Anglos Abroad: Memoirs of Immersion in a Foreign Language

Mary Besemeres

Biography, Volume 28, Number 1, Winter 2005, pp. 27-42 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: 10.1353/bio.2005.0023

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bio/summary/v028/28.1besemeres.html

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ANGLOS ABROAD: MEMOIRS OF IMMERSION

IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

MARY BESEMERES

At a time when English has acquired the status of a global language, literature
in English is increasingly being written out of experiences of non-Anglophone
cultural worlds, as acclaimed novelists as diverse as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin,
and Ahdaf Soueif attest.1 Anglophone writers whose memoirs explore expe-
riences of immersion in other languages and cultures are interesting because
of the ambiguous position they occupy in this context. They are in one sense
representatives or carriers of the dominant language and culture of contem-
porary experience. Yet in another sense they can be seen as part of a wider
resistance to the ascendancy of English, because they willingly traverse or are
carried beyond its borders to explore other ways of being-in-the-world. In this
paper I compare some recent narratives of language immersion by authors
from Australia, Britain, and the United States. While one of the authors
writes about aspects of his adopted culture with a condescension that may be
related to his speaking a global language, the other narratives resist being read
as colonizing of the encountered “Other,” revealing rather a dialogical, self-
questioning stance.
Towards the end of her influential study of Western travel writing, Impe-
rial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt offers an
incisive critique of a passage from celebrated Anglo-American travel writer
Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express. The passage dwells on what
Theroux sees as the monotony of the Patagonian landscape (“this place had
no landmarks, or rather it was all landmarks, one indistinguishable from the
other—thousands of hills and dry riverbeds, and a billion bushes all the
same”), and ends, sardonically and damningly: “I looked for guanacos. I had
nothing better to do. There were no guanacos” (qtd. in Pratt 218). “Theroux
constructs Patagonia out of paralysis and alienation,” Pratt comments, and
asks: “If he knew Spanish, would he have had something better to do? Would

Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005) © Biographical Research Center

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28 Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005)

everything have been less interchangeable?” (218). Inhabitants of Patagonia

are not invited to share their view of the landscape with Theroux, Pratt
implies, because he travels in and writes about the region without feeling the
need to learn Spanish. In fact, in The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux does
occasionally refer to conversations that he had in Spanish with local residents
(e.g. 48, 272). And yet, Pratt’s commentary remains apt, for the outlook
conveyed in the book, despite the author’s knowledge of Spanish, is essen-
tially a monocultural one, rather than one of openness to the experiences of
people living with another language.
Pratt’s point helps to place the memoirs of cultural and linguistic immer-
sion that I am concerned with—narratives of what might be called “language
travel”—in the context of contemporary Anglophone travel writing. Unlike
the writings of Theroux and of other popular travel writers like Bruce Chat-
win and Redmond O’Hanlon, immersion narratives represent an attempt to
communicate with people of another culture on those others’ own terms.
They can be seen at once as a subgenre of travel writing and as a distinctive
genre in their own right, related to memoirs of language migration like Pol-
ish-born author Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Lan-
guage.2 Through their focus on the experience of learning another language
as a foreigner and cultural outsider—and translating the self in the process3—
memoirs of language immersion arguably extend the possibilities of the larg-
er travel genre, possibilities foreclosed in the canonical, often monolingual
writers whose narratives typically observe and comment on, rather than
engage with, cultural others.
In this paper, then, I want to illustrate how life writing by “language trav-
elers” may go beyond the monologism so trenchantly brought out by Pratt
in relation to Theroux. Here, I am in sympathy with Dennis Porter, who in
Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing sug-
gests the limitations of Edward Said’s “discourse theory” in Orientalism for
reading the “works of [his] corpus”:
The implications of the discourse theory deployed by Said are such that if he were
right, no alternative to Orientalism . . . is conceivable in the West. If articulate lan-
guage is a collective enterprise of the kind Said describes, then the individual is not
free to write against the discursive grain, but is bound by an already constituted
system of utterances. . . . [P]rolonged contact with the literature of travel has con-
vinced me of the relative coarseness of discourse theory when applied to the liter-
ary field. . . . This is not because I am concerned to reaffirm a faith in some kind
of existentialist freedom of choice or of representation, but because the human
subject’s relation to language is such that he or she is never merely a passive reflec-
tor of collective speech. We leave our individual mark in our written and spoken
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Besemeres “Anglos Abroad” 29

utterances . . . [and] natural languages themselves provide resources to loosen the

constraints they also impose. (3–4)

