The Two Hardest Things

Not too long ago, I received an e-mail entitled Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: :) insprational Life quotes!!!1 You can imagine my excitement when I opened it, though of course I was careful to avoid plunging in too fast – such rare pleasures are meant to be savoured. So, for a delectable 30 seconds, I pondered gems of philosophy and science – “Life is like riding a bicycle: you’ll never fall off unless you stop peddling” – as well as just plain witty turns of phrase – “Life is a game, play it!!!!!” By the time I was finished, I was an immensely richer person, and I’m not talking about my bank account. Because, as you may or may not be aware, “True wealth comes from experiences, not money.”

But there was one quote in particular that stuck with me. Presented in the form of a three-line poem, it read:

The two hardest things to say in life
are hello for the first time
and goodbye for the last

If you’re feeling soothing waves of catharsis washing over you now, you’re not alone. But perhaps it has also occurred to you to wonder how qualified the author really is to give life advice to thousands of strangers, given that merely saying good morning to any of them would tie for the most difficult conversational experience of her entire life. She could be an official charged with bringing 18 impoverished children the news that they will be evicted from their house on Christmas Day, and also that she ran over their puppy, kitten, and parents on the drive over, and the hardest part of the whole speech would be the greeting at the beginning of it.

Still, e-mail forwards don’t lie. I decided it was up to me to figure out the deeper meaning of these words, and then apply them like a healing balm to every real and potential problem in my life. The reason I’m writing this all now is because I believe I have finally succeeded. With only a few additions, alterations, and a slight change in scope, the quotation could be presented as such:

The two hardest things to do as a foreigner in Switzerland
are to legally obtain a job
and to officially quit one

Let’s start with the issue of getting a job, but to begin with I should make a couple of things clear. The first is that, compared with a very large percentage of the immigrant population in Switzerland, my working prospects are blessed beyond all merit and proportion. I have a European passport, which allows me to bypass a lot official restrictions; I am not of Yugoslavian, Turkish, or African decent, which spares me from many unofficial restrictions; and I have my very own Swiss concubine ready at hand, which confers innumerable legal and personal advantages. You might well declare that Switzerland is my oyster, as indeed I do every day.

Which brings me to the second point: namely, that in spite of all these assets, I have never managed to obtain work legally in Switzerland. Five months after I first applied for a work permit, four months after the date the Police Étrangère promised I would receive it, and two months before I will finally quit my job and leave the country, bureaucrats are still hotly debating whether or not I should be allowed to extend my summer tourist visa until at least the end of 2006. All the work I’ve gotten so far has been on the understanding that my papers should be arriving any day now – which, to be fair, is no more than I’ve been told by the three government offices and one private contracting agency that have passed my file down the line like the baton in a relay race. But even as my legal right to remain in the country for another day remains in question, I am required to pay every month into a fund that will support me when I finally retire in Switzerland some forty years hence. It’s a pretty damning indictment to compare any country’s government bureaucracy to the one in France, as all of you who were in Grenoble can attest, but I think Roman Switzerland comes close to deserving it.

Now let’s move on to the thorny issue of quitting a job. I am leaving Lausanne at the end of May, so I gave my boss my two-months’ notice yesterday. She told me to put it in writing and send it to her. Accordingly, I went home, typed up a one-line letter, put it in an envelope, and dropped it into her mail slot at the office this morning. This seemed a trifle formal for a language school where two years is considered a long time for a teacher to stay, but no matter. Formality is nothing new among the Swiss, whatever their reputation as free-wheeling, salsa-dancing party animals.

Later this morning, however, my boss told me that even this was insufficient. It wasn’t enough to just give her notice: apparently, I had to walk one block to the post office, buy a special express-delivery stamp, and send the notice back to the office. She even advised me to hurry, so that it would reach her by the afternoon. Standing there listen to her explain that she needed the very letter she was already holding in her hand as soon as possible had a nonsensical, Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. And yet this is the standard procedure for leaving every job, large or small, throughout the whole country.

So, five francs and a half-hour wait at the post office later, I am now permitted to quit the job I was never allowed to have in the first place. But I’m not letting it get me down. As a very wise person once told me and everyone else on their mailing list, “In three words I can explain what I've learned about life: it goes on.”

