Books and I

I want to explain how a boy with working-class parents from Western Mexico ended up teaching French at a prestigious American university in the Midwest. Whenever I think of who he is, who statistically he is supposed to be, I get a little confused. The story seems a little odd, a little too good to be true. But listen patiently and you will see it makes sense.

It started when his aunt gifted him and his siblings a set of encyclopedias from the 1980s; for some reason he adored looking at the maps and the entries for all the countries. Of particular fascination to him was Australia: it was big but sparsely inhabited, English was its official language, and there were plenty of animals you couldn’t find elsewhere. He couldn’t get enough information about Australia and its unusual creatures.

In middle school, he attended English classes like everybody else. He greatly enjoyed learning the language — he struggled with phonetics, as a native speaker of a Romance language, but grammar and vocabulary were not particularly challenging. Listening to music in English on TV and his MP3 player helped him practice his listening skills. He eventually envisioned himself studying English in the future, should he be able to attend university.

His family moved to the United States in 2010. Originally, his parents envisioned moving to California, where most of their relatives resided. However, his dad heard from his sister that South Carolina had a booming economy and plenty of jobs. Furthermore, the cost of living was not nearly as expensive as California’s. After exploring the area and getting a job there, he decided that is where they ought to live.

He was very excited by these news. He had grown up watching American movies and listening to American music, and things up there seemed fun and interesting. Upon arriving, however, he realized things were not going to be simple. Even though he knew English quite well from three years of studying it, he was very shy to speak it. He was self-conscious about his pronunciation and accent. Although he did well in school, he felt like a fish out of water for most of his high school years.

That feeling made him turn to other channels to find socialization and a feeling of ease lacking in the real world. The internet was one of such resources, but he would rather not get into his rocky relationship with that medium now. A much more positive force were books. He would read book after book; reading in English surprisingly felt more natural as the days passed.

He read The Stranger and Oliver Twist. He read most of Steinbeck’s novels and short stories. He adored The Jungle, Frankenstein, The Lord of the Flies, Brave New World and The Martian Chronicles. For class he found delightful to read and share thoughts about As I Lay Dying, Wuthering Heights, Death of a Salesman and many others.

He also enrolled in a French course because his experience enrolled in a Spanish one was very frustrating (nothing worse than being taught your first language, a language you know too well). He enjoyed the process of language-learning a lot.

Upon enrolling at a public state university, he kept taking French courses. Literature ones were especially his favorites. He read Paul et Virginie, Ourika, Manon Lescaut, Nadja and many more. He considered a career as a high school French teacher, but education courses bore him. Instead, he took a year off to meditate his goals and settled on applying to grad school for French literature. During that break, he also read a lot of stuff: from André Aciman to Bertrand Russell, but mostly innocuous materials like a buddhism guide and a philosophy manual for the general public.

He got accepted to a great graduate program in French literature and has kept reading plenty of French books and all kinds of humanities theory texts since then.

Reading gives him comfort. Books were there when nothing else was there; they filled a void that could not have been filled by anything else. With books he traveled to the seven Seas without needing to exit his neighborhood. Books made him feel things and forget things; learn things and unlearn things; frown and smile, yell and cry. Books make him feel like an active person in a way that television and the radio do not — books require you to make sense of words with a multiplicity of meanings and grasp interpretations; they force you to practice your spatial memory and sometimes push you towards frustration due to incomprehension. But all these ups and downs are worth it, I think.