Errances

chapitre 5, page 23 : « I googled the salary range for junior vice presidents at his bank: €137,000 to €217,000 a year, plus bonus and housing allowance. I tried to take heart from this. That he could have that many zeroes and not consider himself wealthy surely showed that material lucre would not make me happy, ergo that I needn’t find a real job. But if money wouldn’t improve my life, I couldn’t think of anything likelier to.
Staying in his flat was possibly a rupture from the capitalist notion that I was only worth something if I paid my own way economically. Or maybe it made me a bad feminist. I could puzzle it out once the experience had passed. There wasn’t much point in dwelling on it until then. What if I decided I didn’t like staying with him? I’d have to do something else, and I mightn’t like any of the alternatives any better. »

p.26 : « […] he did not want to be my boyfriend. That hurt my ego. I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them. »

p.28 : « I imagined her having me for dinner, just the two us. I’d mispronounce « gnocchi » and she’d avoid saying it all evening so as not to  embarrass me. I would meet her eye and think: in this way I could strip you of every word you know. I’d take them like truffles and you’d say, « Help yourself », and then I’d take those too and you’d be speechless. »

p.29 : « You could go manless entirely, and I saw a great deal of elegance in that approach, but enough people felt otherwise that I thought it best to have one. »

chap 6, p. 31 : « He’d voted for Brexit for tighter borders, and was applying for an Irish passport to avoid being stopped at them. »

p. 36 : « There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen. »

chap 7, p.39 : « His honesty hurt my pride, so I told myself he was a liar. And I couldn’t feel truly, sumptuously sorry for myself, because it wasn’t reciprocation I was craving. My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine. No one would sympathise with that. I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me. »

p.40 : « People frequently said things about themselves they did not like other saying, but I was not always inclined to be good at men. »

chap 8, p.44 : « Ava is drawn to wealthy partners as a way of quieting her class anxieties. In practice having sex with rich people only heightens her awareness that she herself is not rich, and yet she keeps on doing it. »

chap 9, p. 48 : « […] speculating as to whether his father’s politics suggested there was a degree of daddy issues bound up in his attraction to me, […]

p.49 : « Others were obeying the ever-robust principle that one could not expect rich people to stay anywhere too long. »

chap 10, p. 51 : « […] but historians could debate all that when we were dead and interesting. »

p.52 : « It would almost suggest that capitalism doesn’t fairly remunerate socially important labour. »

chap 12, p.61 : « You were supposed to find it endearing that children thought only of themselves. Especially if you were a woman, it was meant to make you want one of your own. It would do parents a world of good if I told them their child actually suffered from a form of self-absorption that some adults outgrew and others didn’t. They could note the risk factors: only child, male only child, privately educated male only child whose parents, at odds with their stated politics, gave that child everything until he was of an age to buy it all himself, fellatio potentially included depending on how I was feeling about my own motives. But none of this seemed quite the rub for term reports. »

p.61 : « Julian often reminded me to eat. It made him feel better about liking that I was thin. »

p.62 : « When we’d finished eating, Julian said: « I remember the first time I saw you. You were walking so carefully in your heels. I was wondering what this shy person was doing having so much hair. »

p.62 : « We knew I was complex when others didn’t. This made us better, or at any rate different, which because of our contempt for them still made us better. »

chap 13, p.65 : « I’m going to be me, but worse. »

p.67 : « But you had to go down every day to be a part of things. »

chap 14, p.72-73 : « My eight-year-olds had mastered prepositions and were now on question words. We recited them like bullets : who what when where why. Most English people said “what” as “wot”, though authors only spelled it “wot” when the characters were poor. Sometimes I said “wot”, but with my parents I pronounced it as they did: “hwot”. This had been correct when Churchill said it but was hokey now Cameron did not. Even the Queen had stopped haitching it, at the behest, no doubt of some mewling PR consultant. Irish English kept things after Brits dropped them. “Tings” was incorrect,  you needed to breathe and say “things”, but if you breathed for “what” then that was quaint. If the Irish didn’t aspirate and the English did then they were right but if we did and the English didn’t then they were still right. The English taught us English to teach us they were right.
I was teaching my students the same about white people. If I said things one way and their live-in Filipino nanny said them another, they were meant to defer to me. Francie Suen’s mother thanked me once for my hour a week. I smiled, accepted her praise, and never asked whether she should also credit the helper who spoke English with Francie every day. From job adverts on expat forums I estimated she made a quarter of what I did. One forum post asked what children should call their helpers. The parent knew “auntie” was common but worried that if they called the helper that and later fired them the kids would think other family members could also be dismissed.
On days off it was illegal for helpers to stay in the house. This was so the government knew they were really getting a holiday. They didn’t have the money to go other places indoors, so they sat on cardboard boxes in parks and on walkways.
The parents took sixteen hours a day from their helpers, then complained if I started lessons three minutes late. When Joan accused me of stealing time, I thought: yes, and so do bosses. »

p.74 : « At least Julian was honest. He’d never experienced anything but permission. I hated him for it, but all the same I was glad he knew he had it. Most men with permission never realised. »

chap 15, p.77 : « Benny was not taken with my post-Christmas surliness. He liked to remind me that the demand for ‘standard English » came from the parents themselves. Sometimes when he’d paid me, I’d comment on the learning materials. The illustrations were of white children braving weather conditions that would never occur near the equator. We branded a mistake any usage that might hint a Hongkonger was from Hong Kong. »

p.78 : « On my lunch break I messaged Julian. Unusually, he sent a long reply. He said Benny possibly meant – big “possibly”, but possibly – that it was white-saviourish to think Hongkongers didn’t know their own interests in a world where, like it or not, children go ahead with standard English. Parents couldn’t change society, so they aimed for its inequalities to harm someone else’s child rather than their own. Julian’s mother had made that choice when she sent him to public school, and mine when she’d told me not to say “amn’t”.
He often surprised me by coming out with statements like that. Something I admired in him was that he could calmly note where he benefited from unfairness – not self-indulgently like I often did, but factually. »

p.78 : « For a while I luxuriated in thinking they’d all been normal but me, I was the only strange person who’d ever fascinated him so, and I alone stroked every contour of his mind. »