Addendum to Asians

I was so tangled up in trying to be valid in my impressions from which I was deriving conclusions that I was putting into the post “Asians” that I completely forgot something way more important – it seems to me –  than the fact that there now seems to be a rather large number of French men and French women of Asian descent out and about and speaking educated French. 

That something is that, like the Africans, the Asian sourced French seem to have a reasonably strong affinity for the European sourced French: the number of mixed couples on the streets walking hither and yon, stopping at boulangeries, boucheries and poissonneries, or having a café in the brasserie of their choice, speaking French that sounds to me to be the standard that is taught in school as properly accented, articulated, pronounced and grammared are legion. 

Of course, in a mixed couple, one would expect that correctness of French from the non Asian member.  That would be an appropriate and unarguable default prejudice.

But both seem to be railing on at one another with equally correct Frenchness.

I seem to have noticed that these ubiquitous mixed Asian and European couples are all of an age to have children.  That is a difference compared to what I think that I have observed with the Africans.  My observations, at least, don’t support the apparently multi generational mixing that seems, again by my observations, to be occurring (and apparently have already occurred) between the Europeans and the Africans.

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I was in the checkout line at Carrefour City back awhile and in the line next to me was and absolutely beautiful three or so year old Asian child – I guess a girl – it was too beautiful to have been a boy.  She started speaking what sounded like complex sentences to no one apparently in particular.  She was apparently just making observations on what was going on around her. 

As always a surge of the unfairness of it all, that I didn’t somewhere early enough in life to have done something about it, acquire the need to learn French.  It just seems so unfair that all these little kids can speak the language and I am illiterately mute.

But, what the hell.

Anyway, I was going through this envy trip and trying to figure out what it was that she was saying when her father bent down to her and said something.  I know not what it was, but the tone and demeanor were suitably adoring.

He was a slender six foot or so, tall, European stock Frenchman with strawberry blond hair.

“Oh” I said to myself.  “How stupid of me to have thought that the kid was having her hair done.”