Rambling Notes on Being Nuyorasian in Berlin

My facebook feed is full of friends in America proclaiming #BlackLivesMatter and #Justice4Liang and most recently, the whole debacle of #OscarsSoWhite. I’m following the stories but here in Berlin, the battle for racial justice is in a galaxy far far away. 

Yes, the refugee crisis is everywhere and racism is definitely part of the problem. But refugees are newcomers fleeing from war or famine or extreme poverty; they’re not citizens battling for justice and equity within entrenched systems. In Europe, the race issue is over having enough pieces of cake to give out, while in America, the bakers are wondering why they just get crumbs.

Obviously, I don’t face the discrimination that refugees confront here. People don’t think I’m dirty or looking for a handout. But being Asian-American has its own weirdness in Berlin. I think this has a lot to do with how few Asians there are. People from the Middle East are the only sizeable minority and they’re only 9% of the 3.5 million people in the city. Asians are just 3% of the population. There is no Chinatown. And Germany never had an Asian colony so there isn’t a history with all its inherent baggage.

On the one hand, this is rather liberating. There isn’t really any fetishization of Asian women here. Germans don’t look at me and see a geisha sex kitten, ready to dispense koan-like wisdom and a tea ceremony. And my added American-ness just confuses them. It seems no one knows what to make of me; an Asian-looking woman with some kind of vintage style who speaks perfect English. I definitely don’t look like I work in a nail salon. I also don’t look much like a student. “I’m so surprised,” a rather drunk friend of a friend kept repeating after every sentence I said. I’ve seen a room full of lonely guys check out every girl in the room but their eyes pass right over me like I’m a table or a chair. It’s definitely not the States, where a recent study of 25 million OKCupid members showed that Asian women are the most desired race of women in online dating. Because, you know, geisha sex kitten.

At times, I rather miss being fetishized. Well, it’s not all that pleasant being looked at from the ass-end of a telescope, but at least you’re looked at. In New York, I often found myself in an intense political conversation and then caught the guy beaming at me with a paternal look that seemed to say, “Aww, it’s so cute. It’s even talking.” Here, the look is more one of utter consternation, “Ack, it’s talking?!! In English??? What is it?!” I wonder which is worse. Or how this compares with Asia, where the general reaction is skepticism tinged with disapproval.

But while there isn’t much of a fetish for Asian women, that’s not to say there aren’t Asian stereotypes in Berlin. I danced at a Chinatown-themed party on New Year’s Eve. All the white bartenders dressed in cheongsams with chopsticks in their hair. I had an interesting conversation with a white guy trying to ignore that he was all done up like Madame Butterfly with a kimono, white face, and slanty-eyed makeup. I think I must have been the only one to notice or care that the only Asian music at the so-called Chinatown party was J-pop.

My feelings about cultural (mis)appropriation are very very mixed. I’m not always offended. It’s the other way around too: I see Asians all the time trying really damn hard to be Americans through some token surface means. They bleach their hair blond, wear blue contact lenses, get a nose job. Or they wear baseball caps backwards and low-hanging pants. For Asians, it does seem to come from some kind of inferiority, as if by dyeing their hair or wearing that hat, they can assume a power they wish they had.

For Europeans aping Asians, it’s definitely the other way around. Here are white people, with all their privileges, trying to find a way to be “other.” They wear Native American feathered bonnets and get all tribal or they put on blackface like this lady attempting to bring attention to those poor African tribes. It's a misplaced magnanimity, thinking they can embrace another culture by adopting traditional dress or other surface representations. The line here is kind of fuzzy. Painting your face another color and taping your eyes in a slant and dancing around a teepee: no no no. But antique kimonos are beautiful and I'm glad some other people appreciate them as long as they're not bowing and shuffling like they're Princess Yum Yum in the Town of Titipu. It's interesting to me; this desire to be the “other.” Most people who come from marginalized communities will basically agree that it sucks and if there was a way to erase all the marks of being "other" and still be true to yourself, then YES PLEASE.

