“Immigrant in Paris”
by Elena Chen
One of my friends here in Paris (it is still so bizarre to even type out this word, I cannot believe I live here now) that I met in my French course was asking me in the most nonchalant way a question I never thought I’d get asked on our walk to a library. We were along the river and striding up these giant, looming stairs when he posed the question: “Do you ever feel like an immigrant here?”. I was taken aback by the question because: 1. I actually have never thought of myself as an immigrant, ever, and 2. I have never asked myself this question in Paris. I have lived in quite a few cities in the world but I have never seen myself as a person who has migrated. Feeling “out of place” is something I have always and never felt. Spending the first 12 years of my life in Hong Kong, a city built on international influence and multiculturalism, it was wonderful and commonplace to be submerged in diversity. I spoke English, Mandarin and Cantonese, all my friends were multilingual, and almost every menu, roadsign, and direction was meant for a polyglot. Food, music, art, even maths (following the British tradition, Mathematics is just not going to cut it and we say maths) are somehow intercultural. I also knew I didn’t really belong because my parents weren’t from Hong Kong so we spoke Mandarin at home and I spoke in English with most of my friends. We would eat all kinds of food, all the time. There was nothing in me that told me my friends whose parents came from India, Pakistan, the UK or Hong Kong were any different from me or one another. They were different because they had different hairstyles or spoke different dialects or had different handwriting. But we were all just kids in this sprawling urban jungle trying to buy Sprite from the vending machine after school. Then our family moved to Shanghai, I went to New York and London for school and the rest is history.
Well, I live in Paris now. The story of how I got here is history as much as it is manuscript, because I am still trying to write out this paragraph of my life I’ve been stuck on. Stuck because French is a difficult language to learn (a mindf*ck really) and also because for the first time in almost 30 years of being a human I have to learn what it means to live in a place where I don’t speak the language. What privilege but also what an experience as old as human history. Human migration, diaspora and cultural exchange have been at the very root of our ability to adapt and evolve. Of course, in the moment when I’m trying to figure out how to tell the cobbler that I just want an extra hole in my belt and not insoles made of leather two days after Christmas, this grand narrative that I have been offered as part of my own loses its way amongst the scent of leather oil and silences punctuating my broken French. Do I feel like an immigrant now?
In Cantonese, there is a rather derogatory word for “foreigners” that comes from the word for “devil” (see Wikipedia: “Chinese: 鬼佬; Cantonese Yale: gwáilóu, pronounced [kʷɐ̌i lǒu]) is a common Cantonese slang term for Westerners.”). In Shanghai, depending on your ethnicity and race, you might be seen as someone desirable as an employee or a nightclub and get the equivalent of free entry to either (depending on your occupation as well, of course). In New York or LA, race is a topic we hear and talk about like a hurdle we have jumped but continues to stretch into the future. In Paris…I’m not sure. Maybe because I literally hear 3 languages being spoken at any given moment on the street, in the metro, at a restaurant by people who are of different ages, ethnicities and origins that it feels like we are all just trying to be here in this city. Whether it’s the 3rd perturbation of traffic this week or the brilliant orange sunset of yesterday, we are all just trying to enjoy this city and our lives here. And our lives here are wildly diverse and complex. Just down the street, there is a local bookstore, an Italian catering service, a Mexican restaurant, a small Japanese family-owned business, a fine-casual Peruvian dining spot, a modern French cuisine bistro and a laundromat that I have never seen anyone in. This isn’t around the block, this is 10 restaurants and shops side by side on one street, coexisting and constructing our community. Laundromats also seem pertinent to this community since we have 3 of them on this block alone. People gather, come, go, talk, share, eat, support and exchange here. Every neighborhood is different in Paris but this city is only 10km by 10km big. Metropolitan Paris is 15 times smaller than London and 7 times more petite than NYC. Population wise, it is one of the densest cities in Europe. The stats on museums in NYC have ranged between 90-500 (most say it’s around 150) and there are roughly 140 museums in Paris. As a city with 4 times less people and 7 times less space than NYC, Paris is doing pretty good when it comes to honoring culture. In fact, it does an amazing job of giving culture a spotlight. In the 6 months I’ve been here, I would say that this city honors culture like no other.
But really, I have always been an immigrant. I was born in the US to Chinese parents and we migrated to Hong Kong when I was two months old. We didn’t have any family there. I grew up speaking languages different from those to my parents and to many of the HongKongers around me. It was the same in Shanghai where we didn’t speak Shanghainese, where we did not have family either, and where we had to learn what we would like to order at restaurants. The first night I spent in New York I slept on three sweatshirts I rolled up to make a pillow. I had to learn how to use Google Maps to find my way to Target and for the first time in my life I used US bills to pay for something on my own. A 17-year- old opening up a foreign-local bank account is a funny sight. Foreign because my parents didn’t live in the US and local because I lived in the US then. Why are there only 10 digits in an American mobile phone number but 11 in China? Why do they say “Are you alright?” in the UK for “How are you?”? Why don’t we have more pubs in Shanghai? In fact, all the time, I was a foreigner and everything was new to me.
