I AM NOT PAMELA DRUCKERMAN

When I came to France in 2003 as a young parent and American ex-pat, here because of my husband’s job in a multinational corporation,  I quickly started to realize that my experience didn’t seem to be quite that of the other, mainly white American women whom I met through the company’s spousal network, or who were parents at my daughter’s bilingual international schools…we didn’t seem to have the same expectations, didn’t create the same kinds of social networks—either with other expats or with French locals—and didn’t have the same parenting experiences.  

A few years later the book Bringing up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman became a big bestseller and a topic of much conversation among my American friends, who would ask me about my life in France, assuming I was having similar experiences and perspectives on the French and the French way of life.  Only I wasn’t. I hadn’t come from New York to live in Paris, so I could only make comparisons between American suburban and French village life and didn’t really have an opinion on life in Paris (which is very different from life outside of it!). I also didn’t recognize Druckerman’s childrearing dilemmas in my own family and started to resent the implication that there is only one typically ‘American’ way of doing things (read: white and middle-class). Besides, having a German spouse rather than a British one probably also changes the dynamic in our interactions with the French, where many conversations revolve around European history, family histories during the world wars, education, and the value of the European Union.  So though, like Druckerman, I also have many fascinating, sometimes maddening, sometimes hilarious, and often thought-provoking social encounters, in my case they are always filtered bodily through the lens of race, ethnicity, and skin color and through the prism of language(s), religion and other cultural baggage that I bring with me as an Indian-American married to a European citizen, and that in turn influence others’ view of me as well. And of course, as an anthropologist, I end up seeing my life experiences as one endless fieldwork project! 

 So in this blog I’d like to share these experiences and my analysis of them as a counterpoint to the mainstream narrative (code: white, often romanticized, imaginings of the “American” experience of French life and culture), exploring how my hyphenated-American identity tries to find space in a country in which identity is (on the surface anyway) solidly monolithic—secular, monolingual and Republican, in the civic sense.  I will share with you here what life is like among my neighbors and community in a small town/village outside of Paris, my encounters with French students and higher education through my work, my interpretation of the French context of the European migration ‘crisis’, influenced by first-hand volunteer and research experience with migrants and asylum seekers, and the upcoming bureaucratic battle I anticipate as I prepare to become a naturalized French citizen!