Although I see a greater role for culture in shaping the individual self through
the particular languages it comes into contact with than Porter allows for
here (Translating 12–20, 24–35), I agree with his objection to the implicit
linguistic determinism of discourse theory. An interpretive approach which
implies that no Western writing about non-Western cultures fails to be com-
plicit with imperialism denies ground to Western travel narratives that are
aware and critical of their own cultural assumptions. At the same time, I
would acknowledge the rhetorical and ethical constraints on Western travel
writers (“language travelers” included) articulated in Patrick Holland and
Graham Huggan’s nuanced account of contemporary Anglophone travel
writing, Tourists with Typewriters. Holland and Huggan argue persuasively
that travel writers often reproduce exoticizing narrative tropes that readers
(and publishers) have come to expect, and that the mobility and relative
wealth which set traveling authors apart from many of those they write about
inevitably complicate the moral perspective from which they write. Again,
however, as Holland and Huggan’s own readings of specific travel narratives
demonstrate, there is as much diversity among Anglophone writers’ responses
to these constraints as there is commonality.
The issue of language in cross-cultural travel writing is strikingly absent
from the major studies by Porter, Holland and Huggan, Caren Kaplan (Ques-
tions of Travel ), and Sidonie Smith (Moving Lives ), and only touched on in
Pratt’s Imperial Eyes. “Language,” unlike “landscape,” is not listed in any of
the indexes of these otherwise comprehensive books. Pratt’s brief critique of
Theroux’s monolingual vision of Patagonia (as she reads it) is exceptional in
highlighting the role of language and the intercultural in travel writing. Her
main focus, however, is the colonial gaze of Western travel writers, which per-
haps accounts for her book’s omission of contemporary memoirs that explore
the experience of coming to live in another language. Arguably, such mem-
oirs have a dialogic potential inaccessible to travel narratives that ignore the
issue of language, regardless of whether these display nostalgia for empire, like
works by Theroux, Peter Mayle, and Eric Newby (Pratt 216–21; Holland
and Huggan 27–67), or sensitivity to the claims of cultural others, like Joan
Didion’s Salvador, in Pratt’s reading (225–27).
This is not to dismiss travel narratives without a linguistic dimension as
inevitably superficial or arrogant, but to suggest that a writer’s reliance on
English in construing other linguistic cultures is likely to limit cross-cultural
vision in some significant ways.4 Neither is it to contend that translingual
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30 Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005)

travel memoirs are all, inherently, dialogic. While striking for their cultural
insight and subtlety, the “Italian” memoirs by British expatriate Tim Parks
often reveal an unquestioned sense of the author’s culture as normative. In
the translingual memoirs considered in this paper, the other language is itself
given a voice in the narrative, with the potential to displace the narrator’s
cultural assumptions. It “talks back” to these assumptions, overcoming some
of the externality of what might be termed the “Therouvian” perspective
through which people of other cultures are observed rather than speak in their
own right. But, as we will see in the case of Parks, if translingual travel implies
a dialogue, the dialogue can be an unequal one, with the authority of the
author’s cultural assumptions exposed briefly to question before being firmly
reasserted over those of the speakers of the other language.
In my readings of Almost French by Sarah Turnbull, River Town by Peter
Hessler, and An Italian Education by Tim Parks, I focus on the narration of
encounters or relationships played out in the medium of the other language,
and on the implicit self-perception and cultural orientation that emerge from
these representations.
Sarah Turnbull’s memoir Almost French: A New Life in Paris relates how
the author, a former journalist with SBS television in Australia, came to live
in Paris, initially arriving for a fortnight to visit a Frenchman she had met
while traveling in Romania, but eventually making her home there and set-
ting about becoming, as she puts it, “almost French.” The memoir conveys
the elusiveness of the desired cultural ideal with self-deprecating wit. In writ-
ing about her life in France, Turnbull sometimes resorts to generalizations
about “the French,” commenting for example on a national tendency to sober
self-criticism alongside a “glaringly Gallic” quality (79). In this respect, her
writing shares something of the style and spirit of satirical travel guide-books
like the “Xenophobe” series, which unlike much contemporary academic
scholarship in the humanities, are not particularly concerned with avoiding
essentialism.5 Yet despite her occasional recourse to what might be seen as
typical preconceptions about Frenchness (many of which she in fact debunks),
Turnbull’s memoir reflects in illuminating ways on aspects of the relation-
ship between self, language, and culture brought to the fore by her experience
of living as a foreigner in France. Her most effective writing probes and dram-
atizes differences in expected ways of speaking and behaving that emerge from
her conversations at social gatherings in and around Paris and in her partner
Frédéric’s hometown in the Boulonnais region.
One memorable encounter occurs at a cocktail party in Paris. It strikes
Sarah that the other guests are “hanging back,” none willing “to break the
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Besemeres “Anglos Abroad” 31

