165: Americans in Paris
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Prologue
Ira Glass
Hi there, everybody. Ira Glass here. Today's program is a rerun, but from a long time ago, the year 2000. So forgive any anachronisms you hear. That's a word a person doesn't get to say very often outside of the SATs.
Forgive any anachronisms. It's back when the person at the center of the story still smoked, back before Notre Dame started burning. Anyway, it's a great show. We haven't aired it in forever. A total favorite. In honor of Bastille Day this month, here we go.
It's a grey, rainy day in Paris.
[CHATTER]
A silky line of tourists waits on the grounds of an old medieval palace, now one of the most famous museums in the world. I'm with David Sedaris who lives nearby.
Ira Glass
So, David, explain where we are.
David Sedaris
We're at the Louvre. And this is the closest I've ever come. I've never set foot inside the Louvre.
Ira Glass
So you've lived in Paris for how long?
David Sedaris
Two years. But I still haven't visited. I didn't see the point. Why come to Paris and go to the one place where you're not allowed to smoke? As a matter of fact, it's my goal to be the only person who's come to Paris and has never set foot in the Louvre.
Ira Glass
You live how far from here?
David Sedaris
I'm probably about a 12-minute walk, 15-minute walk from the Louvre. I'm close to Notre Dame, too, but I've never gone in there either. It just doesn't interest me.
I mean, I think so many people come here and they feel like they have to do certain things because somebody told them to do it, or they're going to go home and people will say, what do you mean you didn't see the Pantheon? What do you mean you didn't go into the Louvre?
So I'm guessing that a good number of these people are just standing here because somebody told them that they should do it. I don't think that they're all museum-goers at home. I don't know. Do people look back and remember the experience of standing in front of a painting?
I might remember eating something, or buying something, or seeing something, like an accident, or somebody who's really twisted up in some way, but not looking at a painting. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, for them, it doesn't get any better than this. But I don't know. Just from people that I know that have come here, they go to the Louvre because somebody told them that they have to.
Ira Glass
Today on our radio program, where you might go in Paris instead of the Louvre. I spent three days with David Sedaris, who writes a lot about what it's like to live in France. He never saw the Eiffel Tower, or the Rodin Museum, or the famous cemetery where Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison are buried. No historical sites. Nothing having to do with the culture or language of the people of France. But if you want to know the best place to buy a model of a rotten tooth, or a collection of leeches, or a life-sized replica of a human head with the top cut off so you can see what's inside, David did show me that.
David Sedaris
This is a pretty good medical supply store. These body parts that they have here, they're handmade and hand-painted. And they're not nearly as expensive as you would think that they would be.
I think I got my sister Gretchen a stomach-- or a backbone. I got her a backbone made out of papier-mache for Christmas. And I think it probably cost about $60, which is a great price for a backbone.
Ira Glass
Today in our program, Americans in Paris and how our Paris sometimes has very little to do with the one familiar to the locals. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.
The French government says that three and a half million Americans visited Paris last year. The US government says it was more like two and a half million. Either way, it is a lot more than the actual population of Paris, which is 2.1 million.
Americans have dreamy and romantic ideas about Paris, more than other places, I think. In 1944, at the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, EB White wrote, "Probably one of the dullest stretches of prose in any man's library is the article in Paris in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet when we heard the news of liberation, being unable to think of anything else to do, we sat down and read it straight through, from beginning to end.
Paris, we began, capital of France and of the Department of San, situated on the Ile de la Cite, the Ile St. Louis, and the Ile Louvier in the Seine, as well as on both banks of the Seine. The words seemed like the beginning of a great poem. A feeling of simple awe overtook us as we slowly turned the page and settled down to a study of the city's weather graph and the view of the Seine looking east from Notre Dame. The rainfall is rather evenly distributed, continued the encyclopedist. Evenly distributed, we thought to ourselves, like the tears of those who love Paris."
But what is it actually like in Paris, really, without the rose-colored glasses, if you're American? Well, our This American Life team headed overseas to find out. And let's just pause for a moment. What exactly does that sound like, you wonder? Well, here's a recording.
Would you like to take a guided tour of Paris?
No, no, no, we're not tourists.
Do we look like those people who run around gaping all day?
I guess they can't understand anyone coming to Paris to work!
My suggestion is that we all go straight to our hotels and get some rest. I, for one, am exhausted.
Ira Glass
Well, in act one of our program today, "Him Talk Pretty Three Days," David Sedaris gives me and you a walking tour of his favorite places in the city that he calls home. Act two, "Ca Vie Americaine," in which we try to answer the question, what is it that some Americans see in Paris anyway? What is the draw?
Act three, "Notes of a Native Daughter--" why it helps sometimes to pretend your French accent is worse than it really is, and why it's harder to cut into a movie line in Paris than in New York, and whether it is the same for African-Americans these days in Paris as it was in the heyday of James Baldwin and Sidney Bechet. Answers. Stay with us.
Act One: Him Talk Pretty Three Days
Ira Glass
Act one, "Him Talk Pretty Three Days." Two years ago, at the age of 41, barely speaking French, David Sedaris moved to Paris. He had no special feelings about France, no particular interest in the French. It would be the same if it's Korea, he said to me, a sentence that, I think, if the French ever heard that he said it, they would deport him.
