Mercredi, Mai 17 2006 @ Paris - Are you French?
An Indian guy asked me "Are you Japanese?" with his fluent Japanese in the subway station. After I got into the train, a French young man was focusing on his "Detective Conan" comic book and sometimes raised his head and looked at me. I believed he must be questioning whether I was Japanese or not. BUT I AM NOT.
On Paris streets, you can easily run into a Muslim or an African wearing their traditional clothes. I've never expected that there are millions of Muslims living in Paris. In the States, people try to be clothing the same with other people, especially immigrants. More than 70% of Islam immigrants in the US are actually turning into Christian. Here, people keep their religion, culture, and clothes. It seems that Paris is a more "freedom" and "liberty" internationalized city than even New York.
However, the big strike happened last year in Paris suburb areas might tell us some things. Several cultures simultaneously exist in the "City of Light", which Parisians called Paris, in another way might imply that those immigrants are excluded from being the "real" French people. They didn't fuse into one culture. Does this cause any problem? Especially, France is a socialism country and still remains a certain level of aristocratism tradition. I cannot help wondering whether those immigrants really thought themselves French.
4 comments:
you sound like Carrie of Sex and the CIty in your last sentence. ha!
Really? You think so?
Maybe I reviewed it too many times...haha
Wow! You went to Paris! So how long will you stay there?
I haven't been to Paris, but when I first came to US, I was also fascinated by their concept of a pluralistic society. Probably France is doing it differently than America.
Having people to assimilate into a mainstream culture indeed eliminates many problems, but it also drove sub-cultures to extinction, much like what is happening to the biological world these days.
When a species maintains genetic diversity, it has an edge over others in adapting to environmental changes. Whenever two distinct subspecies meet, the genetic pool is expanded, and the species enjoy a period of advancement. But then as they lose the independent identities of their subgroups, the species again faces the risk of catastrophic destruction due to poor genetic diversity.
In the same way, different cultures need to meet and reconcile in order for the society to leap forward and avoid deadly conflicts, but they also need to be given rooms for independent development to maintain cultural diversity.
It is interesting to ponder over these concepts, but it is also notoriously difficult to arrive at any useful strategies to address the real-world problems....
I totally agree with you. What France does to their immigrants is quite different from what US does. However, they all cause various disparate problems to their society. It would never come to a conclusion regarding which way is the best. All we, as human beings, can do is to find out a better solution to reduce the conflicts.
I have already come back to TW, but what I saw in Paris really made me to think more and open my eyes to a different world. It is also very good to hear your opinions. :)
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