Faux Amis: Why I Moved to Paris
“Being a Parisian is not about being born in Paris. It is about being reborn there.” — Sacha Guitry
When global travel ground to a halt and I boarded an airplane from San Francisco to London. I needed to get back home; not to a physical place, but to an inner place, and the fastest way to get there was going to be through Paris.
The pandemic had become like a pied piper, masterfully arousing the unhealed children within everyone around me, including myself. Our individual and collective life scripts, revising themselves in real-time, reminded us how much of the lives we thought we are choosing, were actually written for us. In Covid-19’s great unmasking, we faced a choice: fight our way back to our old lives, or accept the invitation to write a new one.
After an eleven-hour, near-empty flight, I navigated the cavernous halls of London’s Heathrow airport. Travel restrictions had left it unrecognizable: a desert island where the occasional faint echoes of essential workers and swish of the tram carrying no one between terminals were the only signs of life. I caught a train towards St. Pancras Station and within a couple hours, stepped out of the Gare du Nord and into a sunny day in Paris.
I walked out of the train station that day, into the warm September afternoon when sunbeams kissed the tiled rooftops of Hausmanian buildings and I could breathe again.
Wildfires in California, where I had been living, had choked the air with smoke and cast the sky an apocalyptic orange. Shelter-in-place orders were still active, but for the pandemic, not the wildfires. People placed their hoarded N95's over their noses and mouths before helping others, seeking to cover the shadows of Bay Area ideology in the name of protocol. To compensate, white people scrambled to make friends with people of color in some sort of Amazing Race to find a black friend in the wake of the George Floyd protests. I had received several invitations to join “educate a white person” Zoom events, collecting a free bottle of wine in exchange for my tokenization. I listened to people name drop the one or two black people they knew, a humblebrag that vaccination statuses would soon replace. The community once famous for pioneering the Free Speech Movement suddenly enforced fundamentalist readings of CDC guidelines, chose statistics over common sense and sheltered-in-place in their own echo chambers. A new interpretation of virtue was catching fire, along with everything else, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
Staring out the window from my couch into the smoked-out ghost town that Oakland had become, I imagined myself in kitten heels, a floral dress and red lips, sipping an espresso on a Parisian terrace and drenching myself in the beauty of the city. If the authorities kicked me out after a day, it would still be worth it, I told myself. I just wanted to feel for a moment that Paris was still alive. If it was, then maybe something inside me was too. A week later, I packed my bags.
“For the first time in my life, I feel beautiful,” I texted a best friend after a visit to the Rodin Museum, a refuge I had discovered two decades earlier when I spent a lonely summer working in Paris.
During the month that followed I passed the hours taking coffees, surviving Zoom meetings from cafe terraces and sneaking photos of strangers. The French irreverence for most dogmas other than vacation and cheese gave me space to reconnect with myself, free from the hyper-vigilance and judgement polluting my hometown. Old memories of a person lost and alone in Paris melted away with these final, lingering days of summer as I left her behind and grew into someone new.
Midway through my stay in Paris, I began to question why I would go back to California and from the guest room of my friend’s home, I began the arduous indoctrination into the French administration.
The French word for disappointed is deceived. Decu. They call this a faux ami, or fake friend, a term that itself is both a deception and a déception (disappointment). In Paris I came to learn that much of what the English language and my culture conditioned me to believe were deceptions are what the French would refer to as disappointments. With the support of my new fake friend, I set free the victim contracting in a narrative of deception and welcomed the woman who understands life is simply full of disappointments. In trying to learn French, I learned how to be human.
In Paris I have less baggage. I don’t overtly belong, the scripts here are not written for me, they never were, and in that I find solace. Because I have no entitlement to be here, everything feels like a bonus, or as the French might say, an exception. If I can get through the line at the boulangerie without a grave misunderstanding, I feel I have conquered the day.
Unlike the last times I was in Paris, I now bask in my anonymity, discovering my beauty for the first time in sculpture gardens, paintings and ornate storefronts. I found the space to confront the question of what it means to be an American, an American in Paris, a Buddhist, mixed race, a woman, an entrepreneur, a writer; the previously irreconcilable veneers of my identity — while still a marvel to many French — are not the centerpiece here. Perhaps this is what made James Baldwin and Josephine Baker find Paris so hospitable as well; what made Baker prefer the Eiffel Tower to the Statue of Liberty, because it “made no promises.”