He moved for two reasons-- one, his boyfriend Hugh had a rundown house in Normandy, and, two, why not? And over the course of two years, he has written extensively about his experience in stories for the radio, for magazines, and for his newest book. In his stories, David portrays life in Paris as a series of humiliations and near-humiliations. And if you hang out with him for a few days, you realize he is not exaggerating much.
David Sedaris
This is my worst nightmare right here.
Ira Glass
We'd barely gone three blocks from his apartment on our walking tour Paris when he stopped on the sidewalk.
David Sedaris
OK, my lighter has run out of fluid, which would mean that I would have to ask somebody for a match. And so what I would say is, hello, do you have some fire? And I so hate saying that that I usually carry four lighters on me so I always have a backup.
Ira Glass
So you're just digging into your bag here.
David Sedaris
Extra cigarettes. I know I must have a lighter in here. I will not spend the afternoon asking people if they have fire.
Ira Glass
I was curious about David's thoughts about Paris, precisely because he was never somebody who had any special feelings for the place. He didn't move here with his head full of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sartre, and Proust. He was a blank slate.
And so for several hours every day I was in Paris, David would walk me to the places he finds most interesting. And the first thing I learned was this. It is so traumatic to learn a new language that a lot of David's experience of the city, a lot of his personal geography of Paris, has to do simply with where people are cruel to him when he speaks and where they aren't.
David Sedaris
This is a hardware store where the owner and the people who work there are really, really nice to me. I buy things here all the time. And I buy things that I don't even need just because they're so kind. And they generally just start laughing right when I walk in the door.
And then the owner will call his assistants out of the back room and say, he's back, he's back! And I buy things like-- I bought a heating element so I could make tea in my hotel room, because I had to go to Germany. So I could go in and say, hello, I am looking for a stick that make the water hot, hot today.
So I say really stupid things when I go in there. But I only say it in French. But they're incredibly good sports.
And I bought an ironing board. And I was able to say, hello, it has been three weeks. I bought an iron. Now, today, I look for a table that might work with my iron. Have you such a table?
And he said, ah, an ironing board, and went and got one out of the back. But he's really, really nice. And it's a place I can always count on where somebody is going to be good to me.
Ira Glass
Do we want to walk in the hardware store? Do we need anything? Do they sell batteries?
David Sedaris
Yeah.
Ira Glass
Could you get me some AA batteries for the camera?
David Sedaris
Sure.
Ira Glass
We need four. I'll pay.
It's a tiny store, just enough room for a few customers to stand, a store that's taller than it is wide, with shelves full of merchandise running up to the ceiling, plus brooms, feather dusters, baskets simply hanging over our heads to be retrieved by a hook on the end of a stick.
Shop Owner
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Customer
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Shop Owner
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
David Sedaris
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Shop Owner
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
David Sedaris
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Shop Owner
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
David Sedaris
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Ira Glass
This is my boyfriend, David says, trying to say, this is my friend. He is making a documentary of my life. He tapes everything.
David Sedaris
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Shop Owner
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Ira Glass
We pay, there's small talk, and we're back on the street in less than a minute and a half.
David Sedaris
See, that's what's so nice about that guy. I went in and he said, I haven't seen you for a long time. Have you been on vacation? And that's just worth the world to me. That is so incredibly nice, for somebody to notice your absence.
Ira Glass
Some shopkeepers don't notice him. He'd been buying his newspaper from the same woman in his neighborhood seven days a week for over a year. And recently she said to him out of the blue, are you a tourist here on vacation?
David Sedaris
And I said, I've been coming here and buying my newspaper every day for the last 19 months. No, I'm not on vacation. I have an apartment around the corner.
But it took that long for her even to acknowledge that she had seen me before. But that's why I go there everyday. I was waiting for that moment, for her to recognize me.
Ira Glass
We go into a chocolate shop and a bookstore and a cafe. And each place we go, if there's a little conversation, just normal small talk, and it goes OK, he's really delighted and can recite it all for me afterwards, line by line. When he first moved here, when his French class wasn't going so well, he was constantly being scolded by people for not understanding the simplest things-- directions, prices, the proper change. People here are crazy about exact change, he swears to me. He realized at some point that he could make it all feel better if he transformed himself from the inept foreigner to the inept foreigner with a charge card.
David Sedaris
People will be really nice to you if you spend a lot of money. So then I just started going out and buying things. I could have a bad day in school. I'd go out after school and buy a desk, or pricey lamps.
Because people were unfailingly nice while I was writing out that check. And I would say the most screwed up thing, and they would say, oh, you speak so well. And they would compliment me.
And I would feel so good. And then I would leave, and I would think, wait a minute. And it took a while to get that under control.
Ira Glass
So just observing your day, as an outsider, I feel like you've put yourself into this position where the smallest human acts of kindness have turned out to mean so much.
David Sedaris
They have, whereas before, they were things that I didn't really think about. It doesn't take much to make me happy now. Whereas before, I feel like it took quite a bit.
Ira Glass
Is your experience here more of a feeling of adventure or more a feeling of humiliation?
David Sedaris
It's more a feeling of humiliation. It would be a feeling of adventure if I were a different type of person, if I were a more adventurous person. But for me to get on a train and go to Switzerland, I don't think, oh, good, I get to have an adventure. I think, oh, great, I get to make an ass out of myself in two different languages.
Because that's what I wind up doing. In Germany, they always include breakfast with your hotel. I'm not a breakfast eater. But I want a cup of coffee or something.
