I don’t care. About getting up in the morning. About making a to.do list, let alone crossing it off.

I don’t want to think. About people. Things. Making a difference.

I don’t want to write emails. Sharing. Explaining why I do what I do. Why I think the way I do. Teaching. Making an impact.
Is this the beginning of depression? Does it creep on you or do you just wake up one morning and decide not to get up at all?

Depression. That brings to mind my stay in France after college. Nobody wanted to be my friend until they heard my English. Then I had no lack of friends-to-be. I wasn’t obnoxious or weird or anything. I was just someone my classmates couldn’t be bothered with. After two years, I did have three friends. I guess that’s a lot for the French. And I got to know the Asian community and we’d have lunches together. We’d go to someone’s small apartment and spend the afternoon cooking. Those who couldn’t cook, ahem, that was me, got shopping duty, which I didn’t mind. An Indonesian girl – was she Indonesian? – and I would go to the butcher’s and explain the cut of meat we wanted. The girl and I spoke English to each other and I remember the butcher saying, “You both look Asian but you obviously don’t come from the same place because you’re speaking English with each other.” It never hit me till then that the language we use speaks volumes about who we are and where we’re from. I mean, of course I know that. But at a butcher’s discussing cuts and quantities of meat?

Many years later, married to my French-Swiss husband, our 10-year-old son in tow, we walk into the local charcuterie and our son talks to me in English, asking for his favorite hot dog in puff pastry. I explain that it is almost lunchtime and it would be best not to have anything just then. There is a queue behind me of little old ladies and couples, all waiting patiently for our turn. Then it is our turn and I start ordering rillettes, boudin, saucisson à l’ail and I am slowly aware of a change in atmosphere. All eyes fixed on us 3. I realize that the people expected my husband to order, the brown-haired blue-eyed Frenchman instead of the Chinese woman who spoke English with her son.

I was proud then, that we were different, that we could change the way people looked at things, especially in the fin fond du Limousin, a forgotten corner of the world,  in a a hamlet of 16, in a town of 5000 people with no blacks, and I the only Asian, if I am not mistaken.

Now, they know me at the supermarket. The manager always says a friendly Hi. She goes to Switzerland regularly to see friends. The pharmacist and the Saturday market vendors all say, “Bonjour.” I’ve never felt discriminated against, even when we first moved here. But I’ve always known we were different. And I rejoiced to think that our presence alone made people think.

Now I couldn’t care less.