ice.” She portrays herself trying to “bridge” the “cool distance” by introduc-
ing herself:
‘Hello, my name is Sarah.’
Surprise scuds across the faces of a crisp couple, who step back involuntarily before
accepting my outstretched hand. . . . For the next ten minutes I practise my best
‘people skills’, chit-chatting in the friendly interested sort of way which can always
be relied on to start conversation. What do you do? How do you know so-and-so?
These people are proving to be much harder work than I imagined, though. While
they answer politely enough they don’t initiate any questions of their own.
Unnerved, I try even harder, filling the silences with embarrassingly inane remarks.
Quel beau salon! Regardez les belles peintures! Two heads nod impassively at me. It
isn’t working, I realise. . . . [T]hey seem to be shrinking away from me. God, don’t
they know the golden rule (show interest in others and they’ll show interest in
you)? Don’t they know they’re supposed to make an effort ? A sudden wave of
doubt rushes over me. Could the rules be so different in France? But then how else
are you supposed to get the ball rolling if not with preliminary questions. . . ? . . .
Back at the apartment, we carry out a post-mortem of the evening. To me, spend-
ing an entire evening talking to your partner is antisocial but Frédéric says this
happens all the time at parties in France. As for my bold introduction, to the cou-
ple it would have seemed like an intrusion; my clumsy questions cluttering up each
comfortable silence. Far from building a rapport, my efforts only seemed to dimin-
ish me in their eyes, as though by showing interest in them I had revealed the
depths of my own dullness. Enthusiastically admiring the paintings . . . was inap-
propriate too. ‘In our culture it implies you don’t have those sort of things at home
and makes you seem a bit paysan,’ Frédéric says. A bit of a peasant. (63–65)

The comically one-sided conversation reveals to Turnbull gradually not only

that “the rules” for conversation might be different in the new context, but
that getting to know others at a party is not, for the couple she approaches, the
self-evident good that it is for her. One of the strengths of Turnbull’s portray-
al of French society is the way she captures the diversity of social worlds—not
all French parties are like this—yet also how styles of interaction that she has
grown up with in Sydney don’t easily find a purchase in any of the varied social
spaces into which she ventures in France. Frédéric himself regards the hosts
of the cocktail party as overly “madame-et-monsieur,” but tries to defend the
behavior of the “crisp couple” to Sarah, and is slightly hurt by her criticism.
On another occasion, Turnbull finds the conversation taking place around
her at a dinner party highly animated, with people interrupting one another
freely, but also forbiddingly polished. Again, building a “rapport” with oth-
ers—for her both a reason and a prerequisite for successful social contact—
does not seem to be anyone’s immediate goal in joining the conversation.
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32 Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005)

As Barbara Hanna and Juliana de Nooy point out in a recent paper,

Turnbull inverts a convention of Anglophone travel writing about France
where the spotlight is on the strange or amusing habits of the French,
emphasizing rather the comic qualities of the figure she herself cuts in
French society. One could add that through the medium of Sarah’s and
Frédéric’s post-mortem discussions about what went wrong in her social
encounters, the memoir creates a symbolic bridging of the gap between the
Australian interloper and her wary, deprecating French audience. We see
Frédéric becoming aware that behavior that seems natural may be culturally
inflected, a parallel development to the one that Sarah herself undergoes.
While Turnbull presents her struggles to communicate primarily in a
comic light, the memoir also brings out her frustrating, at times humiliating
feeling of invisibility in the new language and culture. Partly this is a matter
of limited vocabulary hampering her expression, as when, asked about the
Republican debate in Australia, she launches into a reply in “eloquent
French”: “Many want. Some they don’t want. The old, for example. But I
want,” and finds herself having to rely on Frédéric to elaborate: “It’s just a
matter of time. . . . Sarah thinks most young Australians . . .” (47). But her
dislocation is linguistic in a deeper sense, in that cultural expectations about
behavior make themselves felt through underlying scripts for what can or
cannot be said, scripts which are largely lost on her. At a reunion lunch for
university friends of Frédéric’s, the hosts seem to ignore Sarah. When anoth-
er couple greet her warmly—“Enfin, le kangarou !” (68)—she feels she could
weep with gratitude. Yet their friendliness, which she experiences as a reviv-
ing touch of normality, turns out in this cultural context to be an idiosyn-
cratic response. None of Frederic’s other friends at the lunch feel bound to
come up with it. Marie, a trendily dressed woman with whom Sarah has been
trying to keep up a conversation in French, turns suddenly to Frédéric and
asks: “‘Et ta petite copine, comment va son français ?’ Her words ring across the
table, loud and patronizing. How’s your little girlfriend’s French coming
along?” (69). Frédéric, “embarrassed,” tries to include Sarah: “Er, I think she
can probably answer that herself.” Faced with what seems like a gratuitous
insult and unable to formulate a retort in French, Sarah takes refuge in the
bathroom, crying with anger and mortification.
From the retrospective vantage point of several more years in France,
Turnbull reads the incident differently. She suggests that in French, Marie’s
comment, while hardly kindly meant, would not necessarily have been calcu-
lated to wound; that in the middle-class, urban French milieu of the lunch,
there was no particular expectation of friendliness towards newcomers. Two
years later, Sarah is on amicable terms with Marie: “Marie . . . has turned out
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Besemeres “Anglos Abroad” 33