And I stayed at a hotel in Germany-- I don't remember the town-- the last time I was there. And so I go downstairs to have my breakfast, and there's six people seated at a table. And usually they've got lots of tables. But here, there's only one table.
And I'm thinking, well, I don't really want to sit with six people. But if I turn around and leave, then they'll think that I'm being rude. So I've gotten this far. So I have to sit down at the table with these six people.
So I pull out a chair. And the man says something to me in German. And I say, oh, no, just coffee for me. I'm fine with that.
And what he was trying to tell me was that I was in his kitchen. This was the kitchen of the owner. And this was the owner of the hotel and his family sitting down to breakfast.
I just saw this door and I opened it, and I was in their quarters. And then he had to go and wake up his nine-year-old so his nine-year-old could come and explain to me in English that, in fact, the dining room was downstairs. And so I didn't see it as an adventure. It just happened.
Ira Glass
David moved here at a particular moment in his life. After years of making his living cleaning apartments and carrying furniture, he finally had published books, made the bestseller list, was on the radio, went on tours, and filled 2,000 and 5,000-seat halls with people who wanted to hear him read. And I think most people are built to take only so much of that, to have people think that we're somebody.
I think, for most people, for people who are not hopeless egomaniacs, there is a normal balancing that has to happen, of believing that they're a somebody to believing that they're a nobody. There's a ratio, a balance that has to happen in most people's heads. I've known David for 10 years.
And I think that what happened to him is that the somebody side of that equation got crazily inflated, fantastically inflated. And so the nobody side had to hyper-inflate to catch up. They had to balance out. If a nation of book-buying adults was going to tell him how great he was back home, he needed an entire second nation of adults reminding him that, really, how important was he?
David Sedaris
Yeah, that's exactly the case. When I do go back, it's not like going from-- I don't know-- having an audience to being anonymous. It's "Beneath the Planet of the Apes." It's going from having an audience to being a foreigner, which is the lowest lifeform, to be a foreigner.
Ira Glass
When you were a kid, were you feeling humiliated a lot?
David Sedaris
Yeah. I mean, I always had. I didn't want to open my mouth, because I lisped and I sounded like a girl. So it's a feeling that I'm used to. Really, the feeling that I get here is more comfortable to me.
[CHATTER]
Ira Glass
One day, David takes me to a cafe that he goes to all the time, often alone. And I'm surprised when he tells me that he is somebody who, until recently, had trouble going to a restaurant or cafe by himself just to get a cup of coffee.
David Sedaris
Because I'm always afraid that they're not going to see me there. And then I'll just be stuck there. And other people will say, look, no one's waited on that guy, and he's been there for half an hour, and he doesn't know what to do with himself. I get terribly self-conscious in those situations. I mean, do you?
Ira Glass
I'm not scared that, if I'm sitting in a restaurant alone, they won't see me. I assume that they'll see me and that they'll wait on me. Do you know what I mean?
It's a business. And they need the money. And so they'll usually wait on you.
David Sedaris
No, but I'm always convinced that they don't see me and that they're not going to wait on me. And it just seemed to happen to me so many times in my life, that I would go into a place, and then you have to pretend like you're leaving of your own volition, like you've been waiting for somebody. And then you look at your watch, like, darn, well, I guess they're not going to show. I'm not going to sit around here and wait any longer.
And you make this whole little play that you do. But really, nobody's watching it. But it's very elaborate. And then you can get up and leave.
Ira Glass
The thing is, what you're describing is, you're sitting there, and you think that other people are watching in such a way that they will think, oh, that guy hasn't gotten waited on?
David Sedaris
Because that's what I do. I look at people like that. And I notice when it happens to other people. And it's because I look at things like that that I imagine that everybody else is.
Ira Glass
This turns out to be quite a burden to carry into a foreign country. If somebody does something stupid in front of him, David says, he goes home, writes it down, tells his friends, sometimes turns it into a story that he reads in front of thousands or tens of thousands of strangers. And so when he says something stupid in French, which he does daily, he believes that it is possible the shopkeepers or waiters just shrug it off and never think about it again. But it seems just as possible that they go, tell their friends, and laugh at him.
David Sedaris
That's why I get so embarrassed of the way that I speak. It's because I go home and I write everything down. That's the way I am. I assume that everybody else is that way as well.
Ira Glass
We walk to the places that David likes best in Paris. And it's like hopping from one discreet island that David had already explored and found to be safe for human habitation to the next discreet island. I think this is the way that anybody gets to know any new city, especially a city where you do not speak the language. You try one place, and then you try a second place. And you return to those places over and over, slowly expanding your territory to gradually include more little spots that you return to.
The places David takes me to usually had one of these characteristics. There were fantastically unusual and interesting things to buy. They were places of a type which simply do not exist in the United States. And they were places where the French was usually very simple.
(SUBJECT) PUPPETTER: [SPEAKING FRENCH]
Puppetter
[CHILDREN YELLING]
Ira Glass
Often, this meant the presence of children. At the Luxembourg Gardens, there's an old puppet theater where we see Treasure of the Sultans. It's like watching an art form as sturdy and indestructible as the cockroach-- the slapstick, the menacing character sneaking up behind our heroes' backs so everybody yells in warning.
David Sedaris
And there always comes a point where he hits somebody over the head with a stick. And the kids just eat it up. When he starts hitting people with the stick, they go bananas. This is the fourth time I've seen The Treasure of the Sultans. I just like coming because it just makes me so happy to be around people who are so happy.
