As I sit in my bed looking around at all the shoes, clothes, books, and little bits and pieces that don’t really matter but still need to be packed, it’s only appropriate that I reflect on the city I’ve tried to call Home for the past three months. The reflection is going to run on until I, personally, feel like it should stop, because it’s impossible to live in one place for this long and not have a great multitude of thoughts and feelings that circle through your head, opposing or complementing one another.
You’ll notice that this post is significantly more coherent than my other posts about Paris have been, and there’s a very good reason for that:
Paris confused me more than any other place ever had. I couldn’t pull together all these internal questions I had into well-ordered sentences that actually depicted things.
But after three months of living in the City of Lights, it’s time to actually pull these thoughts together since I’ve sorted them out now. Before you read on, I’d like you to keep in mind that this is my own personal take on Paris, and that every person feels differently about every place. Take our other Her Campus UChicago writer Michelle, who studied abroad in Paris during Winter Quarter last year: her final impressions of Paris diverge significantly from mine, but that’s not surprising since we’re two very different people who came to Paris with two different ways of analyzing our surroundings.
In Michelle’s case, the way she saw her surroundings helped her love Paris. In my case, I developed a love-hate relationship with the city that would frequently ping pong from one end to the other, hence the initial confusion.
For instance, there would be times where I’d be walking through Montmartre, the Marais, or taking my usual stroll down Avenue Général Leclerc towards Denfert-Rochereau, and I would feel more than happy. There’s no doubt that Paris is a beautiful city, and there’s also no doubt that the city’s got its own brand of charm that takes you back to some very old traditions. The little cafés, lovely squares and parks, and majestic buildings can definitely transport you to a fantasy land of old.
This same obsession with clinging to tradition, however, also became a huge source of resentment. I tried to elaborate on it in my personal blog, but ended up taking the post down since there ended up being way too many inappropriate, harsh, and pointless personal attacks on both me and other commenters. While there were a lot of objections to what I was saying, I do believe I have a point when I say that Paris and, to a certain degree the rest of France, are in a modern crisis where the country is trying to re-define itself in an ever-changing world while also trying to desperately hold on to what made France, France.
From there comes the question: what is France today? Before, France was an empire, a country of revolutionaries, and a powerhouse of intellectualism and culture, the height of what we think of as European civilisation. But in the 20th century and even a bit before then, they began to slip. They lost their colonies (I know they technically gave Algeria independence, but only after a war that was basically their equivalent of Vietnam), the economy stagnated, and the country started slipping behind other European states, namely Germany, in terms of prominence. Since then, the country’s been trying to find a way to reach their height once again, but they’re not sure of how to do it, especially because they’re not sure what France means anymore. Is it a key EU power player like Germany? It wasn’t Sarkozy, but is it Hollande?
Then there’s the question of what being French means, and that’s where a lot of the controversy about race comes up. During my first cab ride from Charles de Gaulle Airport to the Cité Universitaire, my cab driver elaborated very thoroughly on the subject after I mentioned how we briefly went over immigration in France at UChicago during a French class. He warned me not to be surprised if many people weren’t receptive of me, especially because in recent years more and more Asians had been immigrating to France, which only amplified fear of an “Asian Invasion” among many people.
My cab driver was right and wrong in a few ways. While most Parisians were, as expected, receptive to the fact that I was a foreign Asian woman just trying to grasp and understand how they lived, there were also many people who either made it clear that they didn’t want me there (I was twice refused a cab for being “Chinoise”), or were fascinated to the point of fetishism (various men talking in front of me, since they thought didn’t know I was fluent in French, about how they loved Asian girls because they were “submissive” and “did whatever you wanted them to”). Though I understand that a lot of these incidents reflected entirely on the individual and can’t be wholly applied to describe the general French populace, it does still say something about a society’s views when referring to someone on the street as “Chinoise” is acceptable. Do people mean harm? For the most part, of course not, but it does goes to show how big of a role racial identity plays in defining the “Us” and “Them” factors in France.
So what you see is a society currently shrouded in a lot of pride (the French do have a lot to be proud of), but also a lot of anxiety. You might initially think that all of Europe is going through the same thing and maybe they are, but it’s by far most apparent in France, and it has made people tense.
You can see the tension everywhere, from the brooding people on the Parisian metro to the less-than-satisfactory customer service you get in most places. And it was that tension that made me realize that I probably couldn’t ever settle down in France unless some big radical transformation got under way.
As frustrated as I was to see a lot of these things, though, keep in mind that this is what study abroad is supposed to do. Study abroad isn’t supposed to just take you to another country to experience its culture and get your requirements over and done with. It’s also go a third job: it’s supposed to make you analyze a whole other society and how it’s structured. Its fourth job is to get you to take your analysis of that whole other society and form your own conclusions. My conclusion is that I could never settle down in Paris, but it’s something I could only learn by being here, and that’s what made study abroad so worth it.
I was asked to put together a final take-home message for people thinking of studying abroad, and it took me a while to think of one that would be appropriate. After three months of spending day after day in the arrondissements of Paris, I believe that I can say the following and be completely accurate when I do: when you’re abroad, you may not necessarily fall in love with wherever you live, but you will definitely take away countless bits and pieces of knowledge that are lying around, waiting for you to pick them up before you pack them away into two suitcases, homeward bound.