to be really nice. In the last six months she’s made a special effort towards
me, drawing me into conversation and persevering until I thawed . . . per-
haps I’ve passed some test of time” (171). Similarly, the hosts of the lunch
who appeared so cold ultimately turn out to be “fun and gregarious.” Asked
about their initial unfriendliness, they observe: “The problem is the French
aren’t very comfortable meeting new people. . . . For us, friendships form over
years, at school or university. And after that, we’re not interested, we’re no
longer curious. We think we’ve got enough friends already” (171). For Turn-
bull, this explanation is “somehow healing” because, as she writes, “even
though that lunch was more than two years ago now, the cool reception,
those unreciprocated what-do-you-do’s, my anger, the hurt, had all accu-
mulated in a knot which needed untangling” (172).
A sense of the painful and conflicted aspects of becoming recognizable to
others in a new language also characterizes American author Peter Hessler’s
memoir River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. River Town gives an account
of the period from 1996 to 1998 that Hessler spent in Fuling, a remote town
in the Chinese province of Sichuan, where he taught English literature as a
Peace Corps volunteer. Central to the narration is his experience of gradual
immersion in Chinese language and culture, a process portrayed as complex,
incremental, marked by frequent chagrin and loss of face, and sometimes
anger, if also warmth and the emergence of genuine friendships. Throughout
his stay Hessler encountered mocking shouts of “Halloo” and “waiguoren”
(foreigner) when he went for walks through the city. Symptomatic of ethnic
prejudice and unfamiliarity with foreigners (Hessler and the other Peace
Corps volunteer in Fuling were the first American residents in half a century)
rather than of any cultural difference reflected in language, these catcalls nev-
ertheless helped form Hessler’s linguistic identity in Fuling, his “self-in-trans-
lation.” As he portrays it, they acted as a spur to his study of Mandarin; by
the end of his first year, he no longer found them so troubling, as by then he
could speak the language with some confidence and was on friendly terms
with a wide range of people—vendors, tradesmen, free-lance photographers,
and teashop waitresses—who humored his desire to practice Chinese and
extended his Chinese-speaking self.
The memoir evokes vividly Hessler’s struggle to learn Mandarin. In his
private classes with Teacher Liao, a lecturer in modern Chinese at his college,
he is dismayed by her emphasis on what he gets wrong, the number of times
she says “Budui! ” (not correct). He comes away wondering “had a human
being ever compressed more wrongness into a single hour?” (67). When he
reads a passage aloud without making a mistake he looks up expecting affir-
mation, but encounters a bored expression on Teacher Liao’s face. After all,
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34 Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005)

he has only done what a child could do. He begins to experiment with new
words that he teaches himself between classes, and imagines he can see her
“flinching with unwilling admiration,” but again, she says “Budui!,” correct-
ing the part that was wrong. In hindsight, Hessler recognizes that his desire
to have his “ego soothed” with praise was an expectation created by his
American education, and notes how in his own English classes in Fuling,
when his students made mistakes he automatically praised them for their
effort, unable to modify his teaching style even after realizing that they found
his praise meaningless. The impulse to encourage, to build up students’ self-
esteem, was too ingrained a part of his educational self.
Hessler writes of an “unhealthy note” brought out in his relationship with
Teacher Liao by the historical lessons in his language textbook:
Often there was a definite tension as we prodded each other carefully. When the
textbook discussed the Opium Wars, she quietly pointed out that America had also
benefited from the unequal treaties that were forced upon the Chinese, and she
lingered over the description of the waiguoren looting and burning the Summer
Palace. (146)