Ira Glass
After the princess is safe from the pirates and the friendly tiger is rescued from the savage jungle to come live in Paris, we head outside to the carousel, where six-year-olds are strapped onto wooden horses and handed little wooden sticks, play a game that dates to 16th century Europe, or possibly earlier, a jousting game where they tried to spear a dangling ring while speeding by on horseback.
[CHILD YELLING]
David also takes me to one of the tiny mom-and-pop theaters in his neighborhood. The whole culture of movies is different in Paris, with hundreds of theaters showing all sorts of movies, new and old.
(SUBJECT) MOVIE CHARACTER 1: Nice little place you have here, Lydecker.
Movie Character 1
(SUBJECT) MOVIE CHARACTER 2: It's lavish, but I call it home.
Movie Character 2
Ira Glass
David sees a movie everyday in Paris. He also takes me to the flea market that's open every weekend on the outskirts of the city. It's a sprawling warren of booths selling old paintings, watches, and what amount to five centuries of coffee table decorations.
We find a device in one store from the early days of telephones. It's just a paper cone, really, designed to be attached to a telephone inside a theater so your family at home could supposedly listen in on the concert or play over the telephone, in defiance, I might add, of all the principles of proper microphone placement. But that wasn't the highlight of our flea market trip.
David Sedaris
Whereas most places here, people have their booth-- I was here the last shopping day before Christmas. Oh, my god. That's Judge Judy. That's Judge Judy with that white parka on. I love Judge Judy! And that was her right there!
Ira Glass
Should we say something?
David Sedaris
No. If you watch her show, you get the idea that saying something-- bothering somebody like that is so inappropriate. And that's what she does for a living, is tell people that they're acting inappropriately. I can't believe that we saw her. I love Judge Judy so much. I wish that she would run for mayor of New York. Wow, Judge Judy.
Ira Glass
Is that your biggest celebrity sighting in a while in Paris?
David Sedaris
I saw Catherine Deneuve. But Judge Judy is bigger than Catherine Deneuve, as far as I'm concerned. This square up here, this is the Pantheon.
And again, I've never been inside of it. But I know that all kinds of famous French people are entombed here. I don't know. I think Balzac's here or people like that, really super famous writers. But I've never set foot inside. But I like the frozen grocery store that's across the street from it.
Ira Glass
This store is part of a chain that's all over France called Picard. Everything they sell is frozen.
David Sedaris
And they've got this method for freezing that I don't think we have in the United States. They could freeze lettuce. And they've got everything in there, from meat to frozen soups and spices.
But it's not like TV dinners. You can buy a little packet of ostrich chops, or of horse meat, or duck legs stuffed with prunes and sausage. And they're sold just in plastic bags. So they've taken the stigma out of frozen food.
And every French person I've talked to swears by this store, especially people who have kids. Because the food is really, really good. And if you opened one of these in the United States, you would just be minting money.
You wouldn't be able to count the money fast enough. I guarantee you. It would be such a huge success.
Ira Glass
Inside, it is exactly what you want when you're traveling in a foreign country. Every object is familiar, but packaged and presented in a way that is pleasingly new and exotic. So it's all comprehensible but, at the same time, palpably foreign.
And the foods walk that disturbing but fascinating line that foreign foods can have between looking delicious and looking frightening-- snails packed in green stuff in their shells of many different sizes, coolers full of massive frozen crayfish that look like they're about to come back to life, pre-made shish kabobs, osso buco. We pick up a few things. And then down the hill, we stop at the regular supermarket for a quick run to the dairy case.
David Sedaris
Hugh screamed at me last night, he was so ashamed of the butter that we served during dinner. And he held this brand of butter right up to my face and told me I'm never, ever, ever allowed to buy it again. So I'm here to replace that butter.
Ira Glass
Wait, what kind of butter did you buy?
David Sedaris
It was this, but it's Grand Jury brand, a butter of Brittany. And I'm not allowed to buy that anymore.
Ira Glass
Why?
David Sedaris
Because Hugh's really picky about things like that. He said, I saw Ira putting that butter on bread, and he had four pieces of bread. I'm so embarrassed. That butter was awful.
And I said, I don't really think that Ira's going to go home and write in his little notebook, dinner at Hugh and David's, butter was terrible.
[LAUGHTER]
Ira Glass
That's where you're wrong, my friend.
Note to listeners-- if you eat at Hugh and David's, avoid the butter.
[FOOTSTEPS]
At 31 Rue du Bac, we climb a wooden spiral staircase to a store that's been in operation since 1831, Deyrolle, which David calls the Noah's ark of taxidermy.
David Sedaris
There's a kangaroo. There's a moose. There's two wild boars.
There's about five different varieties of monkeys, a hyena, a pair of zebras, a polar bear, and a beautiful oak case containing different reptiles-- snakes and lizards. And there's an ostrich. And that ostrich is-- what-- nine feet tall. It's really magnificent.
Ira Glass
We walk through room after room filled with pigs and lions, cats and dogs. The dogs are especially real looking. Some of them, according to the woman who runs the place, were stuffed by their owners, but they never had the heart to pick them up. The price to buy an ostrich or a lion or gorilla is nearly $10,000. To rent them for two days is 420 bucks, American. Most of the business is rental. David buys a magpie, black and powerful and sleek-looking, and we had down to the street.
