Immigrant in Paris 🥖

A new essay series that is not your Emily in Paris

via “A Lookbook 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?