Rebel Chef

One

Home

One day late in the summer of my twenty-fourth year, I stepped off a plane and took a deep breath. I had never been to San Francisco before, but as I breathed in, I knew instantly, almost violently, and without a shadow of a doubt something that a quarter of a century later I'm still completely convinced of: I was home.

I had left my parents that morning on a station platform in Quimper, northern France, waving to me as my train left for Paris. My brother, Jean-Christophe, was beside them. A day earlier, we had all stood in a church and watched him get married, surrounded by family and friends. That was where I belonged, in a lush farming region of northwest France where I had lived all my life and where my family has roots going back generations. And yet, as my train left the station that day, I was ecstatic. I couldn't wait to get out.

The decision to move to America looked, from the outside, impulsive. My English was imperfect. I had no long-standing friends or relations in the United States. My parents, although well traveled, were chiefly interested in Europe and I had inherited their priorities. And even though I had grown up hooked on American TV shows-primarily Starsky & Hutch, those maverick TV cops of the 1970s whom I'd once planned to grow up and turn into-my knowledge of the United States was hazy. I could talk for hours about German reunification, the Polish Solidarity movement, or the long-range fallout of the Second World War on French politics, but I was largely ignorant about the United States. This was partly why I wanted to move there. For some, lack of information is frightening. For me, it has always been energizing.

This draw I feel toward the unknown, and the fundamental curiosity that drives it, is connected to how I came into the world. I have two birth certificates, with a different name and a different birthplace on each. My parents are Allain and Louise Crenn and my brother is Jean-Christophe Crenn, but I'm aware that I have at least two other siblings in the world, neither of whom I have met and about whom I know nothing. And then there is the riddle of my birth parents.

When I left France that hot summer day, I knew these three things about myself: I knew I had been placed in an orphanage at the age of six months. I knew that the name on my birth certificate had been Dominique Michele. And I knew that when my parents first set eyes on me, I had been smiling.

I knew lots of other things, too, of course. I knew I was competitive. I knew I was ambitious. I knew my recently completed degree in economics, undertaken in the absence of any better ideas and largely to please my education-loving parents, wasn't going to be the basis of my career. I knew I loved poetry-especially Baudelaire-for the way it could transfer emotion from one person to another, and I knew I wasn't going to be a poet. The things I had loved as a child revolved around being outside and running around, and at the age of twenty-four nothing much had changed. I couldn't imagine doing a job that kept me hunched over a desk or in an office all day.

I also knew I liked cooking. My love of food was almost too intimate to connect with a career. It was deeply bound up with my love for my family and my relationship with the country I was leaving. To me, France didn't mean Paris or fashion or the Left Bank or the Belle Epoque, although I loved all those things. At mineral level, however, France meant something else: the blazing green countryside and the wild northwest coast. It meant lobster just caught from the sea and vegetables yanked from the earth, dirt still clinging to their roots. There was something about plunging my fingers into the warm summer soil or biting into cold salted butter on fresh bread that affected me the way nothing else did. It would take me a long time to articulate and even longer to accept, but deep down, on that day of departure, I knew I loved France.

Of course, I hated the place, too. The reality of living in France, where tradition is revered to the point of intransigence, is that doing things differently is rarely an option, and even as a child I had known I was different. It wasn't simply that my interests were different from those of my friends. I was different in more profound ways, too. To be adopted is to have a shadow life, to live alongside the outline of What Might Have Been. What if I had stayed with my birth mother? What if another couple had adopted me? What if no one had adopted me and I had grown up in the orphanage? These were thoughts that as a child had the power to flip my stomach. When I boarded the plane that day, it is safe to say the number of things I didn't know about myself-crucial, structural things of a kind that, for most people, go to the heart of who they think they are-outnumbered the things that I did.

It didn't matter. The blank slate of my adoption opened up possibilities for reinvention. And while the details might have been slight, for twenty-four years the story of where I had come from had told me everything I needed to know. I knew the world was wide open and anything could happen.

In the mid-1960s, my parents lived in Garches, a picturesque town near Versailles seven miles west of Paris, because of my dadÕs job. When I was growing up, my dad moved between various government posts in and around Paris. For a while he worked as the director general of a think tank called the CFPC - Centre de formation des personnels communaux-, and later as the secrŽtaire gŽnŽral in Meudon. At the time of my adoption, he was the regional representative for Brittany in the French national government and went to work every day at the National Assembly.

