NorthSouthEastWest: Expat Dispatches
Moving abroad sends our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell into overdrive, and in this month’s NSEW offering, we explore an element of expat life through one or more of the five senses.
In Bottling the Essence of Beach Life, I (South) walk us through the multitude of sensory experiences found at the beach (more than you might think!). In Sound Check, Linda (North) finds that it is distinctive sounds that remind her where she is. In Tastes that Tell Our Stories, Erica (East) admits that she does, in fact, cry at Cheerios and roasted chicken. And here in Nasal Manoeuvres, Maria (West) knows that no-one knows France like her nose knows France.
Our theme for February — the five senses — offers a cornucopia of choice for the NSEW blogger. Should I write about what I see? I could easily manage a few hundred words on the wondrous sight of the sun rising over ripening vines in Bordeaux or glinting off the sails of the magnificent Sydney Opera House. Should I write about what I hear, and describe the crash of the surf at Manly Beach or the cacophony of Mandarin and English at a Singaporean wet market? Perhaps I should write about what I taste, and wax poetic about mee goreng or crème brulée (and somewhat less poetic about Vegemite.) I could always write about what I feel — the soft sand beneath my feet, the hot sun (or torrential rain) against my skin, that pesky rivulet of sweat coursing between my shoulder blades as I attempt my maiden drive on the left side of the road.
Tempting, all of it. But I’d rather write about cigarettes. French cigarettes, to be precise.
I moved to France at the tender age of 19: alone, excited, and scared out of my wits. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, thrust into a world I didn’t understand and lurching from one bizarre encounter to another. Eventually, the exaggerated peaks and valleys of culture shock abated, and in time I barely noticed the differences that had been so alarmingly apparent only months before.
The cycle continued when I moved back home. Things I had always taken for granted were thrown into sharp relief, and once again I felt disoriented and confused. A few days after I returned, still feeling the effects of jet lag, I opened my front door and was hit by an almost out-of-body experience: I could have sworn, just for a second, that I was back on the streets of Caen. It was such a visceral sensation that it came as a shock to realize I was not in the market on the rue de Bayeux, but in the front hall of the home I shared with my parents. The familiar sounds of the Saturday night hockey game coming from the TV in the living room were at odds with — what? I couldn’t put my finger on it until I sniffed the air, and then I knew. My house in suburban Toronto reeked of French cigarettes.
All became clear once I entered the living room and saw the duty-free pack of Gauloises on the table. At that time, courtesy of my parents, cigarette smoke was part of the fabric of our lives. (Literally: When I was little I once told my mom I liked our new white curtains better than the old yellow ones. Only there hadn’t been any recent home decor purchases, just a very thorough spring cleaning. If that’s what cigarette smoke does to polyester blends, I shudder to think what their lungs looked like.) The odour of my parents’ ciggies, however, was a pale imitation of the instantly-recognizable and much more exotic perfume emitted by French tobacco.
Gauloises and Gitanes had been the dominant brands in France since the Great War. Made from darker “brune” tobacco, they were strong, with a distinctive, powerful aroma. And in 1984, when I arrived in Normandy, they were everywhere: restaurants (a non-smoking section? Mais quelle idée!), bars, shops, offices — wherever people and their lungs gathered, I was enveloped in second-hand smoke.
These cigarette brands were national icons, firmly embedded in the French cultural consciousness. Back when nicotine was sexy and everyone inhaled, chain-smoking celebrities such as Serge Gainsbourg epitomized fumeur chic with Gauloises as their weapons of choice. Everyone from artists and intellectuals to fonctionnaires and street-cleaners had a little blue packet in their attaché case, pocket, or handbag.
More than two decades after my first stay in France, my family and I moved from Singapore to Bordeaux. Much had changed in the intervening years. I had long forgotten about Gauloises, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something — some integral part of the France I remembered — was missing. When it finally dawned on me that the ubiquitous plumes of smoke no longer gave off that distinctly French bouquet, I asked one of my friends why.
“Nobody smokes those anymore,” she told me. “They’re old-fashioned: too raw, too heavy.”
Tastes had changed. The brune cigarettes had a global market share of 80% in 1978. That figure had slipped to less than 20% by 2005, the last year Gitanes and Gauloises were produced in France. The smoke I smelled in Bordeaux came from lighter, low-tar brands of the American invasion.
I’m an inveterate non-smoker. I hate everything about smoking — hate it, in fact, with every single one of my five senses — but I can’t help feeling the tiniest twinge of regret that the winds of change have swept away those noxious clouds of a bygone era. The people of France are better off, but my nose will always know that a small part of my past has disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Is there an element of your own (expat) life that you can most relate to through a sight, smell, sound, taste or touch? Or maybe, like Maria, you also have fond memories of a particular sense and pine for a return to it?
It’s amazing how a singular smell (or snippet of a song) will transport us back in time to a particular memory, isn’t it Maria? Gitanes and Gauloises no longer produced? Quelle horreur! Now the French will have to fall back on that sultry language to signal their sexy credentials…
It’s funny how attitudes change over time. Shortly after we left France, a smoking ban was introduced. I’d love to see how that’s working out — it would be like banning wine or croissants. Production of Gitanes & Gauloises has moved to Spain because there’s still a sizeable market there — for how long, I don’t know.
I remember participating in a French exchange as a 15 year old and spending a week in Alencon in the North West of France (Normandy region). I still remember the smell of Gitanes and Gauloises in the cafes.
I also seem to remember my exchange student coming to stay with me and the smell of these iconic French brands invading my parents’ house in the middle of the night. Oui, oui. Oh, yes, indeed.
I’m currently in the throws of experiencing once familiar senses totally anew, having returned to China for the first time in two and a half years. And funny, I was just thinking today how the ubiquitous scent of Double Happiness cigarettes don’t permeate my experience in China this time round as they did a mere three years ago. I can’t say that I miss traffic jams in the back of a smoke-filled taxi though. Nope, don’t miss that much at all!
How can you not love a cigarette called Double Happiness? What a great name!
Although surely a good thing to ban, it’s still a shame. That said, I bet you can still find a gnarly old Frenchman sat puffing away on a Gitanes outside his door in a regional village or town…
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Anytime. Thank you.