Perhaps it is because I am a New Yorker that I use food as my point of reference.  When I began teaching in October at the Lycée Descartes in Antony, a town twenty minutes south of Paris, it was in the cafeteria that I was most reminded of being in a foreign country; more than in the hallways, where the students shout in French as they jostle one other, or even in the teachers’ room, where plans for strikes and responses to disciplinary problems are battled out.  In this French cafeteria, instead of waiting in line for a hair-netted matron to plop lunch onto a tray, a blond woman in a pink dress serves family-size bowls to our tables for six.  Then, as teachers fume about students who refuse to take notes or dissect the scandal of the élève who wouldn’t remove her chador in class, we pass around the family-sized bowls and serve ourselves.  In the beginning, this seemed like a poignant commentary on the differences between the U.S., a country focused on the well-being of the individual, and France, where society as a whole is the primary concern.

Of course, other peculiarities in this school lunch room highlight the differences between France and home, including the preponderance of oil and red meat, and the availability of red wine with every meal.  It is with poorly hidden distaste and a sincere concern about malnutrition, that some of our fellow diners asked another teacher, Catherine, and I why we had decided to eat végétarien in the cantine.  It is at these moments – and as I contemplate the filets de boeuf sizzling in the serving bowl before me, wondering if they might be carrying mad cow disease – that I often feel my identity as an outsider at its strongest.  Surrounded by native French, I am ever more conscious of my accent, as well as of the gaping holes in my understanding of the French political system and the inner workings of the public schools.  This year, in particular, I am put into a peculiar position as an Américaine, the only real-life incarnation for miles of a country constantly making the front page of newspapers, and that is at once so reviled and admired.  This role is at once amusing – who doesn’t like to take advantage of novelty to bask in the light of minor celebrity? – and painful.  Over our plates during the lunch period and in our hour-long classes, time seems my enemy as I try to explain the complexity of my feelings towards home, as I vainly attempt to assure that I will return to the U.S. leaving behind an image different from the caricature muppets of the popular news-satire program les Guignols, and honest enough to not be one-dimensional.

The first days of school, the students inhaled deeply when I introduced myself as a New Yorker, and the first thing they wanted to know was where I had been on le 11 septembre.  Followed the inevitable debate about America – pig-headed imperialists, or well-meaning superpower?  Some students – especially, I noticed, those with darker complexions – hesitated to speak up, and only ventured an opinion after I assured them of the need, especially now, for dialog.  One cold rainy November afternoon, a group of kids, looking to feel rebellious, called out, "Bin Laden!  Bin Laden!" in the same sing- songy pre-teen chirp in which they cheer on their classmates in the schoolyard or tease a girl with whom one of them has fallen secretly in love.  I realized that abroad, more than ever, I would need to tread carefully, especially since I was the only real American some of these students would ever meet.  I had to, therefore, listen impassively to one student’s comment that the U.S. had it coming to them, and answer honestly – without being simplistic – when they asked my opinion of the President.  Where once it had seemed all too easy to joke about nearly-fatal pretzels and jumbled discourses, I now realized the true weight each of my words held in the minds of these children – who were looking to me to clarify their ideas about the country I came from.

One lunchtime, a French teacher recounted his Christmas holidays in New York, and his discomfort at the ubiquity of waving flags.  Heatedly – and surprised at my own resentment – I challenged him to answer "What’s so bad about unity during a time of crisis?  Isn’t it better than what the reaction could have been?"  This same frustration bubbled up inside me one Saturday night over a pesto dinner I had cooked – in exchange for the use of a real kitchen and a food processor – when a friend airily stated that Americans don’t eat vegetables.  It was her conviction in her own generalization – despite never having set foot in the country – that grated me.  Her oversimplification of a nation over 15 times the size of her own – which she knew only through Hollywood movies and documentary exposés – was just as gross as the oversimplification for which many French reproach our government.

It was during this dinner, as Mélanie, Aimée and Jérôme lit their cigarettes, and I chomped on a wad of chewing gum, that I began to realize the intricacy of my dilemma.  Despite my frustration, I couldn’t help but see how Mélanie had come to have such an extreme vision of our country, when you consider the exported movies that get the most publicity and the stories that make headlines here.  And if we don’t want others to oversimplify our intentions, why does our President address the Union with simplified rhetoric?  What sort of reaction do we expect when we cast ourselves as the heroes in a battle of good and evil, and paint current events with the simplicity of a Disney fairy-tale?

The French, most Americans are aware, are the first to argue that their country is the most beautiful, their cuisine the most delicious, and their language the most glorious in the world.  At the same time, they are also quick to voice than grievances – against authority in general, and the government in particular.  The local newspaper Le Parisien features a traffic map marking the day’s strike-related closings and protests, so motorists can avoid bottlenecks and road closings.  Perhaps we can trace the difference in spirit between these two nations to their very revolutions.  America won independence by overthrowing an oppressive monarch living on foreign soil, while modern France was formed after a bloody revolt against corruption from within.  This spirit of domestic upheaval lives on in France, allowing the coexistence of protest and national pride.  There is, perhaps, no better way to manifest one’s gallic blood than to decry a government, or policies that are considered inappropriate or unjust.  In mainstream America, it seems, one must often make a choice between criticism or patriotism, and there does not appear to be – particularly during times of crisis – room for both.

Perhaps it is due to the comfort with ambiguity that exists in France that my sense of self began to crystallize during my junior year in Paris four years ago.  Growing up, I had always had a hard time seeing things in black and white, and felt as though swept up in welcoming arms upon my arrival in this city where people love a good debate. Being a foreigner, additionally, tends to liberate people from the usual constraints of fitting into a mold.  It was this sense of freedom, that I felt for the very first time the year I turned twenty, which insured that France would always remain important for me. 

At twenty-four, I have been learning to chip away and discover the person underneath the different layers, and to accept the fact that in her, little is simple.  As I have struggled to make sense of the wide range of emotions that have washed over me, I have been able to come to terms with my feelings about home.  Finally, I have come to understand that I can love my country without agreeing with every policy, and that speaking up when I disagree does not make me unpatriotic.  The geographical distance from home has brought me to the realization that the faults I find in my country – like the faults I find in my family and my very best friends – are merely a byproduct of love and a desire to make things the best they can be.

I cannot be sure that I will leave my students in May with an understanding as true and complex of what it means to be American as I have reached within myself, but I suppose that is to be expected, considering they have their own self-discoveries to make.  Besides, my own understanding may be wholly different from that of any of my compatriots.  I do know that I will have tried my hardest, and that somewhere in France will remain the student who realized that not all Americans eat fast food for every meal and don’t bother to ask questions (as many of the stereotypical images would have one believe); and the girls who discovered the secrets of New York during a virtual tour in class, via a MetroCard and MTA subway map; and the colleagues who sat around the lunch table with me, hammering out the complexities of the world today, and working to make sense, in our hour together, of who we all were and who we would like to become.

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