新世纪英语专业本科生（修订版）综合教程4（第2版）电子教案 Unit 6
Section Three Detailed Reading
A FRENCH FOURTH Charles Trueheart
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Along about this time every year, as Independence Day approaches, I pull an old American flag out of a bottom drawer where it is folded away － folded in a square, I admit, not the regulation triangle. I’ve had it a long time and have always flown it outside on July 4. Here in Paris it hangs from a fourth-floor balcony visible from the street. I’ve never seen anyone look up, but in my mind’s eye an American tourist may notice it and smile, and a French passerby may be reminded of the date and the occasion that prompt its appearance. I hope so.
For my expatriated family, too, the flag is meaningful, in part because we don’t do anything else to celebrate the Fourth. People don’t have barbecues in Paris apartments, and most other Americans I know who have settled here suppress such outward signs of their heritage － or they go back home for the summer to refuel.
Our children think the flag-hanging is a cool thing, and I like it because it gives us a few moments of family Q&A about our citizenship. My wife and I have been away from the United States for nine years, and our children are eleven and nine, so American history is mostly something they have learned － or haven’t learned － from their parents. July 4 is one of the times when the American in me feels a twinge of unease about the great lacunae in our children’s understanding of who they are and is prompted to try to fill the gaps. It’s also a time, one among many, when my thoughts turn more generally to the costs and benefits of raising children in a foreign culture.
Louise and Henry speak French fluently; they are taught in French at school, and most of their friends are French. They move from language to language, seldom mixing them up, without effort or even awareness. This is a wonderful thing, of course. And our physical separation from our native land is not much of an issue. My wife and I are grateful every day for all that our children are not exposed to. American school shootings are a good object lesson for our children in the follies of the society we hold at a distance.
Naturally, we also want to remind them of reasons to take pride in being American and to try to convey to them what that means. It is a difficult thing to do from afar, and the distance seems more than just a matter of miles. I sometimes think that the stories we tell them must seem like Aesop’s (or La Fontaine’s) fables, myths with no fixed place in space or time. Still, connections can be made, lessons learned.
Last summer we spent a week with my brother and his family, who live in Concord, Massachusetts, and we took the children to the North Bridge to give them a glimpse of the American Revolution. We happened to run across a reenactment of the skirmish that launched the war, with everyone dressed up in three-cornered hats and cotton bonnets. This probably only confirmed to our goggle-eyed kids the make-believe quality of American history.
Six months later, when we were recalling the experience at the family dinner table here, I asked Louise what the Revolution had been about. She thought that it had something to do with the man who rode his horse from town to town. “Ah”, I said, satisfaction swelling in 5
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新世纪英语专业本科生（修订版）综合教程4（第2版）电子教案 Unit 6
my breast, “and what was that man’s name?” “Gulliver?” Louise replied. Henry, for his part, knew that the Revolution was between the British and the Americans, and thought that it was probably about slavery.
8 As we pursued this conversation, though, we learned what the children knew instead.
Louise told us that the French Revolution came at the end of the Enlightenment, when people learned a lot of ideas, and one was that they didn’t need kings to tell them what to think or do. On another occasion, when Henry asked what makes a person a “junior” or a “II” or a “III”, Louise helped me answer by bringing up kings like Louis Quatorze and Quinze and Seize; Henry riposted with Henry VIII.
9 I can’t say I worry much about our children’s European frame of reference. There will
be plenty of time for them to learn America’s pitifully brief history and to find out who Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt were. Already they know a great deal more than I would have wished about Bill Clinton.
10 If all of this resonates with me, it may be because my family moved to Paris in 1954,
when I was three, and I was enrolled in French schools for most of my grade-school years. I don’t remember much instruction in American studies at school or at home. I do remember that my mother took me out of school one afternoon to see the movie Oklahoma! I can recall what a faraway place it seemed: all that sunshine and square dancing and surreys with fringe on top. The sinister Jud Fry personified evil for quite some time afterward. Cowboys and Indians were an American cliché that had already reached Paris through the movies, and I asked a grandparent to send me a Davy Crockett hat so that I could live out that fairy tale against the backdrop of gray postwar Montparnasse.
11 Although my children are living in the same place at roughly the same time in their lives,
their experience as expatriates is very different from mine. The particular narratives of American history aside, American culture is not theirs alone but that of their French classmates, too. The music they listen to is either “American” or “European,” but it is often hard to tell the difference. In my day little French kids looked like nothing other than little French kids; but Louise and Henry and their classmates dress much as their peers in the United States do, though with perhaps less Lands’ End fleeciness. When I returned to visit the United States in the 1950s, it was a five-day ocean crossing for a month’s home leave every two years; now we fly over for a week or two, although not very often. Virtually every imaginable product available to my children’s American cousins is now obtainable here.