Ira Glass
So did you have things like this when you were a kid?
David Sedaris
My mother had a great aunt who was the only person in our family who really had any money. And she was married to a man who was a big game hunter. And she would come to our house to visit when we were young.
But I only went to her house once. And it was right before she died. And she had a trophy room. And there were all kinds of animals in there, extinct animals. There were snow leopards in there. There were white tigers in there.
And you would walk into this perfect room, and there were thousands of eyes staring at you. And I just thought, this is what I want. And that's the thing that I loved. And that's the feeling you get when you go into Deyolle, that all of these creatures that are stuffed and poised to pounce are all staring at you. It's the same feeling you get from being in front of an audience.
Ira Glass
It's the same feeling you get in front of an audience?
David Sedaris
Yeah, that people are looking at you. But these are creatures that are looking at you.
Ira Glass
Wow.
David Sedaris
You know that feeling, that feeling when somebody is watching you.
Ira Glass
David, of course, thinks about that feeling a lot, especially here in France, where he wonders what Parisians think as they watch him speaking so badly. But it's not entirely so hard, that daily stage fright, worrying about how to say every little thing, anxious and straining to understand all the words around him.
David Sedaris
It's that thinking that makes me feel alive and that makes me notice everything around me. When I become complacent, like I was in the United States, you just get used to things, so you don't think about them. You think, I'll get a cab. I'll go to the airport. I'll have a patty melt. And you don't think about it.
Whereas now, with me, the anxiety starts early on. And I'm always afraid that someone's going to throw me a curveball and ask me a question, like, what sign are you? They'll just ask me a question like that out of nowhere, and I'll appear foolish. So it keeps me on edge. But really, that edginess has always made me feel alive.
Ira Glass
Someday, David says, he'll be more comfortable in French. His accent will improve and that daily anxiety will be removed from his life.
David Sedaris
But when it is removed from me, then I probably won't be interested in living here anymore. I'll probably leave.
Ira Glass
Because it'll be just like living back home.
David Sedaris
Plus the more you learn, the more disappointed you wind up being. It's easy to like somebody when you don't know what they're saying.
Ira Glass
That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, that not understanding somebody makes them seem more interesting than they really are.
David Sedaris
I just assume that everyone talked about books and movies all the time. That's all they talked about, as far as I was concerned. And then I learned a little bit more and I realized that they're no different than the people anywhere else, that they talk about the same banal things that we all talk about everywhere.
Ira Glass
At one point, at the cafe David goes to all the time, we sit and watch a waiter that David likes to watch, though he barely dares to say a word to him. The waiter's in his mid-40's with a kind, baggy face. Picture the actor who played the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, Ray Bolger.
And this waiter's kind of a cut-up. He hangs out with the regulars, making them laugh at this and that. That's what makes him fun to watch.
David Sedaris
You wonder, though, where that guy lives, or how much money he makes, or if he's married. You know, you don't wonder about everybody. But I've always wondered about that guy. Do you think he makes his bed?
Ira Glass
For now, things are good for David in Paris. He still feels curious about everything, about figuring out what it all means. And that makes everything so interesting all the time. The mystery has not ebbed from everyday life. Ray Bolger takes a sip of wine.
David Sedaris
I always like it, too, when people drink on the job. He's behind a bar, he's drinking wine, he's smoking a cigarette, and he's picking his nose, which are three good reasons to live in France, I think.
Ira Glass
David Sedaris. His book about Paris is called "Me Talk Pretty One Day." His latest book is "Calypso."
[MUSIC - LLOYD COLE, "SI TU DOIS PARTIR"]
Coming up, a public radio host who does not speak French mangles more foreign words in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.
Act Two: Ca Vie Americaine
Ira Glass
I'm Ira Glass. It's This American Life, the radio program that dares to ask the question--
(SUBJECT) CHOIR: (SINGING) Parlez-vous francais?
(SUBJECT) SINGER: (SINGING) Mais oui. Allons-y.
(SUBJECT) CHOIR: (SINGING) Entre-vous, chere madame.
Ira Glass
No, after you, madame. If I can lay my cards on the table at this point in the program, I have never understood why anybody cares so much about France. I mean, it's fine. It's lovely.
But there is just this thing that some Americans have for Paris. Though, as they are the first to admit, it can be kind of ridiculous.
Kristin Hohenadel
Well, when people ask me where I live, I sometimes say Paris. And they say, well, you live in Paris? But that's my dream.
Ira Glass
Kristin Hohenadel has lived in Paris for five years.
Kristin Hohenadel
Why do you live in Paris? And I say, well, I just sort of wanted to. All the reasons that you would give sound really embarrassing, cliche, and ridiculous at this point. Paris is a stale dream.
And it's kind of like falling in love with the most obviously cute boy in the class, or a movie star. It's like being a groupie. And then you try to convince the other 25 women who he slept with last week, well, I really love him, and I think he loves me too.
There are some people who come here and they sort of get off on that feeling of being-- they think they're unusual because they put themselves in this position. And to me, that's really kind of awful and embarrassing.
Ira Glass
They think they're really special.
Kristin Hohenadel
Yeah. They think it makes them special to live here, A, as if it's original. And B, part of the horrifying thing about moving here is it's a sort of disappointing experience to realize that your dream is so banal.
This is a dream I had my whole life. And it seems ridiculous to me now that it meant so much to me. It was so important.