When Teacher Liao claimed that China had become self-sufficient in oil, he
would counter with the point, gleaned from Newsweek, that China had
become a net oil importer in 1995. While unconvinced, she was evidently
annoyed by the readiness of his statistics. Hessler brings out the defensiveness
of his rejoinder: “I had never been a patriot, and certainly I had never been
patriotic about oil, but things were different now—I was a waiguoren, and I
was developing a waiguoren’s sensitivity to any sort of slight” (146). He fur-
ther relates his position in these uncomfortable exchanges to an aspect of the
language that he was learning:
the Chinese use personal pronouns when they speak of national affairs—it’s “our
China” and “your America.” I found this to be a small but critical quirk in the lan-
guage; every political discussion quickly became polarized, and every aspect of
America—both its successes and its failures—became my personal affair. (147)

Before coming to China he had not thought of himself as particularly Amer-

ican; speaking the new language drew him reluctantly into such an identifi-
cation, positioning him through the use of a pronoun that there was no way
of avoiding. In drawing out the significance of what might strike others as a
minor fact of language, Hessler shows how this use of the possessive pronoun
exemplifies a particular way of thinking about nationality, and how speaking
Chinese, even as an outsider, involves taking on that way of thinking, how-
ever ambivalently.
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Besemeres “Anglos Abroad” 35

Hessler writes of his growing respect and liking for Teacher Liao over the
two years of their lessons, which stem not from any rapprochement over pol-
itics but from a clearer sense of her as a person, something that is in part
enabled by his more fluent Chinese. At a farewell dinner that she holds for
him and the other Peace Corps teacher, another guest, a college administra-
tor, makes fun of Hessler’s Chinese, “speaking with patronizing slowness,”
until finally Teacher Liao snaps: “Ho Wei”—the Chinese name Hessler was
assigned during his Peace Corps training—“understands what you’re saying.
. . . We studied that a year ago” (389). Hessler feels that the same “fierce
pride” that characterized her stance in defending China is now being extend-
ed to him as a student. At the time of their final class Teacher Liao is eight
months pregnant and insists on continuing a lesson in spite of an attack of
morning sickness. Returning from the bathroom she smiles, blushes, and
says “Duibuqi” (I’m sorry), and when asked if she’d prefer to cancel the class
maintains “firmly”: “‘It is nothing. Now, please continue what you were say-
ing before I left.’” Hessler pays tribute to her “quiet pride and toughness,”
which had “gone from being infuriating to something whose consistency was
admirable and even comforting” (391).
The memoir’s account of these Mandarin classes conveys both curiosity
about, and respect for, a different cultural outlook, one according to which
Hessler’s own understanding of student-teacher relations looks foolish. At the
same time, the narrative voice seems never to surrender a critical instinct and
a sense of the irony inherent in cross-cultural encounter. The same qualities
characterize Hessler’s writing about his English literature classes, where the
medium of communication was English but where, culturally, he was still
positioned very much as an outsider. He quotes excerpts from several of his
students’ essays and class journal entries in English, commenting on him and
the other Peace Corps teacher, Adam Meier, or tentatively expressing criti-
cism of the West. Students clearly availed themselves of the opportunity to
convey things to Hessler that might have been harder to say to his face, given
a student-teacher dynamic marked on the one hand by traditional, Confu-
cian-derived overtones of respect, and on the other by wariness towards a
foreigner from the capitalist heartland of America. One essay, by a student
who chose the English name “Catherine,” compares “girls in the East” to
“girls in the West,” concluding that the former are “elegant, refined and
kind” and the latter “lead a loose life” (21). Hessler describes Catherine as “a
lovely girl, a quiet student with eager eyes and a friendly smile,” towards whom
he “couldn’t be harsh,” simply noting on her essay that he had three sisters in
America—a note which drew an apology from her. Another student’s journal
entry, written in response to seeing Peter play Frisbee with Adam Meier in
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36 Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005)

the college plaza, renders their “lazy game . . . Olympian”: “How wonderful
it looked! The Frisbee was like a red fire, flying person to person between the
two men. I have seen it for a long time. Foreigners are so versatile” (16–17).
An essay Hessler singles out as his “favorite,” by a student calling himself
Richard and titled “Why Americans Are So Casual,” offers a “less heroic”
description:
I’m a Chinese. As we all know, the Chinese nation is a rather conservative nation.
So many of us have conservative thinking in some degree. I don’t know whether
it is bad or good.
Our foreign language teachers—Peter and Adam—came to teach us this term. It
provides a good opportunity of understanding the American way of life. In my
opinion, they are more casual than us Chinese people. Why do I think so? I’ll give
you some facts to explain this.
For example, when Mr. Hessler is having class, he can scratch himself casually
without paying attention to what others may say. He dresses up casually, usually
with his belt dropping and dangling. But, to tell you the truth, it isn’t considered
a good manner in China, especially in old people’s eyes. In my opinion, I think it
is very natural. (17)

