In recent weeks, the e-mail messages from home have come flying. ''Are you suffering from a lot of anti-Americanism?'' ''I worry your children might be getting a hard time at school. . . .''
My husband and I don't live in Islamabad or even in Seoul. We live in rural France, whose president has just roused the Bush administration's fury by raising his own international coalition against the invasion of Iraq.
Americans are convinced that the French hate America every bit as much as many Americans hate the French. But the reality I've encountered is more interesting -- a France whose values are quite different from the anti-Americanism of Parisians in black 501 jeans and ponytails.
For the past five years, we have been living in a corner of the Mediterranean Pyrenees known as Roussillon. It is inhabited by French Catalan farmers, North African immigrants, pieds noirs who settled here after the French withdrawal from Algeria and a growing population of dropouts from northern France. There is little industry, double-digit unemployment, low crime and one of the highest National Front votes in the nation.