12 If time and globalization have made France much more like the United States than it
was in my youth, then I can conclude a couple of things. On the one hand, our children are confronting a much less jarring cultural divide than I did, and they have more access to their native culture. Re-entry, when it comes, is likely to be smoother. On the other hand, they are less than fully immersed in a truly foreign world. That experience no longer seems possible in Western countries － a sad development, in my view.
I. Questions
1. Why does the author hang the American flag from his fourth-floor balcony in Paris? (Paragraph 1)
Answer: He does it for two reasons. First, as an American living in Paris, he does not want to
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新世纪英语专业本科生（修订版）综合教程4（第2版）电子教案 Unit 6
forget his native heritage and flag-hanging is the only thing he can do to celebrate Independence Day. Second, he wants to use the flag-hanging as a special means to teach his children about American history and as a reminder of their American identity.
2. The author has kept the old flag for a long time. Why didn’t he get a new one? (Paragraph 1) Answer: The text does not tell us explicitly, but it is very likely that this flag was brought to Paris from the U.S. a long time ago. To the author, the old flag is a better reminder of his home country than a new one.
3. What are the costs and benefits of raising children in a foreign culture? (Paragraph 4)
Answer: According to the author, it is difficult for children to understand and identify the virtues of their native country without living in it, so they need to go back to their native country to make up for the ineffective family education. But the practice of raising children in a foreign culture has its merits. For example, it helps the children to acquire the new culture without being exposed to the disadvantages of their native culture.
4. Why do the author and his family go back home for the summer? (Paragraph 5)
Answer: As expatriates, they have little access to the traditional culture of their motherland. So they go back home to trace the heritage of Americans. In addition, because their children are reared up in a completely foreign culture, they have the obligation to teach their children the culture and history of their motherland.
5. What are the differences between the author and his children as expatriates at about the same age? What causes the differences? (Paragraph 9-10)
Answer: They are different in both behavior and mentality. His children are quite like their French peers in behavior and dress style, while when the author was a child he was quite different from his French peers. These differences are due to the rapid social changes and cultural merging that have been happening all over the world. The world is becoming a huge melting pot in which different cultures are mixing up.
6. Why does the author say the development is sad? (Paragraph 12)
Answer: Because globalization becomes the keynote of life in the world today. Cultures are merging with each other; distinctions between different cultures are becoming blurred. Children cannot tell the exact differences between their own culture and other cultures and it is impossible for them to relive the author’s experience of living in a foreign culture. This kind of development of cultural globalization is a sad thing in the author’s view.
II. Words and Expressions
Paragraph 1-3
1) fold away: fold into a smaller, neater shape for easy storage
e.g. These camping chairs can be folded away and put in the trunk.
The piece of paper was folded away carefully and tucked into her purse. foldaway (i.e., collapsible) bed/iron board
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新世纪英语专业本科生（修订版）综合教程4（第2版）电子教案 Unit 6
2) regulation: a. in accordance with the regulations; of the correct or designated type
e.g. As we walked along the street, we could see the noisy cheerful group of people in
regulation black parade tunics.
He had the short regulation haircut of a policeman.
3) prompt: v. cause or bring about an action or feeling Derivation: prompt n. → prompt a. →promptly ad.
e.g. The Times article prompted him to call a meeting of the staff. My choice was prompted by a number of considerations.
4) refuel: v.
(1) supply a vehicle with more fuel
e.g. The authorities agreed to refuel the plane.
(2) take on a fresh supply of knowledge, information, etc.
e.g. In a society of intense competition, people have to refuel every year .
5) twinge: n.
(1) If you feel a twinge of an unpleasant emotion, you suddenly feel it. e.g. John felt a twinge of fear when he saw the officer approaching. (2) A twinge is a sudden, sharp pain.
e.g. I feel a twinge in my back now and again.
Paragraph 4-9 6) exposed to:
If you are exposed to something dangerous or unpleasant, you are put in a situation in which it might harm you.
Derivation: expose v. →exposure n.
e.g. Poor John was exposed to the wind and rain. Translation:
吸二手烟的青少年长大以后患心脏疾病的机率比较高。
Answer: Teens exposed to second-hand smoke have a higher risk of developing heart disease later in life.
7) object lesson: a striking practical example of some principle or ideal
e.g. They responded to daily emergencies in a way that was an object lesson to us all. That was an object lesson in how to handle a difficult customer.
8) take pride in = pride oneself on: be proud of e.g. She took pride in her flower garden.
The team has achieved unprecedented success in this season. All the players take pride in
being a member of this team.
We pride ourselves on always being punctual.
9) confirm: vt. prove that sth. is true
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