, we wouldn’t go through the same thing I myself went through.
Just a what-if anyway. The fact is, I was the only one.
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Bánh mì in Paris (very different from the real thing though)
There were other things, of course. Paris itself, which I loved and still love. The little pleasures of being a foreign student discovering life in a highly romanticized city on a budget: a bánh mì as a reward on Friday, a boba with N (a Vietnamese friend in the Maths department) on Saturday afternoons at the place near Opéra, the small joy of a croissant from the good bakery versus a croissant from the mediocre one closer to school. The way the metro smells completely different in different seasons (worst in summer, obviously).
There was a whole period when I was obsessed with trying to cook Japanese curry, but I never had all the ingredients: no onions, no carrots, no potatoes, so I made it with chicken and mushrooms and a lot of butter. I was convinced it was excellent. It was probably just okay. I still make it that way sometimes. The refrigerator of a Parisian shared apartment during exam season is not a place of culinary ambition.
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Carambar
There was the first snow of the year, when I ran outside in my pyjamas with just a raincoat and a scarf because I had decided that if I was going to be far from home, at least I was going to see the snow properly. There was the second snow a couple of months later, when I was a little more blasé but still went out. There was a field trip in the Pyrénées where I mentioned wanting to try the local cheese but having no room in my bag, and a classmate shared his with me two weeks later in Paris. Then there were the Carambar sweets that someone had bought on that same trip. They had terrible jokes printed on the wrappers and another classmate had taken the time to translate them for me. A few weeks later, when we found a pack of the same sweets, he scooched close to me to translate the new jokes too. Small things. The things that actually make a place into something personal and worth remembering.
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The first time I saw snow (best day ever)
The second year was easier. Not because the French-speaking situation had changed (it hadn’t, structurally) but because I had stopped taking it quite so personally. Also, M2 brought a fresh wave of new classmates, many of them more openly aware of what I was navigating. One night during our field trip in the Pyrénées, a new classmate, M, asked me how I actually felt when people switched to French and I got lost. I almost teared up. I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed someone to just ask.
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The Pyrénées
A walk
Later that year, she asked me again, in a more formal context, about what I thought the program could do better. I don’t think I articulated it well at the time. What I meant was: it isn’t fair that one person in the class has a completely different experience from everyone else. Academic programs are supposed to be places where most of your energy goes into the work. When you’re the only non-French speaker, a large chunk of your energy goes into managing the social logistics of existing: translating, apologizing, trying not to make anyone feel awkward, trying not to feel awkward yourself. It’s work that nobody else in the room can see.
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Very random insertion but I’m a big fan of this
Or maybe some of them did see it. I exchanged glances with M pretty often in class. Sometimes it was about silly things, like both of us being complete noobs in Geology and being quietly lost together about twenty minutes into every lecture. Sometimes it was during an unexpectedly great lecture on Dynamical Systems, and we’d turn to look at each other with raised eyebrows, a silent damn, I’m loving this, you too?. One time, right before a final exam, the lecturer had forgotten (again) that there was one international student in the class and had only printed the exam sheets in French. I had to wait 10 minutes while he went to translate and print an English version. I exchanged glances with M, but also with a few other classmates. A collective this is absurd.
I understand why programs want to stay international. It’s a research program, after all, and the current research world is dominated by the English language. I understand why they want to take one student like me. But if you take one, you should take two. Two people can look at each other and silently agree that this is hard. One person just shoulders the whole weight, and often ends up blaming themselves for it.
It’s not like I’m a native English speaker who came in expecting everyone to accommodate me. English is also my second language. My bachelor’s program back in Hà Nội was taught entirely in English, even though we were all Vietnamese, because we knew we needed the language to step into the world. Maybe the landscape here is just different.
I actually have a lot to say about M, who’s probably one of my favorite people here, but this post has gotten long enough. She would probably never find this blog (I never told anyone about it), but: I adore her, and I’m glad I got to meet her.
