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‘Wherever You Go, There You Are.’ Really?

Pamela Druckerman mulls over her decade-long experience with expatriate life in Paris. Excerpt: Sometimes I yearn to be in a place where I don’t just know more or less what people are saying, but know exactly what they mean. But I’m no longer fully in sync with America either. Do people there really eat Cronuts, […]

Pamela Druckerman mulls over her decade-long experience with expatriate life in Paris. Excerpt:

Sometimes I yearn to be in a place where I don’t just know more or less what people are saying, but know exactly what they mean. But I’m no longer fully in sync with America either. Do people there really eat Cronuts, go on juice fasts and work at treadmill desks?

The thought of becoming an ordinary American again scares me. We expatriates don’t like to admit it, but being foreign makes us feel special. Just cooking pancakes on Sunday morning is an intercultural event. I imagine being back in the United States and falling in with a drone army of people who think and talk just like me — the same politics, the same references to summer camp and ’70s television.

But the fact is, those drones are my people. I end up gravitating toward them in Paris, too. The biggest lesson I’ve learned in 10 years is that I’m American to the core. It’s not just my urge to eat turkey in late November. It’s my certainty that I have an authentic self, which must be expressed. It’s being so averse to idleness that I multitask even when I’m having my head shrunk. And it’s my strange confidence that, whether I stay or go, everything will be fine.

As happy as I am in Paris, I never allow myself to believe when I am there that I could ever really be at home in that wonderful place. I’m just too American. That’s neither a bug nor a feature; it just is. Similarly, whenever I’ve lived outside the South, I never have been able to forget that I’m a Southerner. Mind you, my “authentic” self loves Paris, and it loves New York; if I were to bang the drums for US nationalism or Southern regionalism, that would be fake. In the end, I feel most at home when I am around Americans — mostly because we laugh at the same jokes, and have the same cultural points of reference — and when I’m around Southerners, because there’s a particular easygoing mentality I associate with Southerners. And besides, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who say “yes sir” and “yes ma’am,” and raise their kids to do the same; and those who don’t. It is impossible to explain to non-Southerners why that means so much, but it’s equally impossible, I find, to quit caring about it. I must say, though, that since being back home in Louisiana, I have realized that some of what I thought of as Southern attitudes and ways of thinking were actually particular to South Louisiana.

Anyway, I digress. People who have read Little Way ask me, “Can you go home again?” The answer is no, you can’t, not really. Not if you’ve been away for a long enough time to have been changed. Home and the people in it will have changed while you were away, and so will you have done. That doesn’t mean you can’t live at home again, and be happy there. But you can’t unsee what you have seen while you were out in the world. If Pamela Druckerman moved back to America, she might be content, even happy. But she would carry France in her heart, and it would change her experience of America. Some things about America she might appreciate more, and other things she might find harder to live with. The point is, she will have changed irreversibly.

It’s something like this: twenty years ago, a college friend with whom I was extremely close back in the day found himself living near my then-home in Washington, DC. We hadn’t been in each other’s company since he went off to Germany for graduate study, and then UMass for more graduate work. We were both so pleased to have the chance to renew our friendship. But in the four or five years that had passed since we had last seen each other, we had both had very different adventures. Once we had been as close as brothers, but now we felt the separation between us — this, through no fault of our own. We didn’t become as close as we once had been, and, I think, both mourned that loss.

This is a universal human experience, but we still like to think it can’t happen to us, and the people we love. But as Auden said, in his haunting poem about mortality and idealism, “You cannot conquer time.” Mind you, this is not really what Pamela Druckerman is talking about, but it does have that dimension in it. In Paris, she cannot fully leave her American history behind, but if she came home, she wouldn’t really fit here either. The passage of time in these different places will have changed her. The same sun strikes her and her Parisian neighbors when they walk out on the street, but it is refracted differently as it passes through them (so to speak), because they bend the light at different wavelengths. And if she were to move, say, to New York, all that time spent in Paris will have ground the lens that is Pamela Druckerman down in a way that makes her bend the light differently than people who have never left America. The great thing about a place like New York is that nobody is surprised by that, and nobody really cares.

We love to believe that wherever we go, there we are, and it’s kind of true, as any young person who believes they will be different, and better, if only they get out of ____ and move to ____ is bound to discover once they get their wish. But it’s only kind of true. You are in Paris who you were in Altoona, but if you stay in Paris long enough, you may never really become Parisian, but you will be less of an Altoonan. Our identities are neither as fixed as we hope, or as fixed as we fear.

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