I sound like a Martian in both English and French

There are certain things you become painfully aware of when you're living in a country that's not your own. I know it's an obvious observation, but it's true in ways you can't even imagine, even something as ignored but as intimate as your voice. I've never been so conscious of the way I speak, and I don't mean just in French.

Before continuing I must fully confess an important but embarrassing detail for those reading this who have never heard me speak French: My accent in French is thick. It's not so thick that people can't normally understand me, but it is quite obvious from the look in strangers' eyes that it hits them in the face with all the force of an elderly lady's generous application of perfume. However, seeing just the uneasy look in a stranger's eyes is the kindest of reactions. Among the worst is when they respond in English, which in US culture amounts to a (mild or not so mild) form of bigotry. If you're not sure what I mean, imagine the reaction of someone responding to a Hispanic person in broken Spanish (HHHOLAH) and repeatedly calling them their "amigo." It makes you cringe, doesn't it? I live a similar situation here in France. This happens regardless of the persons skill in English. Such as the time when, midway through the transaction, the cashier decided to switch to English but only managed to repeat "She.... She.... She..." over and over again. Or the time when I was ordering in Subway, where the menu items are in English, and they couldn't understand my pronunciation of English words (but could understand the French words), decided my French was bad (the irony!) and then tried to switch to English, which failed as spectacularly as you are probably imagining. It's worth noting, without writing a blog entry of its own, that the problem lies not really in the person's skill in English but in the othering and lack of acceptance of someone who's clearly trying to integrate into your country, but I digress...

All of this up until now, you could probably expect, but it doesn't stop there. Even in my own native language, my speech and accent is the subject of unease. At work, I'm constantly told that, "The American accent is difficult," as if there's only one American accent in a country that is between 14 and 15 times the size of France.

"You don't speak English; you speak American," is another one I hear often, as if I speak some kind of English pidgin. I'm not sure if this is just a weird linguistic quirk since they do, after all, call Canadian French (roughly translated for the French-impaired) "Quebecian" (Quebecois). But when you consider that they often put down Quebec's accent and dialect, maybe it's not some weird linguistic thing where they have the habit of referring to dialects instead of language, and French people are just completely unfamiliar of the idea with language plurality. It's ironic to think that in the US, we laugh at people as uneducated when they say they speak "American," and here, when I tell people I speak "English, not American," I'm considered the incorrect one.

I know this sounds highly sensitive, like I should just get over it. Don't worry. Plenty people of told me this--most of them French--which is why I don't really discuss this with them anymore. At a certain point, it seems fruitless. When you've had the same conversation a thousand times with the same result, why bother? And truthfully, the first times that it happens, it wasn't so bothersome, but it's like being tickled. After first it's funny, but slowly but surely it stops and before you know it, it's unbearable. So I'm trying to develop a thicker skin. It helps that this most often happens at work, and I just have to grin and bear it in the name of being professional.

Now, a year later, it's old hat. Yes, it was fun for a moment to be "the American" at the party, but eventually after the 700th joke about hamburgers and how fat we are or the 345th tongue-in-cheek comment guns, or fucking Donald Trump, it gets old. It also doesn't help that all of these things are serious topics that I worry about at night because I care about my country (well, maybe hamburgers aren't so serious) but they're just jokes to them. Feeling like the visiting ambassador from the "New World" is fun, but eventually you want to be part of the group, not the invited guest.