I guess this is what I find hardest to relate to: Germans are not underdogs. I’m generalizing very much of course -- and things were different fifty years ago for half of the country -- but at this particular moment in time, Germans don’t know what it means to live with limited opportunities. It’s rather enviable, actually. There isn’t an entrenched class system here like in England, so they don’t know what it means to be on the bottom even in an economic structure. And women are not considered the low end of the social heap here. Germans can choose to identify with the poor or with outcasts of various sorts, but it’s a choice. They can drop that shitty end of the stick anytime they want. This is part of why I think Germans can't sing the blues.

Sadly, my opportunities are a lot more limited. Yes, having good English and being articulate does give me a freedom that some immigrant Asian-Americans may envy, but being Asian and a woman is definitely a handicap if you want to be taken seriously as a writer or director. It's nearly impossible to get past the gatekeepers. You’re constantly fighting cultural stereotypes that relegate you to a tiny dusty unobtrusive corner of the playing field. 

What’s interesting is realizing how much I am defined by this, like a painting created from negative space. My whole life, I’ve resisted stereotypes about my gender and ethnicity: I’m not a math whiz or a model minority or an immigrant or subservient or kawaii. But without these expectations to oppose, I have much less of a defining edge. I know what I’m not, but I’m not sure what I am.

It’s also interesting that I find myself a bit on the opposite end of my stance in America. Back in New York, the great majority of Asian-Americans in the arts are second generation and college educated. Most of them have only been in Asia a few times. Most of them barely speak the language. I’m different in that I do have language skills and my mother is a barely educated immigrant from a rural area. So in New York, I’m often bringing attention to working-class immigrant Asian-America. But here in Berlin, the general stereotype is that Asians work in restaurants and nail salons and speak very bad German and no English. Being Little Miss Mary, I find myself reminding everyone that the model minority is real and I’m (sort of) it. 

But in Berlin, "second generation" and  "model minority" are really foreign concepts. Am I Asian? Am I American? How can I be both? I suppose maybe liminality is what this rambling article is ultimately about. Not to toss a high-faluting five syllable word around, but liminality is such an interesting idea in terms of mixed ethnicities and diasporas. 

The idea was first applied by an anthropologist in the early 1900s to the middle state of rituals. Now it’s also applied to societies and history and individuals. It’s the state of being between things. It’s the moment when something is being dissolved and something else is being created. The anthropologist Victor Turner argues that liminality is a state of great tension that can’t remain for too long. That might be obvious but it’s an important thought. Another interesting thought is the liminal being, a creature between two different states. In fiction, that would include shape shifters, tricksters, and cyborgs. And in reality? Teenagers, transsexuals, people of mixed cultures. 

We’re the people at the threshold. We are the future. Everyone else just has to get used to it. All that racist hostility in America? Howls of a dying beast. It's inevitable that one day, everyone will be of mixed cultures and race will be totally moot. Until then, my mutant powers of invisibility seem to have developed a weird and interesting tangent here in Berlin. I wonder if there's any use for it. 

Life in Planet Berlin

Lately, Berlin has been touted as the best place in the world for creatives to live. See here and here and here. Well, it’s been about one year since I made the move to London and somehow ended up in Berlin and I'm still not sure if this is really the place. In London, I had a coherent idea of what I could do: link the Asian-American and British-East Asian theatre communities, make experimental theatre, take a few more steps in film. But I’m in Planet Berlin where (because of language and culture) these options don’t really exist.

For one thing, in Planet Berlin there are no Asians. Or black people except for African drug dealers in Gorlitzer Park. Berlin is 82% white.  This is a wildly different reality to New York, which is only 44% white.  Or London, which is 60% white. All that concern elsewhere about the underrepresentation of minorities in mainstream media? Completely moot here. The minorities are so minor they barely exist.  There are good things and bad things about this. I’ll write about that more fully in another essay.

But living somewhere predominantly white isn't entirely unfamiliar. European culture is something we all know, even if we grew up in a place where it co-exists with other cultures. What is completely weird and alien in Planet Berlin is the strange lack of pressure. It’s like getting used to a different gravity. I’m still floating about, trying to figure out how to put my feet on the ground and actually take a few steps. Most of the Americans and Londoners I’ve met also grapple with the same challenge.

