Category: Culture

I know it’s a little bit late for National Coming Out Day, but I have a coming out of my own to make.

I am Canadian, and I don’t like hockey.

I don’t dislike the sport. It just leaves me completely indifferent. In elementary school, I would remain silent while my friends would discuss the previous night’s game during our morning walk to school. In secondary school, the annual hockey module in our PE classes was always the least interesting to me. And since I moved to the US ten years ago, I must have left many a would-be acquaintance scrambling for new topics after I replied in the negative to their “You’re Canadian? You must like hockey!” or “You’re from Montreal? Patrick Roy, man…”

All of which really means that this article from by Stephen Marche in The Walrus — the closest thing to The New Yorker in my home and native land — deserves all the accolades it can get. Indeed, although I have no interest in its subject matter, I read it with considerable interest from beginning to end:

From Numéro Cinq magazine, an interesting article by Sion Dayson about what it’s like for a biracial American to live in Paris:

Now in France — it’s been five years already — I need not chase slippery identities as I am considered only one thing: a foreigner. Full stop.

Here they keep no statistics on race or ethnicity. This is the land of liberté, egalité, fraternité, after all. Everyone is simply French. It would be “racist” to demand any further information from people, as if those answers mean anything.

When I open my mouth in Paris, the first response is not “welcome,” but “where are you from?” If it were simple curiosity, that would be one thing. (I am a curious person, too.) But there are no follow-up questions, no real interest. Only the need to establish a distance and an unspoken message: You are different from me.