I.
Wednesday I had my last aesthetics class at Paris-Diderot with Mr. Courtois and we arranged for our meeting coming January so I can take my make-up final exam before the last deadline. It's been a real pleasure learning from Mr. Courtois this semester, and I only regret not having been to any one of the shows he recommended.
I have made a few acquaintances, if not friends, among the French students who are also taking this class. We have talks during breaks and they send me their notes to help me review alright, but I haven't been active enough to really hang out with them outside of classes. During our last break, I went to get hot chocolate from the vending machine, when Nathaël came by the machine and started talking to the girl before me.
"Are you coming to the pro-gay marriage protest this Saturday?" He asked.
"Oh, I'm afraid not, I have this thing I promised my friend I would go Saturday afternoon..."
"Oh come on, you have to come. They'll be staging an anti-gay marriage thing Jan. 13, and we'll be screwed if they turn out to have more supporters in a month! I'll see you on Saturday. It's a deal!"
I've never really talked to this guy called Nathaël, though he's undoubtedly a favorite in the class and everyone knows him. Unlike most French students, he comes to class every week, always sits in the third row, and constantly makes jokes or funny comments during the class. This is a privilege most students don't enjoy, because it really takes the professor's favoritism to not get scolded for such behavior.
After convincing the girl, Nathaël went back to the corridor and started telling his other friends about his plan for Saturday, how his father would put up a banner for the parade, etc. His whole person was animated, and I couldn't help but recalling that cliché our French professor told us in class, that going to a protest is the rituel for each French student to enter into adulthood. I pictured in my head the kind of family Nathaël is from, with possibly intellectual and socially active parents, who voted for either Mélenchon or Hollande.
I guess that's why Mr. Courtois likes Nathaël so much, besides his apparent astuteness as a student. Mr. Courtois never misses the opportunity to plug in a UMP joke in class. For him, to approve of this "unfortunate" party is totally out of the question, which makes his humor a tiny bit harder to appreciate for anyone rightwing, though this hardly matters: Paris-Diderot is quite a socialist camp, and agreement on the joy of political sarcasm is more than universal in this country.
II.
I was myself excited about the idea of a protest. The chance that I might get to jump into a marching crowd to chant pro-gay marriage songs or something sends me mental shivers. But I have work to do and besides, as a foreign student, I'm advised by my American program center not to get involved into any kind of political activities during my stay in France.
As if I'd get caught for participating in a pro-gay marriage in Paris with a bunch of twenty-year-old's.
But the quick decision I made on my own not to meddle with the fun-looking protest also made me realize once again how distanced I still am from this place, not a distinct geographical area, but just this historically determined block of space with which I have trouble still fitting completely in.
As much as I find myself more involved with the lives of my American friends on the other side of the Atlantic, the fact that I'm not marching with a group of French students for a pro-gay marriage protest makes me realize how loosely anchored I still am in the lives of the French. Being a Chinese gives me some perspective, though, since it's precisely the same kind of "anchorlessness" that makes the observation or even news reports by so many non-Chinese seem so ridiculous in my eyes.
I was born, grew up and matured in a space that's an impenetrable historical absolute. There are certain things an American would never get even if he spends five years in China. Exceptions exist, especially when you come to marry a native of the country, but for example, I bet that many Americans living in China don't really understand how the education system really works in China. I often have random chats with my friend Jan making fun of ridiculous New York Times columns, when the writer just clearly "doesn't get it". [I should try to think of an example here.]
Admittedly, Chinese society is a much more exclusive one compared to the Occident, and my remarks above can be read as a form of exclusivism, where the "outsiders" never get to get their labels off. I can be blamed for pointing to the Americans in China who don't understand our education system and calling them "the Other". I am very willing to concede—in fact, this is my proper point of view, and not a concession—that when one starts to make observations about "another" culture, one is already making the attempt to enter into it. Many of us are forever living in this "in-between" stage indeed, if only each one occupies a different spot on the "in-between" spectrum. I wrote a blog entry every week the first month I was in Paris, because everything seemed so very new and exhilarating. But once I found myself more or less "settled down", I started to focus more on actual living what would otherwise be written as travel blogs—it IS my life, after all. The freshness seems to wither away as the sense of "actually living it" sinks in further.
But that hardly eclipses my actual point. Superficial research about facts and history helps one understand a place, a nation, its people, but there are certain things that only those deeply anchored in its "life" can see. This is why Tocqueville emphasizes so much on the customs and social mores of the American people when he discusses the political constitution of America and this is perhaps even why, in his philosophical inquiries, Hume becomes such an unsatisfactory anthropologist and puts all the burden on the shoulders of "customs and habits".
The in-betweeners would surely disagree with me on this, though, and I might be forced to give up having a definite position on this question (after all, I consider myself one of the in-betweeners). But I think I need not waste more time on the significance of Su Shi's words: 不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中。[Could have mentioned the famous "paradigm shift" but oh well.]
Wednesday I had my last aesthetics class at Paris-Diderot with Mr. Courtois and we arranged for our meeting coming January so I can take my make-up final exam before the last deadline. It's been a real pleasure learning from Mr. Courtois this semester, and I only regret not having been to any one of the shows he recommended.