This was kind of a big deal. As a child, I was never ashamed or self-conscious of being adopted, mostly thanks to my parents' attitude; they were so open and positive about our adoption, it never occurred to me to be otherwise. I suspect that some of my confidence, however, also came from the fact of who my father was. We weren't wildly rich, but in the communities of my childhood Allain Crenn was a well-respected and connected politician, among whose friends and mentors included Charles de Gaulle. The pair had met in London during the Second World War, when my father was a volunteer for the French Resistance and de Gaulle was head of the Free French government in exile in Britain. In the 1960s, when de Gaulle was president of France, he and my father remained on friendly terms.

I like to imagine my father as a swashbuckling teenage Resistance hero. But in a quieter way, my parents' decision to adopt my brother and me, two children of obscure origin, was an act of bravery, too. It's worth remembering that 1960s France was not a liberal place. The demonstrations that took place in 1968, and that both of my parents participated in, broke out in part as a response to the stifling conservatism of a society in which the Catholic Church still wielded enormous influence. Even now, France is less progressive than it might superficially seem: legally, gay couples can adopt in France, but in reality it is extremely difficult. Algerians and North Africans face widespread discrimination. In 1966, a couple adopting children who did not look altogether "French" was a broad-minded act.

I never spoke to my parents about their inability to conceive a biological child, but later I found letters that hinted at how difficult it had been. "No baby yet," wrote my mother, painfully, in letters home to her family years before my brother and I were adopted, a sentiment echoed by my father in his own letters. "We hope to expand our family soon," he wrote.

I sometimes think that my father's open-mindedness came in part from having grown up with three sisters. There was a sensitivity to him, an openness to the world and to others that I have always put down to his upbringing as the only boy among women. When my parents adopted my brother and me, they did so with it firmly in mind that it doesn't matter where you come from, or even whether where you come from could ever be known.

In the case of Jean-Christophe, the lack of information about his birth parents was absolute. Jean-Christophe was a little boy with dark hair and chubby cheeks who was impossible not to love and who, my parents were told by the orphanage, had been abandoned at birth by a woman whose name they couldn't disclose. They could, however, tell my parents she was from a wealthy and prominent family in Orsay, near Versailles, and had conceived Jean-Christophe out of wedlock; her family had told her that if she kept the child, they'd disown her. Part of the terms of his abandonment were that the name of his birth mother would never be revealed.

By contrast, my birth mother's surname was on my birth certificate, there was a full file on me at the orphanage-albeit one we weren't permitted to see-and my place of birth was listed as Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, a suburb of Paris. Growing up, I had no reason not to believe this information. Whoever heard of a birth certificate getting it wrong?

The story of my adoption begins when my parents came to the orphanage, looking for a little girl to be a sister for Jean-Christophe. It was another little girl, one of Algerian origin, whom my parents planned to adopt that day. They had already met her and played with her, but that day the director of the orphanage called them into his office, and while they sat anxiously across the desk from him, informed them it had come to light that the little girl had a sibling, a brother, who was elsewhere in the orphanage system. What did they want to do?

This was a terrible dilemma for my parents. They didn't want three children. On the other hand, they didn't think it was right to separate the child from her brother. Reluctantly, they told the orphanage director they didn't think they could take the little girl, and in that moment, both her life and my own were transformed. It was as they were walking out of the orphanage, full of guilt and disappointment, that another child caught their eye. She was less than a year old, smiling and grabbing at their feet as they passed. When they asked the director of the orphanage about her, they were told her name was Dominique. She just got here, the director said.

What happened next is so imbedded in the legend of my adoption that it feels like the beginning of everything. My brother, who at two and a half had accompanied my parents to the orphanage, took one look at me, toddled over, and gave me a big hug while the adults looked on in amazement. I sometimes think that the fierceness with which I love Jean-Christophe is connected, in some deep way, to an idea I have of him as the person who "chose" me.

Breaking to my parents that I was moving to the United States had been a stressful and nerve-racking experience. I didnÕt want to hurt them. As a young man, my dad had struck out on his own, leaving the family farm to go into politics, but he had moved only a few hours away from his parents and would eventually retire back to Brittany. My brother had settled a few miles from my parentsÕ summer home in Locronon. With the exception of my fatherÕs sister Josephine, who had emigrated to South Africa, the rest of the family was in France. My desire to go further afield with no definite plans was not one my parents immediately recognized, and although this was a feeling that over the years I had grown used to, it still unsettled me.

As the plane took off, I comforted myself by going over all the things that I knew. I knew how to triage a potato. I knew what a freshly caught lobster smelled like, and how that smell could fizz through one's brain. From my father's example, I knew that the most important thing was to fight for what you believe in and for those you love-even if, like me, you were hell-bent on leaving them. Before leaving France, I had approached various culinary colleges and training schools and been warned I might not be suitable for acceptance. As the plane landed in San Francisco that evening, I knew something else, too, the strength of which, perhaps, no one else knew: that whatever happened next, being told no simply wasn't an option.