We’re given an impression here of an observer watching Hessler curiously and

critically, albeit expressing his criticism in a diplomatic fashion—in some
respects the reverse of a Western observer commenting on a foreign culture.
But we also hear someone reflecting on the cultural dimension of his own
ways of speaking and behaving, perhaps for the first time.6 Unlike the self-
mocking that Pratt analyzes in Swedish naturalist Andreas Sparrman’s eigh-
teenth century account of traveling in the Cape colony, which she argues
reinforces the superiority of his scientific knowledge vis-à-vis the “peasant
knowledge” of Afrikaners and KhoiKhoi alike (55–56), or the self-ironizing
of contemporary travel writers Newby and O’Hanlon, which Holland and
Huggan similarly interpret as a disingenuous means of cultural self-authori-
zation (33–36; 78–81), the humor of Hessler’s quotations from his students’
essays is sparked by the friction between his own implied self-perception—
as normal—and the unexpected way they read him, transforming him in his
own eyes. The inclusion of these essay excerpts seems less strategic self-
mocking than a means of representing cross-cultural encounter in a way that
is open equally to its humorous and transformative aspects.
An Italian Education, the last immersion narrative I want to discuss, is the
sequel to Tim Parks’s earlier bestselling book Italian Neighbours. A translator
and writer, Parks came to Italy in his twenties, and eventually settled in Mon-
tecchio, a village near Verona, with his Italian wife Rita Baldassare.7 His early
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Besemeres “Anglos Abroad” 37

entry into Italian is not the subject of these books, but rather his ongoing
experience of living in Italian at the time of writing. The idea that cross-cul-
tural experience is a matter of translation, not merely metaphorically but lit-
erally, is as central to Parks’s memoirs as to Eva Hoffman’s account of her
“life in a new language.” In his note to An Italian Education, he writes: “Our
experience of another country is also an experience of its language, how sim-
ilar it is to our own, how different.” He proposes playfully that “one way to
talk about Italy would be simply to make a list of all those Italian words that
are untranslatable . . . and then give dozens of anecdotes showing how they
are used,” adding that “something of this project” persists in both his books
about Italy. Parks’s approach to cultural translation is distinct from Hoff-
man’s, however, in combining subtle perceptions of cultural difference with
an only semi-jocular persistence in his own cultural bias.
Early in An Italian Education he writes of the cultural salience of the
notion of “spettacolo” in Italian, a word his neighbor Marta uses to express
her admiration for his newborn daughter Stefania. He notes the “positive
connotations” the word has in Italian, contrasting it wryly with the negative
associations of the English “spectacle”: “my mother always used to say: ‘Tim,
for heaven’s sake, don’t make a spectacle of yourself!’ Meaning, don’t draw
attention to yourself. And meaning, little children should be seen and not
heard, or better still neither seen nor heard” (97). In a similar ironic vein he
explains the concept of “fare festa a qualcuno” (literally, to make a party for
someone), translating it, with a blend of sympathy and skepticism, as an
expression that “combines the ideas of welcoming [someone] and smothering
them with physical affection” (142). Again, he contrasts fare festa tellingly
with the “slightly disapproving” English expression “to make a fuss of.” By
way of illustrating fare festa, he describes his mother-in-law, Nonna Maria,
greeting his son Michele on one of her typical unannounced visits:
It would be truly hard to exaggerate the cooing and crying and sighing and kiss-
ing and nose-tweaking and exclamations and tears and tickles and cuddles that
now have to take place. The children must imagine they are the only people in the
whole universe. Nonna lifts up Michele and dances round and round with him
and ‘O che bel bambino! O che ometto splendido! O che spettacolo! ’ She holds him up
to her hawkish face, rubs noses (losing some powder from hers), then swirls him
round again. (142)

The understanding underlying a phrase like “make a fuss of” seems to be that
expressing one’s love for a child by exclaiming over her might encourage her
in turn to express her own feelings on impulse—something the phrase “to
make a spectacle of oneself” implies is best avoided. Historian of emotions
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38 Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005)