Ira Glass
The thing about loving a city, Kristin says, is that a city doesn't really love you back. Whenever I asked Americans who love France what it was about France that just got to them so much-- when did it begin for them, their feeling about France-- they all talked about scraps of French culture that made it to them when they were very young-- the Madeline books, The Red Balloon, French films, Montessori French class in grade school. I think there is still a part of America where the idea of Paris-- Paris, not the space program, or the internet, or moving to New York City-- Paris represents reaching a world outside oneself.
Richard Klein first started coming here as a teenager from a small town in Pennsylvania and has essentially constructed an entire life around the feeling that he got in Paris. He went on to become a scholar and director of the Romance Studies department at Cornell University and author of several books, Eat Fat and Cigarettes Are Sublime, which are deeply suffused with a sensibility that is partly just un-American or, anyway, semi-Parisian, a sensibility that is all about the small pleasures of everyday life.
Richard Klein
You know, the French have a much more uncomplicated and much less guilty relationship to their body, beginning with eating, not only the way they eat, the pleasure that they take in eating. The American notion that food is medicine, for example, is totally repulsive to the French. And yet increasingly, in America, that's all you hear. People eat only as a function of what they think is good for them. And nobody in France would eat strictly as a function of what's good for them.
I'll tell you, I think really the heart of it, for me, when I came here in 1958 for the first time, was Les Halles. Les Halles was the central marketplace right in the heart of Paris, not far from where we are. And I remember I used to go there not every night but frequently.
And then, at around 2:00 in the morning, you would go out in the streets in Les Halles, which was the central marketplace. And they used to bring all the food every night. Trucks would bring the produce and food from all over France to the center of Paris, to the heart of Paris, and display it in the stalls all around the streets.
Butchers were there with their blood-splattered coats. And people made gorgeous piles of artichokes and carrots and cabbages. And it was 2:00 in the morning and it was like life was just beginning at that hour.
And people were there sort of buying and selling. And then right next to Les Halles was La Rue Saint-Denis. And La Rue Saint-Denis was the center of prostitution in Paris.
And the people who worked there would work until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, and then they would visit the prostitutes who were there all night. But this world of-- I don't know-- this incredible life, and food, and sex, and beauty in the middle of one of the most beautiful parts and oldest parts of the past-- it used to be until the 19th century that the biggest cemetery was right there in Paris.
Ira Glass
If you walk around Paris with Richard, he's constantly pointing out spots that had special meaning to Louis XIV. Or there's a restaurant that happened to be one of the first restaurants ever built in France, just after they began the idea of restaurants, or the shops where the notion of putting big, huge windows on the front of stores probably began so people could window shop. The fact is, a lot of what is so pleasing about being in Paris is simple. It's a really interesting, pleasing place just to walk around.
When Kristin Hohenadel tried last year to live back in the States again, she found she missed living in Paris. She missed all that. It'd be kind of hard to get ordinary things done in France. You're always kind of an outsider here, even after years in the country. But she just feels better here.
Kristin Hohenadel
You know, you walk down the street in Los Angeles-- and it's a terrible example, because it's Los Angeles-- but you feel kind of dwarfed. And here, I just think, yes, this is exactly it. This is how life should be-- the pace, the scale, the way it looks.
[MUSIC - BLOSSOM DEARIE, "COMMENT ALLEZ-VOUS?"]
Act Three: Notes From A Native Daughter
Ira Glass
Act three, "Notes of a Native Daughter." Janet McDonald had already learned the language. She'd already learned the culture, had French friends and a French apartment, when something happened that made her realize how much she hadn't figured out.
Janet Mcdonald
I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And there was a long line. And we were like, let's jump the line.
These white people, they're going to be scared of us. We'll just go and jump the line. We'll get to the front of the line.
So of course, we walked up to the front of the line, like, yeah, you want to try me? I'm black. That usually works in New York.
These people were ready to rip our hair out. And they were white. I couldn't believe it.
And they were like, in French, what are you doing? The line starts back there! You can't just walk to the front of the line!
They were ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I'm like, these are white people and they're not scared of us? [LAUGHS]
That's when I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. And I liked it. Of course, it was kind of humiliating, because we're supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then all these like French bitches in high heels are threatening us, and they were in our faces. [LAUGHS] And it made me realize that whole black-white game just doesn't work outside of the United States.
Because white people aren't afraid of you here. And at the same time, they don't hate you. Because that sort of goes together.
So I'll take it. I'll wait on line. Now I don't dare jump lines. [LAUGHS] So that opened my eyes.
Ira Glass
Janet and I are sitting in the Cafe Flore, one of those famous and corniest and most pretentious settings in which to meet, because it and the Deux Magots cafe next door were home to Sartre, and Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, and, when he first arrived in Paris in 1946, Richard Wright, who was well known by them as the author of Black Boy and Native Son.
Janet Mcdonald
Now it's sort of a gathering place for tourists, and wannabes, and nostalgic fake French people such as myself.
Ira Glass
It's classic old cafe on a corner with aging fixtures and plate glass windows onto the street. Lovely, but not ornate. By the time Richard Wright arrived here, Josephine Baker had come, seen, and conquered. Black GIs had come and conquered. Jazz had simply conquered.
Wright wrote in a letter, "There's such an absence of race hatred. It seems a little unreal." I wanted to talk to Janet, because I wanted to find out if it was still that way for blacks in Paris. It didn't seem possible, really.
