I jumped on the cab at Orly airport at five minutes past two in the afternoon, exhausted from an early wake-up in Istanbul and a three hour flight next to an man whose elbows, the least to say, were physically incapable of being constrained to the limits of his armrests (I dozed with my head to right, and the bones in  my neck cracked back together when I straightened my head at the end of the flight). The driver asks which part of Paris I’m headed for – the 20^th, I respond, and I give him the name of the highway exit (or porte, as the French call their entry points to the city). Within five minutes we’re speeding along the pathway to the périphérique, passing by industrial complexes and apartment blocks that line the road.

    The conversation is light and cheery for an exchange with a Parisian cab driver – he is engaging, friendly, and curious, yet he is also respectful and lets me munch on the crisps from my canister of Pringles – he even bids me “Bon appétit” as I start wolfing down seriously. As we enter the neighborhood around Porte de Bagnolet, he remarks radio never works in the area – indeed, his jazz music has been cut off by a decidedly un-snazzy crackle of interference. He asks me if Gambetta, around where I live and just next to Porte de Bagnolet, has the same problem. I say no – my host family listens to the radio in the morning all the time.

    He stops his complaints and suddenly looks at me. “You live with a host family?” he asks, his interest piqued. Do you not originate from France, he asks aloud. I’m deeply honored by the counter-assumption behind the question, but of course I’m not. My family lives in South Korea, and I’ve lived most of my life in the United States.

    But the taxi driver asserts, despite my disagreement with his idea of my level of French, that I could have passed for a native speaker of French. I say no – I can’t understand most of the kids my age, who speak a faster, more garbled version of the language, peppered with verlan (inversed words, such as arabe -> beur or femme -> meuf). He immediately dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “That,” he proclaims, “is the French of the street.”

    Français de la rue is a term that I’ve grown familiar with in my time with Delia, my grammar professor at the centre. For Delia, the taxi drivers, and many French, there are two levels of French – grammatically pure French, with its proper, Academie-approved words and literary forms, and common French, spoken among teenagers and the uneducated. The latter is simply considered incorrect – the French don’t like to leave a lot of room for ambiguity as far as their language is concerned – and the former is the form to be emulated and adopted for anyone wishing to be considered a true Francophone.

    “I forbade my children from ever speaking le français de la rue at the house,” the taxi driver continues. “I came to France from Algeria when I was a student of French, and I couldn’t believe what the young French were doing with such a beautiful language. What a waste - French doesn’t need slang and inverted words!”

    In one way I agree with him, but in another way I disagree. I was on board with him the idea that French doesn’t need slang – after all, French slang only limits my ability to understand conversations and makes me feel more like idiot after prolonged eavesdropping sessions in the metro to try and practice my listening comprehension skills. On the other hand, no language can be considered living if its confined to its academic form, controlled by an outmoded and notoriously slow governing body. For example, Shakespeare was able to produce his plays only by adding some several 1,700 words to the English language. Who would want to use a language that couldn’t change according to the times and needs?

    Of course, there is an advantage to learning grammatically pure French – communication, for example, is much easier for me now that I can hold a conversation with most adults without letting slip my newcomer status to the country. International communication is also easier with Standard French. In Greece, I was able to translate a museum sign written in English to a Quebecois tourist who was having difficulty with the written explanation; likewise, in Istanbul, I helped a Lebanese family find directions to Topkaki Palace by translating the English instructions of the woman at the tourist agency. But just as English has guaranteed me a place in the realm of casual and personal conversation with other Anglophones, I desire also the ability to understand and converse with others my age in a natural setting, where I am not a student of French, or an amateur Francophone, or a Francophile. I don’t want to be limited by the academic bounds set by French language purists – I want to be part of the living Francophone community.

    Perhaps I desire too much. But is that not what one searches when coming to a new country – to fit in?

     After over two months of inactivity, I’ve realized that I am a “schmutt” and have been exceedingly lazy, despite my new activities and experiences, in uploading this blog. I half-heartedly started and procrastinated on several potential blog entries in December and January, only to abandon them mid-way – the result is that my entries from December and January are completely missing. I will try and blame these absences from cyberspace on my family visiting me in December and my travels during the winter holidays in January, but that still leaves me with some 40-odd days that I could have posted an entry and failed to do so.

      So what have I been doing in my spare time since my last entry (which I believe was in November) ? Aside from being on “French time” – the term that many of the Gap Year students conveniently use to express tardiness – I have been taking advantage of high-speed trains and cheap flights on the Continent to travel to nearby countries in and outside the European Union. One of the best things that I have realized about the Union – and the continent itself in general – is that, being a close network of cultures, languages, and ultimately, nations – one can move from country to country, observe a common thread throughout history among the different states, without having to travel excessively or constantly convert currency. 