In Planet Berlin, the cost of living is so low that you no longer have to scramble to pay your rent. You can find an entire (huge! gorgeous! central!) apartment for yourself at €600 per month. I know people who paying €250 for a decent room and sharing with only one other person. I can see my New Yorker friends reading this with their mouths open. Say what??? Yes, it’s true.

 And groceries are ridiculously cheap. If you hit the Turkish market (open on Tuesday and Friday) at around 4:30pm, the grocers are all getting rid of fruits and vegetables. 2 kilograms of oranges can be yours for €1.  That's like 20 oranges. (I’m still trying to finish the oranges from my last shopping foray.) You can also eat nicely at a restaurant for less than €15, drinks included, since a glass of wine is only about €4.  If you’re a beer drinker, well eine kleine bier is only €2.

So economic pressure is way way way reduced. If you’re an artist, you really can have a good quality of life working a P/T job.  Though it’s not really possible for most of us to rely solely on artistic gigs here since the pay is like half of what you get in London or New York. A lot of performers I know get themselves booked in Switzerland or London, where the money is. But it’s still so much easier to survive as an artist. And so much more possible to live primarily on your artistic work.

The other thing that is way reduced is commercial pressure. In New York, your work has the distinct possibility of being the next new thing. The platform is much more public, much more visible. And of course, much more competitive.  I think everyone in New York feels like they’re dancing like a chicken while juggling eight balls and shouting the Gettysburg Address trying to be seen and heard above the ruckus of performers around the world.

But in Planet Berlin, you don’t feel the eyes of the world on you in the same way. There is something rather isolated about Berlin. Spaces are plentiful and cheap. You can do anything you want.  But it’s all up to you. And without economic or commercial pressure, there’s only a fire under your butt if you make one yourself.

So here I am, trying to remember why I do what I do. Which is, I think, what confounds most people from New York or London. In those two cities, there’s no time to reflect. You just have to do it. Now. But here? I can really do anything I want (well, almost anything...) so what is it that I really really want to do?

After six months here unable to write and trying to figure out where I might find a community of like-minded radical vintage literate geeks and weirdos, it seems I’m being cleaved in half between a “serious” writer/director known as Victoria Linchong and a wacky performance artist known as Viva Lamore. Which is maybe what it should be.

I know that I really can’t exist without being on stage. How I ended up off the stage for so long is a mystery to me. Well, a smart theater friend did explain a few years ago, “Once they find out you can produce theater, you’ll never act again.”  I wish I’d known that when I was 17. And what I used to be known for way back when I was 17 was comedic performances. That’s something that Bill Murray said that resonated with me, “If you can be funny, you need to be funny.”

So maybe the lack of gravity in Planet Berlin has resulted in a 360° double me or Victoria 4.0, the Viva Victoria version.  And maybe in this alternate atmosphere it’s possible to live cheaply while creating theater and film and performances that somehow gain a modicum of traction. I’m slowly adjusting to the lack of hustle, though I still wonder if I will ever get used it. You can take the girl out of New York but can you take the hustle out of the New York girl?

Refugees and Me

It seems there was an accident with the sideshow. A truck slammed into the stage and they're assessing the damage so now they don't know when (or if) I am needed for the Munich Oktoberfest. Which sucks since I thought I would finally be able to pay almost everyone back. Well, I obviously couldn't stay in Venice since I was nearly out of money and there are not many legal or ethical or remotely pleasant ways for me to refill my pockets in La Serenissima. So I emailed a friend who sent me money for a train ticket back to Berlin. But there was a grant deadline that day for an application that I was being paid to write and I ended up spending part of my train fare at the internet cafe. The arts organization paid me as soon as they could, but the ticket price had already leaped from €120 to €220. So I bought a train ticket from Venice to Munich, and then a bus ticket from Munich to Berlin.

And that's how I ended up stumbling straight into the refugee crisis.

The train ride was really pleasant at first with beautiful views of the Brenner Pass. I finished my novel and went to the dining car to see if there was anything I could afford. My first glance at the menu yielded the word früstück which filled me with dread and dismay. Oh man, German. After a week of enjoying crostini for €1.20 on the steps of crumbling 17th century palazzos overlooking sun-dappled grey-green water, I was going back with no money to Germany where I would have to eat €3 doner kebabs while staring at Soviet architecture. Remind me why? I had half a mind to get off at Padova and never be heard from again. 