In the half-century since those days, there's been an influx of black Africans to France. And they are not beloved. National Front party, with the slogan "France is for the French," wins 15% of the vote in national elections. Could it be possible that African-Americans still get a warm reception here? Janet said yes.
Janet Mcdonald
I'm not sure what it is. All I know is that it feels very different to be around French white people than American white people.
Ira Glass
Different how?
Janet Mcdonald
I feel much more comfortable. I feel that I'm not a black object.
Ira Glass
Richard Wright, after arriving here in the mid-1940s, said that he felt that, all of his life, he'd been carrying a corpse with him. And when he came to Paris, he felt it slip off his back. Did you have that kind of feeling?
Janet Mcdonald
Yeah. I really have to say that I have felt that way ever since I got here. And a lot of my friends say, why are you living there? In fact, a friend of mine I went to law school with, he said, what is it about speaking French that makes white people not racist? He was very skeptical.
But really, it goes beyond that. And it's not just that we feel free of the burden of race. Because we're still black.
I still experience myself as black. It's just that that's not the center of my identity. It's not the first thing people relate to when I meet them here.
Ira Glass
Janet first came to Paris in 1975 and moved here in '95. She's a lawyer in the French office of a big American company. She grew up in the public housing projects in Brooklyn, worked her way into Vassar College and onto graduate school and law school. And like a lot of people who make the jump from very poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods into the college-educated upper middle class, she felt like she didn't really fit in anywhere, not with family and friends in the projects who were shooting heroin, barely surviving, not with the black students she met in college.
Janet Mcdonald
I thought they were Bourgeois southern belles. I didn't want to be anything like them. And they didn't want to be like me either. They thought I was trash.
I was project trash. I thought they put the B in bougie. And so I grappled a lot with the racial identity.
What will my posture be? I'm from the projects, but people say I talk like a white girl. And then the white girls are like, oh, you're so project.
And then when I got here, none of it mattered. Because if I spoke three words of French that made sense, people liked me and they celebrated me. So I didn't have to worry about talking like a white girl, or a project girl, or anything.
Ira Glass
It was an incredible relief. The central conflict of her life suddenly vanished. In Paris, all the distinctions about what kind of black person she should be, they were all moot. In fact, the most distinguishing fact about Janet was not that she was black. It was that she was an American, which surprised her.
Janet Mcdonald
I associated the word American with white guys with flags on their lawns who didn't particularly like me. And people would call me American. And I'd say, I'm not American. I'm black.
And these were black French people. And they were like, you are so American. And I remember these French West Indian friends of mine-- this one in particular from Martinique-- saying, you even walk like an American.
I'm like, what do you mean? What does an American walk like? And she said, they kick their legs when they walk. They kick their legs forward.
I don't know. Because I was in Brooklyn just a few weeks ago. And this woman who'd never been to Europe was saying, so what's it like in France? What are the people like? Are they prejudiced?
I said, no, they like us. It's incredible-- a country full of white people and they like us. But it's a difficult thing, because they like us, but they don't like other people who look like us. And that's sort of the French paradox.
Ira Glass
Paris, of course, has its own housing projects in the suburbs that surround the city. Now, with generations of Africans who were born on French soil, they face job discrimination, housing discrimination.
Janet Mcdonald
And they're not well received. They're not welcomed. And they are French.
And so in a way, for African-Americans, we're in a very bizarre position. It's almost like being an honorary white in apartheid South Africa. And I noticed that, as my French got better and better, sometimes I wasn't as well received as I would be if I played up my American accent. If I walked into a shop, and people would think I was just basically-- what I say-- just another [BLEEP], just like one of their own, like from Martinique or Guadalupe, it wouldn't be the same reception if I came on with a very heavy American accent or even spoke English.
Ira Glass
Why? How would they treat you if they thought you were an African black?
Janet Mcdonald
A little bit of a chill in the air, like, yes, may I help you? Not so much, oh, vous etes Americaine! Oh, I love New York! I love to speak English!
So it's very bizarre. It's a hard thing to reconcile. Because good feeling is good feeling. And when someone receives you and makes you feel good, it's a positive experience.
Ira Glass
When you're in a shop, and you can feel that there's a chill in the air, and that they think of you as an African, will you actually play up your American accent?
Janet Mcdonald
Well, what happened was I started experiencing that. And so I actually adjusted my speech so that at least I would get the benefit of-- I mean, I'm here in this country. I want to get the benefit of being an African-American.
So instead of walking in-- oui, madame, [SPEAKING FRENCH], I'd say, oui, [SPEAKING FRENCH]. [LAUGHS]
Maybe I shouldn't do that.
Ira Glass
And it works?
Janet Mcdonald
Yeah, and it works.
Ira Glass
A friend of Janet's suggested to her that maybe Parisians prefer black people from America because only a certain class of black Americans usually comes to France-- educated, cultured, interested in France. When Janet asked the writer Cornel West about this at a speech he gave this summer in Paris, that was his argument.
Janet Mcdonald
Basically, he suggested it was a class thing. And he said, well, look at you. You're professional. You're articulate. Maybe if you brought 15 of your cousins, it would be a whole different thing.
So basically he was saying, if I brought all my homegirls from the hood who didn't go to Vassar, and who weren't lawyers, and who didn't speak French, the reception might be a little chillier, even though they also are black American. But I think, if that's true, that is not about racism. Then that's about class.
