BECAUSE we are currently celebrating Chinese New Year of the Earth Rat today, let us take a look at the Chinese community here in France. There are several Chinatowns here in Paris alone but the most prominent of them are in the 13th arrondisement. As with Chinese elsewhere, the Chinese-French have already adopted the culture of the Parisian people. Like the Parisians, a few of them live in very small and congested but elegant flats. Although congested, the condominium suites here in Paris are comfortable to live in because you’ll be having your own air conditioner, heater, cable television with a big LCD monitor as well as a subwoofer sound system. You’ll also be having your own centralized alarm system. Some Parisian condominium suites even feature their own panic rooms.

This is one interesting fact to note. People in the 1950s and 1950s here in Paris and the rest of France are crazy about building bomb shelters in their own basement because they are afraid of a looming nuclear strike. Nowadays, they are crazy to build panic rooms because they are afraid of home invasions. However, don’t be alarmed because it is just actually a state of mind of a few paranoid ones in here. France is actually a safe country and nobody has the gut to become a criminal or a sociopath.

I first went to France last summer and I touched down at Charles de Gaulle International Airport via an Air France flight nonstop from Beijing. I am an international relations student from Peking University and my major is French. Because of this and because I’m the president of the local French studies club of students there in our university in Beijing, I was awarded to go to France as an exchange student at the plush Universite de Paris. It’s really a nice city. The weather is similar like in our place and very cold indeed even during summer. You need layers and layers of clothing to protect you and of course, I don’t wear anything cottony because cotton tends to absorb moisture.

Upon arriving here, it was the start of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States. Nobody thought the crisis will have repercussions elsewhere. But now, I think it is more relevant for people in our country in China to travel to places elsewhere in the world so that they can dump their yuan and help save both the Chinese and the French economies. I guess the closest country to visit where the atmosphere is not intimidating but cordial is France. In the first place, France and China share the same sentiment politically – they cannot be bullied by the United States and they can stand on their own.

Actually, if the Chinese are very resolute individuals, the French are more of the intellectual ones. It is in this character that they know how to immediately react to a situation and not just go with the flow like what everyone else is doing. Take for example the actions of their president Nicholas Sarkozy. Even if he has heard of personal criticisms targeted against him, he remains unfazed.