When we reached Innsbruck in Austria, a new train conductor began his shift. He started to go through the train stopping at every dark person to ask for a ticket. "No ticket, no money, you go out to platform," he declared to a mystified group of four Africans. Two of them had tickets, two of them paid. He approached the next African, a lady in a pink sweater, who looked at him with incomprehension. A German guy across the aisle volunteered to pay for her. I suddenly realized that the conductor wasn't racial profiling, he was refugee profiling.

About a quarter of the people on the very full train were some sort of African that I wasn't familiar with. For the most part, they were small and thin. They had round eyes and a sharp nose, the kind of nose that is coveted in Asian countries, what my mother calls jiam jiam. Their skin was a rich shade of medium brown with a slight underneath yellow tinge. Most of them wore puffy jackets with a hood sprouting fake grey fur.

At the last little town in Austria, the train stopped for an inordinately long time. Finally, there was an announcement in German that confused all the Italian and English speakers. The guy facing me said that it was something about an unidentified bag. The woman across the aisle said that it was something about refugees. Sure enough, after a few minutes, three policemen with padded jackets and guns escorted a few Africans off the train. They looked like teenagers. We all craned our necks and peered out the window to the platform, where a dozen policemen had rounded up about two dozen Africans. Then the train left the station.

The train arrived in Munich half an hour late. At the end of the platform, there was a phalanx of policemen who were dividing up everyone who had just gotten off the train. The dark people were shepherded to the right where they had to show their travel documents and tickets before they could exit. The Europeans were shuttled to the left where they could exit unimpeded. I wondered whether I would be moved to the right or left. As we got closer, my feet of their own accord veered toward to the refugees on the right. A big German policeman got in front of me and pushed me to the left. Oh, okay, I guess I'm with the Europeans? A hundred years ago, you would've examined my teeth and asked if I had worms.

I had a doner kebab for €3 while staring at the lit up plastic signs of the Hauptbanhof and then I walked the two blocks to the bus station, passing by a shuttle bus where about twenty Africans (mostly men) were waiting to be taken to a shelter. At least that's where I assume they were being taken. They seemed relaxed and happy about it. Two seemed to be playing cards.

I got to the bus station and was pleased that I had timed it perfectly. Only fifteen minutes for the bus to arrive. Little did I know. I had chosen the bus because it gave me an hour and a half to transfer. But I had unwittingly picked the bus that was coming from Salzburg. My dumb luck. The bus was over an hour late because of border controls.

Some guy from the bus company finally showed up to tell us something in German. "What did he say?" I asked the big German guy standing next to me. He was in his 40s, I think, a curly haired guy about 6'5"tall in a white linen suit. He looked upper middle class, educated. "They are telling us to stand over there and the bus will come at 11:00," he responded, "but I am going to change my ticket. You see all these people? They are refugees. I don't want to sit next to someone like that for eight hours. You can catch a disease! They could have tuberculosis! You can sit next to a small boy who hasn't been vaccinated!"

I am not paraphrasing too much. This is what this guy actually said.

We waited and waited and waited. There were about five families camped out next to the bus station office where our extremely late bus was supposed to arrive. Moms and dads and crashed out two year olds in stretchy patterned trousers and clunky plastic sandals. These weren't Africans; they were some kind of Middle Eastern. The women were veiled, the men were bearded. I saw a few medics sporting vests that said Doctors Without Borders in various languages. I wanted to talk to them but a chatty Brazilian guy had buttonholed me with something about dancing the tango.

A bunch of policemen came and told the Middle Easterners that they had to go to the train station. Roused from sleep, the children began crying. The parents grabbed their wrists with a don't-you-start steely grip and yanked them howling through the station, following the policemen, who were power-walking to the train. One little boy tried to get into his stroller but his parents were too anxious to go. They left the double stroller in the bus station, toys still hanging on the lip of the hood.

