Bilingual Being (30 page)

The first is the «pari du médecin Dr …» He bet twenty-five cents «sur la venu d'un garçon» – that I'd be a boy. Seems he paid it to my mother as she left «la salle d'accouchement» [the birthing/operating room]. She evidently holds it with prestige because she adds that it is, in fact, «bel et bien celui payé par le médecin» [truthfully and correctly the one paid by the doctor]. The doctor was a family friend in the second generation of his relationship with my mother's family, a point that would end up having further relevance to my future.

His conviction is a simple matter of Cartesian logic: my mother was huge, so I would be huge. This was the verdict of the measuring tape. At birth, I was admittedly at the high end of the weight charts for a girl, nine pounds, «une p'tite pat-a-pouf» – a fatso, a baby Amazon. Yet I'd end up being an average-sized adult female on the thin side. Still, the register was solid about the cold facts that day for Bébé St-Onge in Lit No. 411, Salle No. 464. The numbers become weighty themselves. Clearly, an individual that strong in utero couldn't be a female. I can only imagine the waves of disbelief upon my arrival, and the multiple genital inspections which would have followed, all in good fun. An apt beginning, I suppose, an early omen. But if the doctor was really convinced he was correct, with the confidence typical of his profession and social rank, why not have wagered more?

It seems that the business of my gender wasn't serious for him at all, a paltry joke. If I came out male, he'd make a quarter – enough for a large Oh! Henry bar back then. If I came out female, he'd lose the prospect of that single candy bar. But in this culture (in every culture?), gender isn't a funny matter. It's terribly serious because it makes all the difference in the world. As an “ob-gyn,” he'd have had plenty of evidence of why that was – in clinics and in emergency wards. But it's his cavalier approach to his work – hush-hushing sexual injuries in the service of family myths – that explains why he'd wager only the loose change in his pockets. For here was a doctor who'd leave me with the distinct impression, over encounters in later years, that I was worth little.

Nonetheless, the quarter lived snugly in the baby book in my mother's trust until the works were transferred to me in 1993. Years later, I noticed it was missing. After so many moves, I thought I lost it along
the way. I couldn't find it for years, and I was actually sad about it. I imagined it dropping to the bottom of a box, pretty much anywhere from Victoria to Toronto. The tape had become brittle and had broken free from its page. I guessed I wasn't as careful as I should have been.

But that quarter's story is stranger still, a bit more disturbing. Turns out I hadn't lost it, though it is unstuck. It's paper-clipped to a different page in the baby book. I'm looking at it right now: 1952, a moose on one side and King George VI on the other, blackened and smelly. The scary thing is that sometimes when I look at my baby book, it's there. And sometimes, I
over
look it. Like everything else connected with my trauma, this quarter is elusive.

In fact, it's a common human experience to lose important things, search for them for days, and then suddenly find them when we're not even looking. Stress blinds. But as for this coin, depending on the position of the first “a” in
gratia
, it's now apparently worth up to either $3 or $5. So if I ever have a day when I can actually see it and I'm missing some change for Tim Hortons, I'll consider taking it to a numismatist. Just like I went to the philatelist in 1996 to dump off the entire stamp collection my father left me after his death. To wash my hands of it, once and for all. I have my own experts, too.

THE GENDER JOKE

The second bet was entered into by an employee of a television repair business my father worked at prior to owning his own. This man bet a whole dollar because, the record states, my mother's right foot (as opposed to her left) had swollen during the pregnancy: «car le pied droit avait été le premier à enfler. Voici la carte reçue lors du séjour à l'Hôpital» [because the right foot had been the first to become swollen. Here is the card received during the stay at the hospital]. My mother's scientific and non-scientific evidence are liberally mixing here. I don't know why she spoke about her swollen feet to this man. It's a curious subject, no?

