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YEAR SIX BEGINS |
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American in Paris |
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One day you may wake up
thinking you're French
of TheColumnists.com
As an American abroad, you have an advantage over other expatriates. It’s pretty easy to follow what’s happening back home by reading the local papers and watching television news. In Europe generally, and in France in particular, people want to know what’s happening in the U.S.
Yet as interesting as these accounts are for an American, they are entirely unsatisfactory. Aside from the really big stories, the foreign media provide only more or less random snapshots of what’s really happening.
At first, these neatly wrapped vignettes strike you as gross caricatures, blowing out of proportion one particular aspect of a diverse, complex reality. The report on the plight of blacks in some urban ghetto portrays America as if it were as racist as apartheid South Africa. The story on anti-abortionists makes it look as if America is as fanatically religious as the Taliban. The accounts are not false, you say to yourself, they’re just painfully incomplete, out of context. Just imagine how the Afghans or South Africans might react to last night’s 60-second account of events in their countries.
Over time, though, your level of frustration declines, inversely proportional to your level of comfort in your new surroundings. As you integrate into your adapted setting, your habits and reflexes start to change. You write the date before the month. You wouldn’t think of dining before 8 pm. More importantly, you become increasingly aware of the diversity and complexity into which you have parachuted.
Gradually, imperceptibly, you become interested in the jockeying for power within the French Socialist Party, or the nature of racism in the working class suburbs of Paris. The standings of the teams in the first division of the soccer league start to overshadow the standings in the American League.
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As if there were a set limit to the amount of political, social or cultural understanding you could handle, your vision of America simplifies as your vision of your current context complexifies.
Every time I see my brother-in-law back in New York, he tries to update me on the latest Yankee psychodrama. I don’t have the heart to tell him that, although I used to be a fan of the illustrious Bronx Bombers, they just seem a bunch of nameless overpaid jocks to me now, to whose destiny I am largely indifferent. If, on the other hand, he were interested in discussing whether Paris Metro workers are justified in striking over changes in pension laws that do not apply to them (which he is obviously not), I’m raring to go.
Editors who manage foreign correspondents like to move their journalists to a new assignment every few years, and for good reason--to prevent them from ‘going local.’ The danger is that, as correspondents mesh with the fabric of local reality, they lose touch with the reality of their readers or viewers back home. In France, that can translate into sympathy for the welfare state or strong government controls on business. Or resentment over the considerable influence of American television, movies and fast food chains.
It takes a while to figure out what the local scene is all about, and then, to adapt yourself to it. Keep moving every few years and you’ll probably remain a tourist, looking in from the outside. There are numerous communities of these revolving door cosmopolites here in Paris--diplomats and executives of multinationals for the most part--living in bizarre bubbles suspended somewhere outside of ordinary everyday life. If that’s not your cup of tea, you can either go back home or go local.
But you don’t suddenly become less American the day you decide to sink roots (the decision, by the way, probably takes longer than a day). To borrow an image from Luc Sante, a transplant to the U.S. who describes his Belgian origins in The Factory of Facts, you just add new layers of sediment on top of the old ones.
We remain the products of the “things seen and heard and smelled and tasted and endured in those few years before our clay hardens.”
In my case, the result is hardened American clay covered by more than a few layers of French sediment. In moments of despair, that feels more like apatriation than expatriation: no longer American, never to be French.
In moments of lucidity, hopefully, it yields a curious Franco-American take on the world.
©2003 by Kenneth Dreyfack.
The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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New Yorker Ken Dreyfack started as a radio writer, producer and investigative reporter for CBS Radio in New York. He relocated to France in 1974 to write the as-yet-unpublished Great American Novel. Apart from a few spells in New York and Chicago, he has spent most of the past 30 years in France. He worked for the Associated Press in New York before joining McGraw Hill and Business Week, where he served as the Paris-based European Technology Correspondent. He has written for the Village Voice, International Herald Tribune and numerous trade publications. He has been working in public relations for the past 12 years. He is married to a native of France. They have three children, and live in a lively neighborhood near Paris’ Gare de l’Est, which he says is "somewhat reminiscent of 8th Avenue before the Times Square renovation." |
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