Peter Stearns has argued persuasively that the rise in prominence of the con-
cept of “embarrassment” in early twentieth century British and American
societies was linked to a new sense of the childishness of showing one’s emo-
tion openly (147). Parks makes a similar point in his humorous dramatiza-
tion of the emotionally lavish meetings between his children and their nonni,
where, evidently, no such perception is involved.
Yet despite his recognition of this issue, in relation to fare festa and spet-
tacolo Parks clearly retains some of the disapproval that he identifies in the
English words “fuss” and “spectacle,” suspecting his in-laws and even his wife
of insincerity in their displays of feeling, and wondering how effectively his
children are imbibing this modus operandi from their milieu:
mother and father, sons and daughters, all criticize each other endlessly. . . . [Y]et
when they meet, when the Baldassarres are actually face to face, the gestures of
affection, the extravagant fare festa . . . could not be more voluble or enthusiastic.
My wife embraces her mother rapturously. And her father. Michele watches them.
Everybody does seem perfectly . . . delighted to see each other. The nonni are here!
Evviva! Yet Michele is surely aware, even at five, that we complain a great deal
about these [visits] . . . about not knowing how long Nonno and Nonna are going
to stay. . . . [N]o doubt the children take all this in, this wonderful spettacolo of
affection, this carefully choreographed festa. And perhaps somewhere deep down
they are learning to associate it with the fact that they must remember to say a
huge and quite extravagant thank you to Nonno when he remembers to bring
them a present. . . .
I have often wondered, in this regard, whether Italians can really appreciate a story
like King Lear. Why didn’t Cordelia put on a bit more of a show for her foolish
old father? Surely that was wrong of her. For there are times when a little falsehood
is expected of you, and can be engaged in quite sincerely, because appearance has
a value in itself, indicates, precisely, your willingness to keep up an appearance.
(146–48)

Rather than recognizing a gap between his own emotional style and that of
his Italian family, Parks confidently characterizes their behavior as insincere.
His amusement at their expressiveness—“everybody will laugh themselves
silly, hand-clapping, back-clapping, hugging and kissing” (147)—and per-
haps his awareness that his own restraint marks him as an outsider, translates
readily into a cynical, ethnocentric reading. The phrase “carefully choreo-
graphed,” in particular, sounds a note of disaffection which is not really
explored or acknowledged.
At the same time, Parks’s observation that a sense of spettacolo is important
in Italian culture, that the visual element is significant when expressing one’s
feelings, making the expression seem theatrical from an “Anglo” cultural
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Besemeres “Anglos Abroad” 39

vantage point, seems a strikingly insightful one. His children are, as he pres-
ents it, caught up in a dramatic excitement when their nonni arrive, a kind
of performance into which they are drawn. What Parks says about fare festa
applies as much, conversely, to how the cultural outlook embedded in his
own middle-class English upbringing discourages any communication of
feeling that might draw attention to itself, seeing it as an intrusion into the
“personal space” of others.
The passage that follows bears out even more clearly how, for Parks, the
habit of fare festa entails what in English would be called “making a fuss.”
When the nonni pick up their grandchildren from the nursery or from school
in the afternoon, Nonno Adelmo buys them “sweets and ice cream and cakes
and toys,” while Nonna “fusses over them, her voice squeezing itself into lit-
tle trills and warbles of affection which puff off into the emotional air as
though shot through the hot fissure of one of those volcanoes that for all their
furious activity never quite erupt” (153, emphasis added). In other words,
Nonno spoils the children rotten while Nonna’s expressions of love are like
so much hot air—a form of “furious activity” that leads nowhere and that
Parks finds trying to have to listen to.
Parks’s writing about his father-in-law is generally more sympathetic
than this. Although amused by Nonno’s foibles, in another scene he comes
to a kind of understanding with him when Nonno confides in him about his
younger sons’ voracious demands (one wants him to sell the family property
to speed up the inheritance process). Nonno speaks with “a mixture of gen-
uine complaint and resigned humour” about his sons (440). Parks quotes
back at him the family-oriented maxims that he so often hears from Italian
friends and neighbors, such as “Tieni famiglia ” [you support a family], a
phrase which emphasizes the weighty importance of parental responsibility.
After admitting that he plans to ignore his sons’ requests altogether, Nonno
trumps Parks’s teasing with the solemn retort “Gli schiaffi dei figli sono
carezze per i genitori” [a child’s blows are caresses for the parents] (442). After
a silence of about ten seconds, he and Parks both burst out laughing.
This scene, written with great warmth and charm, establishes Nonno as
a kind of honorary good fellow in Parks’s personal economy. Nonna’s expres-
sive behavior is clearly a good deal harder for him to relate to. Her “trills and
warbles of affection” as he calls them, her physical celebration of her grand-
children (“che ometto splendido! ”), transgress his limits of endurance and for-
bearance, whereas Nonno’s expansive gestures are enjoyed as a sort of added
color to their conversations. If Parks is more receptive to Nonno’s way of
seeing things, this appears to be due to a perception of Nonno as a fellow
put-upon male, someone who, unlike Nonna, is able to poke fun at his own
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40 Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005)

