How I Self Care in Paris
by Elena Chen
I don’t think I truly understood what it meant to be a “foreigner” until I moved to a country where I didn’t speak the language. One knows one has achieved the status of “getting by” when one has begun to forget how much effort it all was in the beginning. Ordering a drink, using public transport, mailing a postcard or buying a movie ticket. What a lightness to not have to bear the burden of being aware of one’s otherness. Of course, feeling different isn’t an experience unique to immigration. We can feel unbelonging in the very places, around the very people, that we have been around for as long as we have known existence. Yet this coming home by going elsewhere, trying to feel centered when everything around us has been thrown into entropy, whether by choice or otherwise, is the task of anyone who first moves from all that they have known.
Learning the language is one entryway into this new world brimming with novel bureaucracies and habits and gestures, remarks that signify a slightly different perspective than what we would have expected. Expectations hurled and reshaped a thousand times, a feeling of being a novice at life and at belonging. What has helped me tread through this chaos has been the attempts to find, internally and externally, certain means of returning back to myself.
Seeing as my identity has since adolescence developed fractured and dispersed, I decided to give myself the grace of accepting the turbulence of such an internal experience by visiting restaurants that remind me of home. Home is Shanghai, after midnight, listening to the crackle of charcoal and traffic when friends sat on multicolored plastic stools munch on grilled skewers. Home is that Thai street food restaurant in Shoreditch that I went to once and smiled at the waiter a little too much. Home is going out to eat every weekend with my family, now scattered on three different continents, 12 hour time zones apart. Home is food and sharing, it is all the memories associated with a little too much spice and just enough MSG. I’ll miss the 3 buck chuck at Trader Joe’s but not as much as their chocolate covered pretzels. So I have my favorite Chinese restaurants and Thai spots and a diner I go to when I need my fix. As I slowly integrate into my Frenchness, whatever nebulous and mysterious ways that is coming to be, find such belonging and comfort in savoring the flavors that witnessed my growth in all those different cities I am distancing from. In my heart, they existed then and they exist now, taking on a new form as I am.
Self care in Paris also means art. It means revelling, basking in and allowing myself to be completely overtaken by the artistic presence in this city. I have visited Musée d’Orsay over 10 times this year. Musée de l’Orangerie was such a delight I had never seen shades of purple so pure. The Louvre, the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Medieval Museum, the Museum on the history of Paris, Le Petit Palais…These are the third places that foster a kinship between the difference I feel within me and that which so many artists, past and present, have also lived through. The affordability and accessibility of art in Paris rests on the fact that it remains largely within the public domain. In Hong Kong, New York or London, I have never known a museum to offer an annual pass to two museums for 20 euros. This also includes a window in the morning for card holders that grants another vantage point and experience with the work.
Living in a city that rewards the artistic so much has been healing for me and I try to immerse myself in this privilege whenever possible. If the thick dabs of pastel colors on a Monet don’t kindle something inside you, the soft marble of Rodin or the archival collections of Dior may remind you of the parts of you that too partake in a primordial and instinctive beauty.
Finally, I have been allocating, with intention, moments of aimless meandering. In French, they call this “flâner”, to stroll, without rush, “surrendering to the impression and spectacle of the moment”. The spectacle of the moment is in the willingness to embrace whatever comes. Whether it’s a boutique of souvenirs or an art nouveau café, seeing it is enough to amaze. I stopped at a red light whilst cycling through the city and saw a banner for a huge sale of TV and film costumes and accessories at a charity nearby that would donate proceeds towards helping the vulnerable. I stopped by later in the week to find the perfect denim dress and I feel one step closer to my ceramicist dream. All the movie posters, pop up stores, and little tucked in shops that make up this wonder of discovering a city, has been one of my favorite ways of feeling more Parisien and myself at the same time. Paris is an especially magical city to discover oneself in. The charm of this city is seen in how much it serves the joys and interests of so many. As we all have unique stories of belonging, I cherish the grand variety in the construction of our individuated rituals around self care.
Read more expat essays by Elena Chen on Dear City Girl.