At 11:20, the bus finally came. The upper level was full of Middle Easterners. I swear that besides me, there were only four other people on the packed bus who weren't from some Muslim country. I sat next to a 17 year old boy who had a slight funk like he had been sweating all day in his velour track suit. He looked at me curiously but he didn't speak English and I doubt if he speaks Chinese or Spanish. I don't think he even speaks German. What will school be like for him? What was school like for him where he came from? Did he manage to attend? I wondered who all these people were and what they were doing on an overnight bus to Berlin. The boy played a video game (pling pling pling) half the night and then he fell asleep, snoring softly. When we arrived in Berlin at 7AM, he was still snoring. His parents across the aisle yelled for him to wake up. But I thought they should let the kid sleep a little more, crumpled up in his velour suit like a breathing bath mat.

Adventures with Mansplaining Americans in Berlin

In Berlin, I’m not meeting guys on the train anymore. But I am still meeting them at swing dances. At the Clärchens Ballhaus, which is purportedly the last original Weimar-era dancehall in Berlin, I met a jazz guitarist whom I’ve gotten pretty close with. I was hanging out with him last week and he needed to pick something up at a recording studio in the Holzmarkt, a really interesting cooperative on the banks of the Spree, right where East and West Berlin used to be divided.

When we arrived, the recording studio engineer was having a tête-a-tête with an older blues musician from Texas. My friend got down to business with the recording studio engineer, which left me in the company of the Texan.  Our conversation quickly devolved into a mystifying argument.

“I’ve been here for twenty years,” Tex kept insisting, “and most of my East German friends don’t speak English.”

When I suggested that they perhaps spoke Russian or Polish, he asserted that his friends don’t speak any other language besides German.

            This is, of course, different than any one else’s experience in Berlin, where it really is rare to find someone who doesn’t speak basic bread-and-butter English.  Well, the Turks in Neukölln don’t always speak English, but of course they speak Turkish since they're Turks. And they probably speak Arabic as well. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that most Europeans have language skills that Americans don’t. But the Texan purported that he’s acquainted with many Americans who speak more than one language, while his German friends only spoke German. He would not let this issue die either and kept bringing it back even after the conversation had taken another turn. Was this because I'm a woman? or I'm Asian? I have no idea why the Texan would be so adamant unless he just wanted to contradict me and be right, goddammit.

            That was the same day that we went to a party where we met another American who was equally baffling. He said that he’s a historian who writes novels. I told him that I was a writer too. He was interested in the subject of my essays, so I said something about how they’re first person so they’re mostly about being an Asian-American woman and how there are all these cultural expectations and stereotypes that you are constantly fighting. This seemed to rub him in all the wrong ways.

            “I only have three words to say to you,” he proclaimed, “Anna May Wong.” 

“But she’s a prime example of the way Asian-American women are stereotyped,” I countered.

            It turned out that he hadn’t seen any of her films and knew nothing about her except that one photograph where she is standing in between Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl at a party in 1928. To him, this somehow proved that there was no such thing as discrimination in Hollywood.

Hot picture, but does this mean Anna May Wong
was fully accepted in the Hollywood system?

      
          “Name one other Asian actor,” I challenged him and while he struggled to fish Sessue Hayakawa from the recesses of his memory, I told him about Anna May Wong’s fight to land the role of O-Lan in The Good Earth. The part went Luise Rainer, who was Austrian of all things. Wong had to go to Europe to play some less stereotypical characters. Her best film is Piccadilly, an amazingly progressive film for 1929, where she got to be a typical British wench who wore cloche hats and striped sweaters, ate bangers and mash at a greasy spoon, and was an object of desire for not one but TWO white men. If you’ve never seen the film, you are missing out on Wong shaking her sweet little thing on a kitchen table, one of the hottest moments ever recorded. Contrast this with all the Hollywood dreck where she played sultry dragon ladies who speak in the third person, “Lotus Flower commands you to peel her a grape or she will stab you in the eye with her extremely long green pinky nail.”

            But according to this guy, discrimination in Hollywood didn’t exist.  And he's supposed to be a historian.

“What do you want me to do?” he suddenly exclaimed, upset, I suppose that I wasn't about to be mansplained, “What. Do. You. Want. Me. To. Do?!”

            “Well…” I replied, trying to take his question seriously, “it would help if you just recognize that this is just the shape of the world.”

            “You know, I hate to say it, but you're acting like a victim,” he suddenly declared, “just like one of those black people.”