I have made a few acquaintances, if not friends, among the French students who are also taking this class. We have talks during breaks and they send me their notes to help me review alright, but I haven't been active enough to really hang out with them outside of classes. During our last break, I went to get hot chocolate from the vending machine, when Nathaël came by the machine and started talking to the girl before me.
"Are you coming to the pro-gay marriage protest this Saturday?" He asked.
"Oh, I'm afraid not, I have this thing I promised my friend I would go Saturday afternoon..."
"Oh come on, you have to come. They'll be staging an anti-gay marriage thing Jan. 13, and we'll be screwed if they turn out to have more supporters in a month! I'll see you on Saturday. It's a deal!"
I've never really talked to this guy called Nathaël, though he's undoubtedly a favorite in the class and everyone knows him. Unlike most French students, he comes to class every week, always sits in the third row, and constantly makes jokes or funny comments during the class. This is a privilege most students don't enjoy, because it really takes the professor's favoritism to not get scolded for such behavior.
After convincing the girl, Nathaël went back to the corridor and started telling his other friends about his plan for Saturday, how his father would put up a banner for the parade, etc. His whole person was animated, and I couldn't help but recalling that cliché our French professor told us in class, that going to a protest is the rituel for each French student to enter into adulthood. I pictured in my head the kind of family Nathaël is from, with possibly intellectual and socially active parents, who voted for either Mélenchon or Hollande.
I guess that's why Mr. Courtois likes Nathaël so much, besides his apparent astuteness as a student. Mr. Courtois never misses the opportunity to plug in a UMP joke in class. For him, to approve of this "unfortunate" party is totally out of the question, which makes his humor a tiny bit harder to appreciate for anyone rightwing, though this hardly matters: Paris-Diderot is quite a socialist camp, and agreement on the joy of political sarcasm is more than universal in this country.
II.
I was myself excited about the idea of a protest. The chance that I might get to jump into a marching crowd to chant pro-gay marriage songs or something sends me mental shivers. But I have work to do and besides, as a foreign student, I'm advised by my American program center not to get involved into any kind of political activities during my stay in France.
As if I'd get caught for participating in a pro-gay marriage in Paris with a bunch of twenty-year-old's.
But the quick decision I made on my own not to meddle with the fun-looking protest also made me realize once again how distanced I still am from this place, not a distinct geographical area, but just this historically determined block of space with which I have trouble still fitting completely in.
As much as I find myself more involved with the lives of my American friends on the other side of the Atlantic, the fact that I'm not marching with a group of French students for a pro-gay marriage protest makes me realize how loosely anchored I still am in the lives of the French. Being a Chinese gives me some perspective, though, since it's precisely the same kind of "anchorlessness" that makes the observation or even news reports by so many non-Chinese seem so ridiculous in my eyes.
I was born, grew up and matured in a space that's an impenetrable historical absolute. There are certain things an American would never get even if he spends five years in China. Exceptions exist, especially when you come to marry a native of the country, but for example, I bet that many Americans living in China don't really understand how the education system really works in China. I often have random chats with my friend Jan making fun of ridiculous New York Times columns, when the writer just clearly "doesn't get it". [I should try to think of an example here.]
Admittedly, Chinese society is a much more exclusive one compared to the Occident, and my remarks above can be read as a form of exclusivism, where the "outsiders" never get to get their labels off. I can be blamed for pointing to the Americans in China who don't understand our education system and calling them "the Other". I am very willing to concede—in fact, this is my proper point of view, and not a concession—that when one starts to make observations about "another" culture, one is already making the attempt to enter into it. Many of us are forever living in this "in-between" stage indeed, if only each one occupies a different spot on the "in-between" spectrum. I wrote a blog entry every week the first month I was in Paris, because everything seemed so very new and exhilarating. But once I found myself more or less "settled down", I started to focus more on actual living what would otherwise be written as travel blogs—it IS my life, after all. The freshness seems to wither away as the sense of "actually living it" sinks in further.
But that hardly eclipses my actual point. Superficial research about facts and history helps one understand a place, a nation, its people, but there are certain things that only those deeply anchored in its "life" can see. This is why Tocqueville emphasizes so much on the customs and social mores of the American people when he discusses the political constitution of America and this is perhaps even why, in his philosophical inquiries, Hume becomes such an unsatisfactory anthropologist and puts all the burden on the shoulders of "customs and habits".
The in-betweeners would surely disagree with me on this, though, and I might be forced to give up having a definite position on this question (after all, I consider myself one of the in-betweeners). But I think I need not waste more time on the significance of Su Shi's words: 不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中。[Could have mentioned the famous "paradigm shift" but oh well.]
Good job! 你有优秀intellectual的潜质~ 而且你正在通往优秀Intellectual的这条路上。我上过Henry Sussman的课，不知道你人不认识他。他大学毕业就到法国和德国呆了几年，然后回美国做的Comparative Literature的教授。他对中国学生特殊好,虽然好到了让人腻歪的程度。等你回来的时候去shop一下？我是ZZX，但愿你没有忘掉我是谁。呵呵~ 我现在快毕业了。不过我很有可能在Yale接着待下去。
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