We only spoke English at home, so both he and I had to resort to gibberish until we both learned French in kindergarten. My parents wanted me to learn French at an early age just to give me as many opportunities I could get, living in a world where to me, the dominant culture really was French people.
When Dac and I met in grade 4, we immediately bonded due to our common knowledge of the English language. All of the kids who would be classified as "racial minorities" hung out with the English kids. Both groups were stuck in a school that was for the most part French, so we could band together and relate to each other on a different level. Because none of the French kids watched "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", or "He-Man". Since both the English kids and the ethnic-looking kids enjoyed the same things, we were cool. Nevertheless, the French for the most part weren't colder with the ethnic-looking kids because they looked different, but because their French was shabby. And we for the most part didn't resent the French. We just had no idea what they were talking about whenever their conversations pertained to television or music. We couldn't even talk about the movies we had seen with the French kids because they had seen the translated versions which had different titles and character names.
Since my dad did most of the cooking, I often came to school with crazy Ukrainian sausage sandwiches, Germanic and Slavic meals and all sorts of goulashes. Dac always had rice. A different Vietnamese-inspired meal with rice. We were all about the exotic Tupperware food, and the French kids were all about the balogna on white bread. During the first few years of our elementary school life, we got the usual "yuck," and "ewww!" (in French it was more like "ouache" and "yak") But as the years passed, our ethnic foods became the subjects of many a French child's curiosity.
Some of the more ignorant Francophone kids (who seemed to remain so as far as I can remember) would spew derogatory insults our way.