     I will try to catch with my absence by post-dating several blog entries from December and January, especially on the days of my travels. In the meantime, please continue to check in for updates on life in Paris as it continues for the second semester.

One of the things I’ve really struggled to find here, on top of good ingredients for preparing Korean food that I miss, is a good church. There is a diverse community at the beautiful American Church of Paris on the left bank of the Seine, a little ways down from Hôtel des Invalides on the Quai d’Orsay, but it’s too far to travel on Sunday morning from my house, which is on the other side of the city and river. Luckily for me, my childhood friend Sandra (who’s studying architecture for her undergraduate studies here in Paris) has introduced me to a Korean Presbyterian church in the 11ème arrondissement, near the station Faidherbe-Chavigny on line 8.

The Korean language and church are inextricably related in my mind. The moment I enter a church, I judge it from the words that used in its prayers and hymns, from the language issued from the pulpit. If the language of the service of Korean, it will take me farther back than I want to remember, to a time when I seven years old, when I was neither Korean nor American, stuck in the pews of my parents’ New Jersey church. Even then, the grandeur of the wood paneling, the barrel vault ceiling of the adult chapel and the stained-glass failed to keep me inspired with the idea of joining the adults someday; what I desired on those holiday services with the whole family was the musty plaster of the basement chapel for kids, where the pastor spoke in English.

I knew I was losing the ability to speak Korean at age seven. My parents’ only-Korean rule in the house served merely stall the inevitable; by the second grade, I would open my mouth, close it, and mumble “never mind” if I wanted to say something to my mother. That was the first time I learned how language can reduce us as much it can elevate us. Yelling at my parents in English made me beyond their disciplinary reach, but being unable to express the most basic desires in Korean made me dim-witted and stupid.

When we returned to Korea, I refused to go to church services for children in Korean. When Sarang Community Church started sign-ups for English speaking children, I was one the first to interview. I signed up for private lessons with other former expatriate kids, and on the fourth floor of a small building in the Daechi district of Seoul, I immersed myself in the books I’d missed, the newspapers I’d always wanted to read, and teachers who reminded me most of those I’d left behind.

By the 6^th grade, I could write full-blown essays in English while I struggled at the same time with book reports in Korean. I could give 5-minute speeches in English in front of 8 other kids while I could barely say a full sentence in Korean without stammering. In every conceivable way I was more intelligent in English, and I made the choice of language that has defined me ever since as an Anglophone.

Oddly, I struggle with being called Korean American. That word for me brings back memories of the first place I called home – towns with perfectly manicured grass and sprawling suburban mansions, of lonely wooded roads and the nameless rivers that ran between and alongside them. Above all, Korean American for me implies a hyphenated person – a Korean who is an American citizen, a person whose origins lie in Korea but who has made a permanent home in America.

I am neither.

It makes me laugh when I think about how much I thought reading English books and newspapers, talking to kids who had lived in America, taking private lessons in English speech and writing would keep me American once I returned to the States. I chose a strange shadow dimension of pre-teen life in America while I was living in Korea, so that in the end, I lived in neither. Recently, I discovered that I have only a language in common with the Americans; their way of life, their way of thinking, is just as much a subject of study for me as it is a way of life.

Strangely, in the Korean Presbyterian Church of Paris, I feel that the kids who are at my age haven’t experienced the same conflict as I have. Here, they speak in rapid-fire French to the few non-Koreans who have attended the service, and then just as easily switch back to Korean when they speak to me. They interject French words and phrases in their sentences, but overall they are at ease with living here permanently, as well as with going to Korea to see relatives. “France is a cultural place; Korea is a comfortable place,” one of them told me. If I hadn’t know  beforehand that they spoke French fluently, I might have thought they were exchange students from Korea.

Moi, en faite, je trouve que c’est trop bizarre.

“Hi!”

 “Hello!”

 “You come from America?”

 Random phrases of English burst out of little pre-teens swarming about as Stassja and I walked across the entry hall to the little middle school at Montreuil for the first day our four-week teaching assistance program. Some looked avidly curious; some leaned it but drew back when we looked in their direction, evidently afraid of making conversation. It was a few minutes before we managed to walk across the yelling and running crowd of kids to make our way through to the staircase and Mme Celine Pontier’s classroom on the second floor.

 Entering Mme Pontier’s classroom brought a lull to the constant hubbub of the school. Even though I’d met all of the teachers beforehand with Severine, the professor for my seminar in the French education system, I was a little anxious; what if I didn’t live up to the teacher’s expectation as an English assistant? What if the kids judged me because I couldn’t speak French? (Of course, I can, but we’re pretending for a while because they want the kids to talk to us in English.) It soon became clear that these concerns were irrelevant; Mme Pontier was entirely pleased that we had arrived, and the kids were excited at the prospect of listening to native English speakers. When Mme Pontier said we could answer all of their questions about life in the U.S., one girl even chirruped, “Donc il sont comme les casquettes, mais ils sont reels!” (They’re like the cassette tapes, but real!)

