29-10-2009 om 23:01 by Sueli Brodin

I once heard that there are three things we always do in our own language: counting, praying and swearing. I can think of a fourth, and that would be “writing to our children after they leave home.”

Today I received a long email message from my Japanese Brazilian mother, in Portuguese. Although we speak French when we see each other nowadays, she still writes to me in Portuguese, even when we chat online, because that’s the written language she masters the best and feels most comfortable in.

I imagine that I too will prefer to write to my children in French once they’ve grown up and left home. For the time being, our communication in French is only verbal and it is satisfactory enough in the sense that they seem to understand everything I say. Yet they often struggle to answer me back, mostly due to a lack of vocabulary. This means that I still need to work on improving their command of French, if I ever want to be able to write to them in my most instinctive language… How did my mother do it?

As a parent, it is important for me to be able to share my cultural background with my children. For my Dutch husband this happens naturally and effortlessly, since our children are growing up in his native country, learning to speak, read and write his native language at school, and are being exposed to the same traditions and values he was brought up with.

This is obviously much trickier for me because I don’t have all the necessary framework and ingredients at hand. It’s not only a matter of language. There are also many smells, tastes and sounds in my memory which I’d like to share with my husband and children one day. For example I’d like them to taste a little red type of berry called “pitanga” which I once picked from a tree in Brazil and which stayed in my mind as one of the most exquisite fruit I ever ate.

Once in a while though, and increasingly often it seems, I can find France, Japan and Brazil all together in Maastricht. Last Tuesday afternoon was such a day.

That afternoon my husband, children and I went to see the film “Le Petit Nicolas”, which was being screened at Cinema Lumière as part of “Festival Jong”. The film has just been released in France and it is an adaptation of the famous “Petit Nicolas” book series by Sempé and Goscinny, which practically everyone in France has grown up with. It was a typical French comedy, full of amusing stereotypes and hilarious scenes, and I liked it very much. But what I perhaps enjoyed even more was listening to my children and husband laughing next to me.



After the film, I suggested we take a look at Amazing Oriental, the new Asian supermarket which opened last week at Mosae Forum. The minute we arrived, it felt as if we were in one of the many busy Chinese supermarkets in the Belleville neighbourhood in Paris, near where my parents live and where I do most of my Asian grocery shopping.

We grabbed a basket and the first thing I checked was the Japanese food section. The assortment was good. My husband immediately wanted to get some sushi rice, but the bag weighed 10 kg so we left it for our next visit.



There were many types of Japanese noodles, soya or sesame based sauces, green teas, and I even discovered a new type of ice-cream, called mochi ice-cream, which is a combination of rice pastry filled with red bean ice. I made myself a mental note to buy it next time too. Then my husband spotted a shelf with small cans of coconut cream and exclaimed: “Manjar!” This was his subtle way of telling me that it was about time I make him his favourite Brazilian dessert again.



We also took several packs of Japanese/Chinese rice crackers, two packs of yokan (a Japanese sweet red bean paste delicacy), and some Chinese buns for dinner that evening.

The shop was busy, not only with Asian customers. That’s what I liked the most about its atmosphere. There were many Dutch and non-Asian foreigners waiting on line at the cashier, and I heard many different languages around me, including English, Spanish, German and French.



It was a fulfilling international afternoon in Maastricht. And who knows, perhaps in one of our next visits to Amazing Oriental, I’ll hear myself crying out to my children: “Regardez, des pitangas!”

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