emotional outbursts. There is a subtle assimilation here of Nonno’s sense of

humor to Parks’s own ironic, affectionate vision of Italians, rather than real
openness to another, markedly different cultural “take” on emotions.
CONCLUSION

The dialogic character of immersion narratives like Hessler’s and Turnbull’s

lies not in an uplifting trajectory of greater integration into the author’s
adopted society, or a picture of particularly harmonious relations with cul-
tural others, but rather in the tone of their representation of relationships
formed in the space of another language: a degree of humility about their
lack of cultural awareness, and an interest in a different perspective not read-
ily quashed by frustrating and downright unflattering experiences. Humor
plays an important role here, as well as in other narratives of “Anglophones
abroad,” like Australian authors Gillian Bouras’s A Foreign Wife and Gra-
hame Harrison’s Night Train to Granada. The use of humor in these texts is,
of course, as much a means of engaging and relating to the reader as it is a
mode of perception of cultural others being described. It says something
about Anglophone readers, culturally, that so many English-language travel
narratives use humor in representing cross-cultural experience. But the kind
of humor involved tends to be especially revealing of the author’s attitude
towards those represented. Parks’s satirical cameos of his Italian mother-in-
law do not entail any sort of dialogue with her; the humor is meant entirely
for the non-Italian reader. Hessler’s portrayal of his relationship with Teacher
Liao is humorous in a different way, playing both with his own defensiveness
as a waiguoren and (American-formed) expectations of praise for his progress,
and with Teacher Liao’s resolute refusals to countenance criticism of China.
Without wanting to deny the value of Parks’s illumination of cultural dif-
ferences between Italian and English, it is a measure of the lack of reciproc-
ity in his narrating self’s relation to a figure like Nonna that in his depiction
of her, his own deepest cultural assumptions are never seriously in question.
In the other two memoirs, by contrast, we see an attempt to triangulate
between the authors’ initial reactions to their interlocutors, their perception
of the others’ responses, and a rereading of both in the light of what they were
learning at the same time about culture, self, and who it is possible to be when
speaking another language.

NOTES

1. In 1995, Pico Iyer wrote of “that increasingly visible phenomenon whereby much of
the strongest writing in English—and especially in England—is coming from writers
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Besemeres “Anglos Abroad” 41

from the former colonies. . . . Among the names to be found on the short list for Eng-
land’s Booker Prize for Fiction—the clearest register of British literary fashion—are
Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ben Okri, and Timothy Mo” (30).
2. Sociolinguist Aneta Pavlenko discusses both Hoffman’s memoir and American traveler
to Japan Karen Ogulnick’s Onna Rashiku (Like a Woman): The Diary of a Language
Learner in Japan under the rubric of “language learning memoirs.”
3. For an elaboration of the metaphor of self-translation, coined by Eva Hoffman in Lost
in Translation, see Besemeres.
4. Two papers presented at the 2004 IABA conference—Monika Boehringer’s on Acadian
artist Dyane Léger, and Dianne Newell’s on Canadian “explorer-painter” Emily Carr—
and John Barbour’s contribution to this issue, all demonstrate that an attitude of open-
ness to other peoples or places may be evident in writing by travelers who do not
immerse themselves in local languages and cultures.
5. The recent memoir by South African-born Australian poet John Mateer, Semar’s Café:
An Indonesian Journal, presents an interesting contrast to Turnbull (and to other Aus-
tralian travel memoirs like Samantha Wood’s Culua: My Other Life in Mexico ) in its
scrupulous attempt to steer clear of generalizations while also conveying impressions of
place and personal encounter.
6. As noted earlier, Hessler and Meier were the first Americans to live in Fuling in half a
century; their students were mostly from rural backgrounds and had not traveled out-
side of Sichuan.
7. In his most recent book on Italy, A Season with Verona, Parks mentions that he was
twenty-five when he first came to Verona, earning a living as a private English teacher
(104).

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