 The kids have a tendency to ask the questions first in French, and then to form the phrase again in English, all the while bouncing their eyes from us to the teacher, as if looking for confirmation that they will be understood. It took all of my concentration to look sufficiently puzzled when they used a French word or expression that wasn’t used in English so that they would try again in proper English. When one of the girls made a joke in French about her mistake, I accidentally burst out laughing and everyone in the class looked at me; I quickly turned to Stassja, as if laughing about a joke she had made, but she looked confused as well. I don’t think I blew our cover, though; the kids continued to pose English questions as they did before.

 For Mme Pontier’s we pretended to be famous dead people; Stassja chose Michael Jackson, which was most unfortunate because one of the girls in the class turned out to share his birthday and knew immediately. I chose Franklin Roosevelt; I figured that if I said “He’s a president” they would know from their history books. Luckily for me, there’s also a station on line 1 on the Champs-Elysées with the same name.

Can you imagine players of American football (le fut is one word I have consistent trouble with) wearing uniforms and shins of hot pink?

Ian handed me a bright pink flag on Saturday with three lightning bolts in the center, surrounded by a white circle. I was momentarily confused; I thought we were going to a rugby game? “But those are the team colors for Stade Français – pink and dark navy.” Somehow, I couldn’t see big, burly rugby players obliging to wearing hot pink.

“It gets better,” he added with a wink.

We took an incredibly crowded Metro train to Stade de France, the site of France’s historic victory in the 1998 World Cup. My hand was jammed up against my chest the entire time, and the train inched along for fear that it would carried past the stations en route to the stadium by the momentum of the hundreds of rugby supporters. It was a relief, to say the least, when we finally pulled into the Saint-Denis metro stop.

The pre-game show was quite interesting (it featured a woman in a panther-spotted leotard with one of her breasts falling out). As she walked out of the stadium, giant plastic pillars of blue and pink were inflated to their full height by the wind machines inside. Then, the players ran onto the field.

The Toulon players had quite banal uniforms (red jerseys with dark navy shorts), but the Stade Français Paris players wore jerseys of hot pink AND dark leopard spots. Their shin socks were also bright pink; there would obviously be no confusion among the players in distinguishing between their teams. But watching them play was no light-hearted manner; they pushed and shoved with the same force as American football players, were just as large in size, and they didn’t wear any armor. There’s also no stopping in rugby; if the player with the ball gets tackled and falls to the ground, he has to let go of the ball, and the next player who gets the ball runs off immediately as soon as he’s disentangled himself from the pile-up.

We managed to see some amazing plays, although Ian was disappointed that I didn’t get to see any tri’s. It was kind of funny how the players would pitch the ball back down two rows of players from both teams from an offside shoot and the teams would immediately host their team members into the air to catch the ball. You don’t see that kind of gymnastics in American football.

Stade Français won. There was a boisterous fireworks show afterwards to celebrate. And while French grammaticians have a big problem with les anglicismes, most French rugby fans seem to have no problem singing songs like “Here We Go” over and over (or at least, that’s what I thought it was; it sounded an awful lot like Haricot).

So as I understood from a brief phone call with my dad last week, foreign media seems to be extensively covering the French pension reform controversy and the unfolding protest drama in Paris and other cities in France. While the Metro strikes of the past two months have been somewhat nerve-fraying as we get squashed into the one train that comes out of every four that were supposed to be in service, the image of burnt-out school in a regional city, and all the flight cancellations, brings home the question – Why the big deal over a tweak in the retirement age? (By the way, the French retirement age will still be the lowest in the world at 62, the proposed figure)

From an American standpoint, the protest against the pensions reform is ridiculous. The French have enjoyed one of the lowest legal retirement ages in the world (60) for nearly forty years; now that their population, much like the rest of Europe, is rapidly aging and living longer, there is sense of urgency on the part of the government that the age for peak pension benefits must be pushed higher to prevent the deficit from ballooning to unmanageable levels. The forms of protest also appear rather overblown; an American would hardly expect high school students throwing rocks and fighting with riot police over a dilemma as distant as their rising retirement age. When I walked out of my apartment on Wednesday, all the trash bags in my neighborhood had been dumped out onto the street; all the green plastic trash collectors had been rammed up against the local middle school by the students in their own manisfesation against the pensions reform, or more likely, going to school.

But there is another side to what most of the world’s non-welfare state countries see as a spoiled French sense of entitlement and laziness. The setting of the retirement age at 60 after the Second World War is seen as one of the greatest achievements of the much-envied French social security system. It guarantees one to a stable retirement, supported by the state. To the working class, it is a fundamental promise from the country that they can enjoy a relatively easier life once they retire, especially since they expect to live shorter than wealthier retirees. Raising the retirement age is thus seen as an unfair burden to poorer people. For French students, the prospect of aged workers staying in their occupations longer means a much lower job turnover rate, and thus higher chances of staying unemployed.

