A picture of me in Los Angeles from December
Hi, my name is Tiffany, and I’m an obsessive planner (after all, my major is Learning and Organizational Change). What’s kept sleep at bay, my clicking through endless tabs of research and making mental or digital to-do lists, is the non-fiction that I will be in Paris in just a few days, and for just a few months. I’ve wanted to travel to Europe since the Lizzie McGuire Movie came out in 2003, and Paris, more specifically, since I began learning French at the start of high school in 2009…or maybe it was Ratatouille (2007)…or, even, the Madeline series that ran on Disney every early morning of my childhood. It might not be an exaggeration to say that I’ve been hardwired to love Paris.
Many times this summer, frustrated with my surroundings and reading books and guides about a culture 4,000 miles away, I marveled at the logic and the simplicity of: prices listed on restaurant menus including tax and tip, cars permitted to pass red lights within reason, and the lattice-like rail system of Paris compared to Chicago’s inequality-driving axis of rays emanating from the Loop.
My tendency has always been toward the romantic. I chose to learn French without hesitation or so much as consideration of the practicality of the tongue, or even the sound of it. The language of l’amour must roll from the tongue, warm and sweet right? My first language being hextonal Cantonese, I didn’t predict the similarly rough, gravelly sensation of forming French in my mouth and my ears pricking at x’s and r’s and the guttural ‘euh’ sounds.
But with time the mythic sheen has dulled, and I refuse to attribute every instance that strikes me as immoral to cultural difference. I anger at the Islamophobia that bars Muslim women from wearing burkinis at the beach and veils in public spaces and that mounts contentious and extremist sentiment. I’m disappointed with the relative status of women, that favors mothers to women in the workplace, in a relatively progressive nation. And I’m conflicted about the blind eye turned toward racism that requires the subjugation of the individual to achieve some assimilated, national identity.
For now, I’m still fixated on exactly how many shoes I should bring and what would be amazing to wear posing by the Seine, but I’m sure these issues, not remote from the ones we encounter in the US, will gnaw at me and lend to the erosion of my romanticization. All said, I still expect to find the character that gives the city its nickname as the deepest love accepts the flaws*.
Reviewing all my French notes from high school
* So cheesy, I apologize.