To be fair, I adore everyone in this class in different ways! I’ve had my own small moments with each of them and picked up their little quirks over time. A lot of them are very athletic, or very musical (French people seem to love wind instruments). One is a film nerd, much more serious about it than I am. She says “like” a lot, shrugs her shoulders all the time, and complains (very validly) about a lot of things, which, honestly, has been good for me. She’s the reason I’ve started being a bit more outspoken, and a bit less quick to decide that something is fine when it isn’t.
Another came from a French territory in the South Pacific. He taught me how to sing Spider-Cochon and the meanings of various diabolical French terms like bobo gaucho and droitard. He also gets off at Place Monge instead of Censier-Daubenton on the way to school, specifically to avoid the uphill walk (he’s just like me!).
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Along the coast in Nice
There’s one classmate who is basically a supergirl. She’s on her country’s national water polo team. She speaks at least 4 languages fluently: her native language, French, English, and Spanish. She’s extremely good at what she studies. And she’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. During the M1 field trip in Nice, I got seriously motion-sick on a boat and ended up throwing up (a memory I would love to lock away forever, but I’ll tell it anyway). She came over to me right away, tied my hair back, and patted my back while I was still heaving. She wasn’t fazed at all. I’ve had a soft spot for her ever since.
When we got back to land, another classmate slowed his pace to walk beside me and quietly asked how I was doing. The next day, on a walk along the coast, he stayed next to me the whole way, chatting about random things. I’m fairly sure it was his way of letting me know that the day before hadn’t mattered at all.
Another invited me to his family’s Christmas dinner, because I’d mentioned in passing that I had no plans for the holidays (Christmas isn’t a big deal in Vietnam, it really wasn’t a sad statement). Every member of his family prepared a gift for me. I brought a box of chocolates and a jar of Vietnamese salt-roasted cashew nuts, which in hindsight was not enough compared to the warm welcome I was given. He’s really into clouds, and he recommended a book I ended up loving, The Ministry for the Future (I might make a whole post of quotes or interesting ideas from it one day).
Another classmate from my M1 year did his internship in Cambodia and Vietnam, and then travelled all the way from Vietnam back to France by train. It took him a month. I’m honestly sooooo fascinated by his journey, and I sometimes imagine doing it myself in reverse, though it would be more complicated and riskier for me: different passport, different gender, different skin color.
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First time baking
There’s a tradition the M2 class started that I love: a baking rotation. We call it the Gâtoscope. People bring cakes and cookies. M and I once spent an hour and a half making a cake that was supposed to take 20 minutes. We talked about politics, our families, and what we each wanted from the next few years. It was the first time I’d actually baked anything in France, and (thanks to M) it turned out completely fine. A little too moist because we were impatient with the oven, but still good.
Most of my problems here are systemic. I know that deep down. And none of it has stopped this from being one of the best chapters of my life so far, because of these people.
I went home for Tết, Vietnam’s New Year holiday. Among many other things, it is the only time of the year when the question what are you doing with your life gets asked by every adult within a forty-kilometer radius, and you have to have answers ready. I had a few. Master’s program, good school, I’m studying the atmospheres of other planets, no, not astrology, yes, atmospheres, like the air around a planet, yes, Jupiter has one, it has several, actually…
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Sunrise in Phan Rang, Vietnam
My parents didn’t press too hard. They stopped doing that when I embarked on this journey and showed them that there is hope out there for my ambition, no matter how… ambitious and fucking delusional it might be. For a girl with this passport to dream of the universe. They tell me they support whatever I want to do and that I shouldn’t sacrifice my dreams for them. I believe them. And yet there is a specific kind of guilt that eats at you every time you come home and see your parents look a little older than the last time, and notice that the fridge is more sparsely stocked than it used to be when you were living there. It’s the guilt of having built a life that requires you to be far away. I don’t have a solution for it. I don’t think there is one. I just try to call home more.