            “Um, things are kind of stacked against them,” I ventured, rather amazed at his accusation, “I mean, like, one out of every three black men ends up in jail at some point in his life.”

            “That’s because they committed a crime,” he scoffed dismissively.

My jaw dropped. Does this guy actually think that out of every three black men, one is a criminal? I wanted to ask him what he would think if the statistics said that one out of three white guys were imprisoned in their lifetime, but our conversation was interrupted.
           So okay, there's all this attention in the media lately on white privilege and I hate to jump on the bandwagon, but talk about a textbook case. Here’s a guy completely sheltered in his own self-centered island where it's always warm and breezy. He has no inkling how things are stacked against Asian-Americans in the arts. He’s obviously never walked down a street with a black guy and experienced how they are treated differently. I don’t think he’s even read one article about the crazy racial disparities in the US. Racial profiling? Nah, all those black guys are just a bunch of criminals who deserve what they get. And mansplaining? I bet he's never heard of it.

It’s a bit of a running joke that my musician friend, who is American, pretends that he’s from a small Eastern European country so he doesn’t have to converse to stupid Americans. Maybe it’s because I’m from the East Village that I am surprised by idiocy. I expect everyone to have an interest in culture and some basic understanding of the world. But after that day with the two American blowhards, I’m about ready to tell everyone I’m Inuit. Except I’ll probably be dragged into dumb discussions about rubbing noses or how there are a hundred words for snow.

Manthropology in France

          “You just seem like you’re available,” a male friend of mine told me in France.

This is something that I’ve heard from two possessive ex-boyfriends as well and it always bugs the shit out of me. I have no idea what “available” means and no idea how I’m not suppose to seem “available.” After all, I’m just being me. Am I missing barriers that other people have?  Do other women act more aloof, suspicious, cautious? It’s not like I wear anything that provocative. It’s not like I throw my tits in a stranger’s face while talking. Ah, the burden of being female. Either you’re too “available” or not “available” enough.

And I think there are different behavior expectations in Europe. I remember going barhopping in NYC with a British girl who didn’t know at all that if you accept a drink from a guy, it means you’re going to at least have a conversation with him for the duration of that drink. Which means you don’t accept a drink from someone who is going to bore the hell out of you or offend you. Unless you are curious as to what makes him so moronic. I’ve been known to have drinks with white supremists and Bible thumpers just for anthropology’s sake. It’s like studying a six-legged creature with ten eyes. Really? You exist?

In Paris, I was totally not "available." My heart was still insisting on London for some annoying reason and I had no money to go out anyway. But then I had a Skype conversation with a friend one day, who chastised me for moping. I realized he was right. There are much worse things than being stranded in France. I should just enjoy it. He even lent me $200 just so I would stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

So I picked my chin off the floor and researched where people go swing dancing in Paris. I learned 1) that swing dancing is called le Rock in France, which is weird since rock is definitely not swing, and 2) there seems to be only one place in Paris to dance le Rock and that’s Le Caveau de la Huchette. Which is even weirder since there is a huge scene in every other major city. A French friend later informed me that swing dancing is something everyone learns in middle school and it’s considered boring and bourgeois. Swing is not an alternative scene in Paris like it is in New York, London and Berlin.

            But I didn’t know this so I got a bit dolled up and went to Le Caveau. There were about a dozen people on the dance floor, most of them grey-haired, also unusual since everywhere else, the average age is around 30. A fantastic London hot jazz band was playing and I would have liked to talk to them but a small French guy who had lived in the Bronx immediately glued himself to my side. The only time I managed to escape him was when a Korean guy cut in and asked me to dance.

The French guy was a bit odd in his dance moves. He seemed to know the basic steps and swing outs, but he kept lifting me up in a way that my only possible response was to straddle his waist. Then, since there were no other physical possibilities, he would turn around and around in place. Awkward is not the word for this. And guys who are territorial totally turn me off. After about three dances with him, I was ready to split.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked.

“Okay, maybe one drink and then I’ll leave,” I said out of politeness.

We went upstairs for the drink and to my surprise, he asked the barman for a coffee. It was about 11pm. The bar didn’t have coffee so he asked if I would get a drink with him at another bar.