A Short History of Racism

While staying at my grandmother’s house in England this past week, I managed to find, after an exhaustive search, an old obscure children’s book called Epaminondas and His Mama’s Umbrella. I had been greatly looking forward to reading this literary treasure ever since my brother gave it a glowing report following his own visit to my grandmother a couple of years earlier. Nor does the book’s renown stop with him. Even such a discerning information source as Wikipedia has a stub article about old Epaminondas, which observes that the work contains “some racist overtones and stereotypes.”

Now, perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, but to me this statement seems only slightly more understated than pointing out that Mein Kampf is tinged with hints of anti-Semitism. The fact is that Epaminondas and His Mama’s Umbrella is dazzlingly, spectacularly racist. The story centers a black boy called Epaminondas, whose grandiose name is offset by his mighty and ponderous stupidity. All day long Epaminondas goes around misunderstanding simple instructions, eating grass, and prancing around in straw hat, while his mother offers such kind encouragement as “Laws a massy me, you am a stupid coon!” (italics original; all grammatical errors made by the black cast are helpfully highlighted for the edification of the reading audience). It hardly needs mention that Epaminondas has a pair of fire-engine-red lips that take up three quarters of the space on his gawking face, or that the adjective “black” is carefully inserted in front of almost every body-related noun in the story (to wit: “Epaminondas waved his black hand to his black mama, then turned on his black heel and started off, but immediately tripped over a piece of old cornbread and fell right on his black face, while Black Mama screamed racial epithets in his black ear from the bottom of her black throat.”) I can just imagine a smug British child of the 1950s chortling away at this display of stark idiocy. I know exactly what he would look like, too, for when I checked the title page, I found there printed proudly the name of my own father. “He loved that book,” my grandmother confirmed when I delightedly showed her my discovery. “It was right up there with Little Black Sambo, Little Black Quibba, and Little Black Queesha.”

All this is hardly shocking; indeed, if you have parents about the same age as mine, I’d wager that they read the same horrible books when they were young enough to find the idea of a child misplacing an umbrella hilarious. Rather, I’d like to turn this all around to my one unflinching purpose: criticizing Swiss society. Because in this country, you see, such themes are not only the embarrassing relics of an older generation. When Deborah was in primary school, her teachers organized such activities as the group game “Who’s Afraid of the Black Man?”, in which scrubbed Alpine children fled from a classmate in the role of a hungry Native bent on devouring them. After she came home, she could turn the tables by feasting on chocolates called Mohrenchöpfli – “Little African’s Heads” – as indeed kids can to this day. So too can they play “Black Peter,” the Swiss version of the classic Anglo-Saxon card game “Old Maid,” which, let’s be candid, is itself hardly a showcase for enlightened liberal values. But even if our version does pack in the patriarchy, it at least refrains from recreating apartheid in game form, as players rack up pairs of nice white people while desperately trying to exclude poor old Black Peter from the society. And while North American kids are doubtless just as heartless and prejudiced as their Swiss counterparts, they can at least be proud of the fact relatively few of them dress up as “Negerli” for Halloween.

I could go on with this moralistic finger-pointing, and indeed I will do just that, but now I will speak from my own personal experience. Last June, during the height of World Cup frenzy, I went to a bar in St. Gallen with Deborah and her dad to watch the Switzerland-Togo match. Now, I should say quite frankly that up until this point, I had always gotten about as much enjoyment from watching the players on a soccer field as I had from watching the grass. But viewing the game in a run-down Swiss drinking hole proved to be a novel and interesting experience, if only because everyone watching the game got so into it, and by into it I mean appallingly racist. Every time a Togolese player made a foul, took a fall, or touched the ball with his foot, curses would fly like missiles from the assembled multitude, usually pairing some or other dark-coloured substance with some or other part of the human body. Most of what was hissed and screamed against the unfortunate opposition can’t be repeated here, but there was one memorable incident that was comparatively so benign that it seemed almost charitable. During a lull in the hard drinking following Switzerland's 2-0 victory, a faint strain of reggae reached us from the radio of a passing car. Out onto the street jumped Deborah’s father, a spry and jovial patriot, where he screamed at the driver of the car to “turn off that fucking Togomusik!” Prudently, the traitor obeyed.