In Avignon, hungry and desperately wanting lunch, I wandered into a bakery. Like any customer, I went up to the counter and ordered a sandwich, but the cashier looked at me. I suppressed a sigh. It was the look that followed me everywhere in France: a fleeting moment of judgment that crossed the faces of white French people when I spoke to them. It didn’t matter where I was—a shop, a museum, a boulangerie—they all questioned my ability to speak French despite the fact that I’d just spoken it to them.
“You can take,” she said in barely comprehensible English, miming something as I stared in confusion.
It took at least another awkward 30 seconds of me pretending I didn’t understand English and of her continuing to mime an action before I understood that, unlike most boulangeries in France, this was a self-serve bakery, and I was supposed to select my own sandwich from the display cases.
However, I still stood there staring right back at her until she explained herself in French. I was tired of native French speakers switching to English when they noticed that I was a person of colour, despite me asking questions and initiating conversations in French.
Is my French perfect? No. It carries an American accent. I occasionally conjugate verbs incorrectly, and I don’t always catch my verb agreement mistakes. But it’s pretty damn good for my third language.
Good enough to help me get accepted into five PhD programs in French literature, and good enough to help me graduate from an Ivy League institution.
Initially, I wanted to obtain a PhD so that I could pursue my dream of becoming a French professor. French and Francophone departments tend to be overwhelmingly white, and as a Chinese American woman, I was excited about the opportunity to diversify academia. During my three years as a teaching assistant, various students of colour across six different classes told me how grateful they were to learn from a non-native, non-white teacher who focused on Francophone countries, and not just metropolitan France. Several of them were inspired to study abroad, and I was able to warn them of the racism that they might face in France, which was advice I had never benefited from in college because all my professors had been white.
Ironically, the six-year journey of obtaining that PhD in French is ultimately what killed my dream. I don’t know if it was a moment or a process, or a series of microaggressions that led to a culminating realisation. When I began my PhD program, I thought I would find belonging in a space where other people shared my passion for literature. Instead, I was met with ostracism. Once again, native French speakers switched to English when speaking with me, oblivious to the hypocrisy of their actions since they were choosing to speak to me with an accent in a language that wasn’t their native one.
Faculty and graduate students alike in my PhD program didn’t hesitate to single me out for my race, treating me in ways that they would have never subjected my white classmates to. People repeatedly mistook me for the undergrad student worker, two graduate students in Spanish, and a graduate student in the French program who’d already gotten her PhD. (Differentiating between Asian women was apparently too insurmountable a task.) Even though I had once told a professor that, unlike in French, the third-person pronoun is gender neutral when spoken out loud in Mandarin, she proceeded to tell a guest speaker that I was Vietnamese. (When I informed the guest speaker that the professor was wrong and that I was in fact Chinese, she was bewildered and demanded to know how I had learned French.) A lecturer had the audacity to ask if I had trouble controlling my students because I “looked young” and was “very petite”—never mind that students aren’t meant to be controlled. (She didn’t bother posing that question to the white graduate students in the room who were barely older or less petite than me.)
The French department also enforced a racial hierarchy that reflected the foundations of French colonialism, favouring native speakers and white graduate students. Native speakers were predominantly granted the privilege of teaching upper-level language and lower-level literature classes, a bias that dismisses a simple truth: people who learn French as a foreign language are uniquely situated to understand how difficult it is to master grammatical gender and irregular verb conjugations. One semester, I received positive student evaluations from my entire class, but somehow the department teaching award was awarded to a native speaker who had received negative evaluations from all her students. My program also exempted white students from rules that should have applied to everybody. According to the departmental handbook, students in the French program must take a master’s exam that consists of writing three 15-page essays in 72 hours. The three days I spent writing those essays are a sleepless blur. One white French student got an entire year.
Nonetheless, up until my last year of grad school, I somehow remained an optimist. I’d dealt with—and would continue to deal with—racism, sexism, and alienation my whole life. Surely, I could survive more of this violence in academia.
When I went on the job market during my final year of graduate school, I was hopeful. My dissertation was done, and I’d written a strong project. I’d even published an article. Plus, I’d carefully prepared the hellish number of non-standardised documents required for an academic post: a cover letter, a CV, a teaching philosophy, a diversity statement, a research statement, a dissertation abstract, a writing sample, and sample syllabi.
But even as I submitted job applications for tenure-track positions, I wondered if becoming a professor was the right path for me. Working with students brought me joy, but was teaching them the best way of expressing that passion? Did I want to keep dealing with faculty and students who dismissed me because of my phenotype but respected my white and French counterparts? Did I want to keep proving that my accent was good enough, that I was good enough?
Sure, there are students and professors who value diversity. They’re the ones who affirmed the strength of my scholarship and my character and helped me through my program. But there aren’t enough of them, which is where the paradox of academia lies: we need more underrepresented faculty, but they usually end up doing all the diversity work because they tend to be the ones who care. And caring in a space that discourages empathy takes a toll.
To protect my mental health, I went into hiding from my department for a year and a half. In fact, I did such a good job of becoming a ghost that they forgot to pay me at the start of my final semester of graduate school.
The Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives (OADI) took me in and provided refuge. Nobody made assumptions about me there. In that office filled with warm, welcoming staff who provided me with the light that I needed to grow and flourish, I discovered fulfilment in supporting underserved students in the McNair Scholars Program. I learned that I could mentor and advocate for them in the hopes that they wouldn’t experience the exclusion and alienation that I was confronting. For three years, I helped them with graduate school applications and interviews, encouraged them to take leftover food from meetings, and accompanied them to conferences and advocacy trips. I learned the names of forty-five students in three different cohorts, along with their hopes and dreams. My happiest memories of graduate school are all of OADI, of the quiet moments of chatting to students, of the hectic moments of setting up events, and of the joyous moments of celebrating students’ accomplishments.
When I landed two interviews for tenure-track positions at small liberal arts colleges but never heard back after the first round, I felt liberated. It was like the rejections were affirming that I didn’t belong in academia. Inspired by my experience at OADI, I began submitting applications for staff positions focused on student success, belonging, and inclusion instead.
After graduation, I became an advisor, where I currently draw upon the advising and mentoring skills that I learned at OADI to guide undergraduate students through their own academic journeys. I don’t regret getting my doctorate degree, as I wouldn’t have landed this job without it. But 453 miles away from the toxic fumes of my PhD program, I’m finally learning how to breathe again.
I haven’t left French behind entirely, though. My advising job comes with a side of teaching, so I’m in the process of designing a course that questions the romanticisation of France by delving into its colonial legacy. The class will introduce how French identity is built on race-blindness, which will serve as the foundation for exploring how the devastating social, economic, and environmental ramifications of colonialism still affect Francophone countries today.
The course title? I chose “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?”. While that concept is a universalist myth, some small, optimistic part of me managed to survive my graduate school journey and hopes that maybe one day, after France reckons with its colonial past and its ongoing racism, the idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity could become reality.