            “Okay,” I said, rather regretting that I’d agreed to have a drink with him, “As long as it’s on the way to the metro.”

So we walked along the pedestrian Rue de la Huchette where it seemed every other place was overflowing with packs of booze-infused 20-year olds desperate to find some fun. A few steps and he put his arm around me. It was rather perfunctory, so I wasn’t sure if he was just being friendly or if he had some other intention. Just in case, I very firmly took his arm off my shoulders and looked at him straight in the eyes: sorry buddy, no dice.

            We walked for a moment in silence and then he said, “I live in Arrondissement 10.”

            “That’s nice. I’m in Arrondissement 14 at a friend’s place.”

             We passed by an okay-looking café where two men quietly smoked at small separate tables.

            “Should we sit here?” I asked, wanting to get this drink over with. 

            “I really need woman tonight,” he replied, “We have drink at my place?”

“Sorry,” I said, rather astonished at his frankness, “I’m not interested in going to your place.”

            “No?” he asked.

            “No,” I confirmed.

            “Okay,” he shrugged.

He accompanied me a few more yards to the metro and said goodbye. It was all very cut and dry, yes or no. I’ve had a more stimulating exchange with a vendor at a market stall over a bag of green beans.

I didn't have any more blatant propositions like that in Southern France. But I did have some mystifying encounters. They all took place on the train. Maybe since I wasn't hanging out in bars. But then France doesn't really have the kind of bars or pubs that there are in London or New York. People don't just sit around drinking and do nothing else. Drinking happens at restaurants or cafes or at clubs where something else like dancing or music is going on. So even if I wanted to, it wasn't really possible to just go sit somewhere and have a drink and talk to someone. Instead, guys would approach me on the train.

The first time this happened, it was that Turkish guy who struck up a conversation as we were both waiting for the train to pull up to Nice Ville. At the end of five minutes, he had offered me a couch in his apartment in Cannes. Weird, I thought, but maybe this is how things like this happen in France? I took him up on his offer since I was too broke for a pad in Cannes and he seemed harmless enough. I also immediately offered him a bit of dough so he wouldn’t expect anything else in exchange.  But within a day, I was regretting my decision. There was nothing to say the guy. And his apartment smelled like some feral animal had peed or died in a corner.

So the second time I was on the train to Nice and some Frenchie guy started to talk to me, I was not as surprised when at the end of five minutes he offered me a couch in his apartment in Nice. This time, however, I didn’t take him up on his offer, since I realized that he was just like the Turk and would also bore the hell out of me. He was some provincial French guy who travels through Europe for a company that produces olive oil. I couldn’t discern any common interest in history or art or film or literature or language or even a scrap of curiosity about my film. It was like trying to have a conversation with a Francophone Willie Loman and he didn’t even have a pair of silk stockings to show me.  

The weirdest encounter I had on the train was when I was lugging my two suitcases from Nice to Marseille. A round little African guy came up behind me and grabbed the biggest suitcase, nodding at me a few times. I hurried after him down the platform onto one of those old-fashioned trains with compartments. He made a beeline to a compartment in the middle of the train, stuck my suitcase on a shelf, and there I was, forced to share a private little room with him.  It turned out he was a cook in one of the hotels in Cannes and originally from Senegal. I had a rather tedious conversation with him in pigeon English and French with the help of Google translate. He showed me pictures of food on his iphone and a photo of a celebrity whom I didn't recognize on the red carpet. He was way interested me being a filmmaker. “You. Me. Movie?” he kept repeating excitedly, “You! Me! Movie!!!”

Then just before the train pulled up to Cannes, he suddenly declared, “I take taxi to hotel. You give me €8.”

“Umm,” I replied, utterly mystified, “I don’t have €8 to give you.”

“You give me €8. Taxi, hotel,” he demanded and wrote down “€8” on a napkin just in case I didn’t understand.

“No €8,” I shrugged helplessly, “I don’t have.”

He seemed perplexed and a bit offended. Some cultural thing was totally lost on me. I have no idea if it was an African cultural thing or a French cultural thing.  We both lapsed into silence pondering our vast cultural divide. I was relieved when the train arrived in Cannes and he left with barely a goodbye.