But the problem with the French pension reform goes even deeper than a mere conflict between certain demographic groups. Workers in France, despite having one of the shortest work weeks (37 hours in total) and the lowest retirement age on the continent, are found to be among the unhappiest, along with the Spanish and Italians. A lot of blame is placed on the hierarchal structure of French companies, which dictate that a person’s position in the corporate ladder is determined by whatever degree they obtained in their youth; French corporate practices rarely allow for professional development or upward mobility. Thus French workers feel that they are squeezed and squeezed until they can take no more, much less an extra two years. The shortening of the work week and the lowering of the retirement age, rather than alleviating the average salaryman and worker’s burden, has increased; surveys show that unemployment concerns have risen by 55 percent since the setting of the retirement age at 60, since older people are now frequently forced out of work at 58.

And of course you can’t forget Sarkozy. He is highly unpopular; my entire host family and their friends who come over to the house can attest to that. Part of the protest movement is against him and his high style of living that is out of touch with the ordinary Frenchman, and his way of ramming laws and new regulations down through parliament. While Sarkozy isn’t lying when he says that France’s AAA credit rating will be in danger if the pension reform doesn’t go through, it is more his character and his style of leadership with which people are fed up.

So from a macroeconomic standpoint, the retirement age and handout period for pensions has to be bumped up. But most French people, like my host dad, don’t see their president or parliament as sufficiently considering their best interests.

For four weeks now I have been taking a seminar on the educational system in France and preparing to teach in a French public school. The system of public education in France dates back to the early 19th century, when the state imagined schools as institutions to rear republican citizens loyal to the motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Today, the French educational system has become the focus of both criticism and social soul-searching – an institution that has been revered as the foundation of an egalitarian civil society is now being viewed as intellectually elitist and psychologically discouraging.

Take my host father, Ian, for example. Having gone to school and taught in France for more two decades, he can easily say that French schools and their teachers have very shallow backgrounds in professional pedagogy. The way he describes the typical French classroom makes it sound like a terrifying experience, where the student is afraid of being called on or being snubbed, or, in the worst case scenario, berated for giving the wrong answer. Teachers also lack the necessary training to make learning interesting or engaging, he says, making them resort to discipline when mere lecturing fails. Looming at the end of secondary education, of course, is the great examination known as le baccalauréat – popularly abbreviated as le bac – which some eighty-five percent of students pass in order to advance to post-secondary education.

In addition, the reality in France is that, despite the lauded inexpensiveness of the French public education system (tuition costs some 800 euros at a French université in comparison to the average 20,000 dollars at an American college), French public universities are underfunded and overcrowded. I started auditing European Studies at l’Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle in September and my Economics course had over eighty students, but chairs for only sixty. When I pass by the amphitheaters at lunch time, there are students spilled over into the hallway, all trying to take notes and listen to the professor over the mealtime din.

Then there is the educational crisis in the suburbs of Paris. For all you hear about les banlieues – the communes that fringe major French cities and were the highlight of extensive media coverage during the French riots of 2005 – you don’t actually see very much of these cities or their residents. Paris is encircled by a highway (appropriately called le boulevard périphérique) that runs almost exactly along the borders of the city proper. “Outside the périphérique” is a French expression that implies the social and economic division between Paris and its satellite communes. While wealthy suburbs - like Levallois-Perret or Neuilly-sur-Seine to the west - do exist, generally the word banlieue holds negative connotations for many Parisians who live comfortably inside the perimeter.

The educational prospects for students who live in les banlieues - and thus who are consequently from immigrant backgrounds - are the worst. Not only are these students from impoverished backgrounds, they are also the least likely to speak French at home, they consistently underperform in school, and they are the least likely demographic group to pass le bac. Even if they do succeed in high school, pass le bac, and finish university studies, they have a seventy-five percent lower chance of being hired for the same positions as their white peers of equal qualifications. Séverine, my seminar professor for the educational system, that employers often mark down white French applicants as BBR – blanc, bleu, rouge - to distinguish them from non-white applicants. These BBR candidates are usually the one who get called in for interviews.

Undoubtedly the French educational system is racked by the same questions that plague democratic systems of education everywhere; the conflict between equality of opportunity and equality of conditions, the institutionalization of competition, and the appropriateness of affirmative action policies. But what is unique about the French system of education is that the government repeatedly insists it is a vanguard of republican equality – France, after all, is the country where the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was written – but whose people seem to be rather indifferent, and indeed retreating, to an older attitude of hostility and condescension towards foreign-born immigrants and their children.

Here are a few photos of France in September.