But I do understand a bit about his character beyond his inclination towards what is supposed to be women's lore, his folk medicine. That's because he left a note on a white index card that's fallen off the page since then but which, at least, I've never lost and always see. On
it he records in an elaborate, methodical cursive hand, in blue felt pen, his own version of the gender joke: «Je regrette, mais je ne peux pas rencontrer mes obligations envers toi cette semaine. Mais pour montrer ma bonne volonté je t'envoie une acct. Dû, $1.00; Acct, .10; Bal. .90. Mes félicitations …» [I regret that I cannot meet my obligations towards you this week. But to show my good faith, I am paying this amount on my account … My congratulations …] And he signs it with his full name.

I thought I was worth a bit more for this one, but clearly I was wrong. Only ten cents. I doubt this was a deep reflection of the value he gave to the female lore he appropriated. But if it was, it was a masterstroke of biting wit. More likely, I think he was, like the doctor, just partaking in some harmless comedy at my expense. Gender as a joke again. This from a man who, given his membership in my culture of origin, should have known better. Then again, maybe he did and his valuing me at ten cents is another bit of humour on his part. If so, he was a comic genius and I hardly dare criticize him at all.

The ten cents fell out, but that was lost on my mother's clock, not mine. Most likely, it ended up at the bottom of some filing cabinet, rusted to the back of a drawer. So without any of those funds, I'm left with just one question. The question isn't why my mother would bet – I know the answer to that. My mother enjoys having fun, likes a good game, has been known to go to the casino on occasion. My question is, with all that she knew about her own life and the life of the women around her, why wouldn't she hope, and bet, that I'd be a boy? Why wager on the other side?

Two answers present themselves. First, had she thought I'd really be a boy, she'd have found no one to bet against her. Which male in the professional world would think of putting up a quarter, or even a dime, on hopes for a girl? A complete absurdity. Besides, girls were cheap and easy to find in this view. Why bother wagering at all? Second, my mother honestly wanted a girl with all of her heart. She truly didn't think of female gender roles as hardship. By then, her silence was already woven tightly with her elaborate sense of «la patrie» – enough to make a cozy cloth that reached from head to foot. And she loved being a woman herself – embraced it fully, presented it boldly, and took on
each day confidently. She wanted a girl, a friend, an apprentice, to pass along her wisdom to.

What a disappointment I would be. Seldom listening. Often rejecting. Barely respecting. Refusing my role. Embracing silence as a necessity – first through intimidation, and later through repression. But engaging my patrie absolutely insufficiently, at all times. Perhaps I should just have had a sense of humour about it? Taken the two bets against me and found the comedy in it, too? Considered, like everyone around me, gender as a joke?

But I couldn't, and I still can't. I've lost much of my sense of humour for cheap laughs along the hard road I've had to walk sometimes. What I think is funny now is darker, smarter. I don't care for simple nonsense, one-note jokes. I also have every reason to believe that gender in a patriarchal society is anything but funny. I don't see comedy in misogyny. For in either common male vista, modern or traditional, the odds were against a female. At best, womanhood was a gamble here from the start.

What remains of their wagers now is a half-dozen brown rectangles with ragged edges that look like stains from watery excrement. They're actually fifty-four-year-old glue marks from the absent adhesive tape. Now the page looks right at least, makes sense. Art imitating life.

Codes

One speaks in a learned and literate language.

One speaks in the mother tongue of culture.

One speaks in archaic myths and symbols.

All speak for
me
.

All are
me
: choices,

valences of the self,

fluctuating identity.

The whole of
me

would be incomplete,

inarticulate, without

input from all three.

Language is a messy

flow of coded sense

within each of us –

an essential trinity.

To be human is

to be multilingual:

a semiotic hybrid,

constitutionally.

16

ON BEING NOT QUITE RIGHT

UN MOUTON NOIR

There have been many indicators along the way that I'm not quite right inside «ma patrie,» nor inside the English-Canadian culture that I also claim for my own. It starts with something as obvious as my name: Kathleen Saint-Onge. Either half of its cultural voices is virtually unpronouncable by the other. I'm an imperfect blend of traits, «un mouton noir» [a black sheep] as my mother tells it with a combination of flourish and authority.