Ira Glass
Before I met Janet, I read the book that she wrote about what it was like for her growing up. It's called Project Girl. And what's remarkable about it is how frank she is about all of the compulsive things that she found herself doing during the years that she was regularly traveling between the projects and the world of the aspiring upper middle class. It was a struggle.
In her first year at Vassar, for instance, she felt so out of place that she started taking the train down to New York City to score heroin, a thing she'd never even done when she lived in the projects, until she got kicked out of school for that. It was as if the further that she traveled into the world of college, the more the project side of her personality was compelled to express itself somehow. She depicts herself as somebody who was depressed and embattled and sort of lost for years.
And the most striking thing about meeting her, if you've read the book, is how completely happy she seems today. She's one of the happiest-seeming people I've ever met, just relaxed, and funny, and at ease. And her feeling about France, the country with this transformation took place, it can be sort of shocking to actual French people.
Janet Mcdonald
When we just won the Euro 2000, I came to work and I was telling the Moroccan secretary, we won! [SPEAKING FRENCH] And she just glares at me.
Because she was born here. And she says, I'm not French. I'm Moroccan. It's just like black Americans. I'm not American, I'm black.
And I was like, we won, we won! And she was like, what are you talking about? You're not even French. What do you mean, we won? I'm like, I'm French in my heart. [LAUGHS]
And this black friend of mine was saying, you're the only person I know who could sing "The Marseillaise." That shows how extreme you are. Do you know why?
It's because I say to them, I never had a country. I never had a country. I had a hood. I had Brooklyn.
But I never felt like I had a country. So now I have a country. It's a little one. We always come in third or fourth place in the Olympics. But it's France.
Ira Glass
Here's something else. There are certain things about French culture, Janet says, that just make life here very pleasant. For one thing, people don't ask you personal questions-- where you grew up, where you work, what's your family like, what's your story? You're not constantly explaining yourself. She says she has one friend who she knew for five years before she knew this woman had a grown son.
Also, there isn't the same striving, the same ambition to be number one as in the States, especially compared with the corporate law job she used to have where everybody was expected to put in 60 and 70 and 80 hours a week. Here, that would be seen as very strange. Work just is not that important to most people.
Janet Mcdonald
I'll get tears in my eyes. Sometimes I look around the subway, and I look at all these French people, and I'm like, thank you for letting me live here in your country.
Ira Glass
We head outside.
Ira Glass
But you feel like it's your country, but your identity here isn't that of a French person. It's that of an outsider.
Janet Mcdonald
I know. And I think that's what it is to be Project Girl. I was always an outsider. And I feel most inside right now where I'm most outside. Go figure. [LAUGHS]
That's what freedom is, though. It's not about nothing left to lose. It's about nothing left to be. You don't have to be anything.
I was just thinking about it this morning. It's like, I'm an outsider. I will always be a foreigner, no matter how good my French gets. I will never really be French, no matter how much of a wannabe I am. And yet I feel that I'm home. I'm just home.
Ira Glass
Around the corner from the Cafe Flore is where the author James Baldwin lived for a while. Janet says she feels like she understands a little of how he must have felt, coming from Harlem, from a family that was always struggling, and then arriving here. Everything is so pretty and so much easier than home.
Janet Mcdonald
Here we are. This is where James Baldwin lived, with that painter, 56 Rue Jacob. But see, he lived way up in the top, on the top floor.
[INAUDIBLE]. One, two, three, four, fifth floor. It's obviously a walk-up. The cheapest apartments are always on the top because you have to walk farther.
And that's where he was. Wow. He probably even mailed letters at that post office down there. He mailed letters back to Harlem. Hey, and here we are.
Ira Glass
Baldwin, of course, decided to settle in France permanently. And when Janet first moved Paris, she thought it would just be for a few years. And now, every time she goes home, she sees too much about the United States that she just does not want to deal with anymore. And she's realizing she may never move back.
Credits
Ira Glass
Our program was produced today by Susan Burton and myself, avec Julie Snyder, Blue Chevigny, and Alex Blumberg. Contributing editors for today's program, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Powell. Additional production on our rerun from Aviva DeKornfeld, Jessica Lussenhop, Katharine Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney.
Today's program was first broadcast in the year 2000. You can no longer smoke indoors all over Paris. And I hate the fact that I have to say this. Janet McDonald, the writer of Project Girl, who is so wonderful in the third act of the show, and who I kept in touch with after the program, she died in 2007 at the age of 53. Her book is still available.
Eric Satie music was played for us on the accordion by Dean Olsher. Jad Abumrad recorded him. Other musical help today came from the amazing John Connors, Nikki Rinkus, and Kathie Berquist. Special thanks today to Steven Barclay, author of the book A Place in the World Called Paris, and to James Campbell, whose book Exiled in Paris, was a useful summary of all the facts surrounding Richard Wright and James Baldwin's years in Paris. Also, thanks to Sandrine Rastello and [? Catherine ?] Johnstone.
Our website is ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can hear our archive of nearly 700 episodes for absolutely free. Or download our app. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who reminds you, don't forget, please, learn from the experiences of others.
David Sedaris
Dinner at Hugh and David's. The butter was terrible.
Ira Glass
That's right. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life.
[MUSIC - ANDY WILLIAMS, "AU REVOIR PARIS"]
