Fifi La Rouge

In elementary school, I had created a character named “Fifi La Rouge,” a white woman with blonde hair who would interject random French words I had learned in French class. At that time, I believed all French people were white. Fifi La Rouge was a bombshell who attracted all the boys in our English writing class. I remember Ms. Kato sometimes having me read my Fifi La Rouge adventures to the laughter and snickers of my classmates.

At one point, my stories became a little too suggestive, and Ms. Kato had to have a conversation with me about it. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe I was writing soft porn in fifth grade. Or maybe we had just had our sex ed class, and I was talking about body parts we had just learned about, trying to remember the terms. Perhaps I was reading too many novels about summer romances or watching too much Beverly Hills: 90210. I have no idea what spooked Ms. Kato, but I knew I couldn’t be writing or talking about breasts when a boy walked into the room.

I pictured Fifi La Rouge with an accent. She was Parisian and would whip her blonde hair around, widen her blue eyes, and capture the attention of any boy she wanted—even the ones she didn’t want, but who had something she desired. She would drop random French words into conversation such as arrondisement or pomme for no reason whatsoever. It was English class, after all.

Fifi La Rouge was my counterpart in real life. I wanted boys to notice me too, but my parents, especially my father, told me: 'You will never find a husband.' I was too feminist. I had too many opinions. I complained that my parents tried to turn me into a slave by making me wash dishes for seven people every night, and my father would command me to do things he could easily do himself, like, “Give me a glass of water with ‘eyessss’ in it.” I’ll never forget how he pronounced 'ice'—because of his accent, it sounded like 'eyes.' That was the only humorous part of the situation. I would have to immediately run to the kitchen and fetch his water otherwise there would be hell to pay.

But Fifi could never. She was bossy and tough. She whipped her long blonde hair as she walked along the Seine in her black and white striped shirt and skintight mini skirt like she owned the goddamn city. Her red heels made the click-clacking sound that makes men lift their heads to look. She would have said, “Get your own l’eau, s’il vous plait,” and kept walking. She would have gotten what she wanted with her audacity of feminine caucasity. She was the free Western woman I could never be.