I wondered more than once as a child if there had been an error at that hospital and I'd been assigned to the wrong mother. I saw her brown skin and brown eyes next to my fair skin and blue eyes. I saw her dance while I shied away, and laugh at tired old jokes while I buried myself in a book. I saw her look fancy in shiny bangles and scratchy synthetics glamourously cut high or low. But I insisted on cotton and plain things, an inner Quaker, and claimed an allergy to acrylic and polyester to buy myself that chance.

Often, she'd catch me just sitting between chapters in the corner of the den, looking ahead at empty space, thinking. «Bin voyons donc! T'es-tu là encore? Pourquoi tu fais pas un peu d'bricolage? Ou bin qu't'appeles pas une amie?» [Come on! Are you still there? Why don't you do some crafts? Or call a friend?] Too much thinking already. What good would it do? It was hard to believe these were my roots.

But then there were my freckles, the baby book, and my looking so similar to one of my maternal aunt's daughters. There was also the birthing day coincidence, of which much was made over the years. For I was born on a special Sunday in a cold November, on my mother's twenty-fifth birthday. We shared our birthday cakes every year. There was the further fact of my absolute resemblance to my father. Skin tone. Eyes. Intellect. Temperament, even, if I'm sincere – too serious, leaning towards an intensity that few people can match or tolerate. Despite my aspirations, then, I couldn't really believe that I was adopted. I was the child of this culturally francophone mother who appeared to be so unlike me, and this culturally anglophone father whom I so dangerously resembled.

Those early doubts about belonging would implant themselves permanently, though. I believe they played no small role in pulling me towards teaching English as a second language – in myself becoming «un étranger parmi'es étrangers» [a stranger among strangers]. It was the best employment in the world for someone like me, a perfect job for «un mouton noir.»

I spent fifteen years working in “language-intensive programs” on the West Coast, and another five instructing newcomers to Canada in Toronto. In either framework, that meant getting a new cohort about every three months. With an average of sixteen per class and two cohorts per term, a conservative estimate is that I had over 2,500 non-Canadian students over the years with whom I shared not just English grammar, comprehension, and pronunciation lessons, but authentic history, life, culture, and emotion. It was like travelling around the world without leaving my children behind. I was snugly entrenched among people who either couldn't see my differences, or who embraced them. I couldn't believe I got paid for it. Were it not for the obligation to rent and bills, I'd have gladly done it for free.

Of course, there were young adults trying to improve their economic futures in my classes. And fellow
ESL
teachers in a conundrum. They were considered “advanced” in English in their own home countries, where English was a minority language accessible to but a few. Yet their fluency was in doubt, considered “intermediate” here, where English is the majority language. Theirs was a classic case of relative bilingualism – where the tongue's dexterity doesn't change but one's respective power on the landscape absolutely does.

The greater share of students comprised a collage of complex lives that profoundly informed my own. There were doctors, lawyers, writers, and artists. Parents and grandparents. People who had walked for days just to escape. People who watched their entire families fall away through indelible hardships. Heroes better than any in a book: a quadri-lingual Japanese man, blind from childhood, who'd lived in a dozen countries; a seventy-two-year-old Japanese widow embarking on a lifelong dream to learn English; a teen from Kosovo who'd carried her grandfather to safety; a Chinese woman my age who worked three jobs to support her family of eight; an Eritrean human rights activist; a Polish custodian with a PhD in literature; a Mexican grandfather who came to class after shift work because he wanted to be able to help his Canadian grandchildren with their homework; a woman who'd been gang-raped back home; and a man who'd been incarcerated for more than a decade for his support of democracy. I could go on for hours.

In a curious manifestation of an embodied teaching practice, I ended up helping them to do exactly what I had done: use English for safe passage. Give up a bit of home for the sake of better odds, invest hope in change, a shift. The mood in academia these days supports this as a positive and progressive approach to teaching – this idea of pedagogy as autobiography, and vice versa. Yet I can't take any credit here for being clever or visionary, for I had no master plan to do anything even half as grand. I just went looking for the sort of job I could do well enough and thought I might like – then I got pretty good at it and loved it. The fact that my work repeated my life while my life repeated my work was accidental. And the fact that my work provided therapy as a result, well, that was more along the lines of a miracle.