When I moved to the United States at age 10, I didn’t know how to speak English. The transition was made easier through one set of relatives and the French and Swiss families that became our friends. These French Speakers living in an English world considered us French, not French Canadian. Our home was French. The outside world, the one in which I attended school and made friends, was no longer French Canada, but the United States. My world slowly became bilingual.

I was put into an American public school at the sixth grade level. It took a few months before I could understand everything. At first I had to learn to use my eyes to read what people were trying to tell me. Sometimes I must have also used intuition. As I became more fluent in English and started to lose my accent, I became more accepted. No one questioned that I might be anything but American by the time I was going to high school because I spoke fluent English.

My parents are from Paris. I was born in Montreal where I lived in a French home and went to a French private school where I learned the geography and history of France, not Canada (photo).

No one questioned that I might be anything but American by the time I was going to high school because I spoke fluent English