Some novels catapult readers into a different world than their own. Others, on the contrary, echo one’s life so closely that one cannot but devour them, if only to find out whether the similarities hold ’til the end. Such was my experience reading David Hoon Kim’s Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost.
Kim has infused his debut novel with personal elements from his Korean-American upbringing, many of which paralleled my own. Kim was born in South Korea, then educated mostly in France, as well as the United States; I was born and raised in France, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who escaped from the Cambodian genocide. Kim’s narrator is a Danish-Japanese adoptee studying in Paris. Different passports, but we share the same almond eyes and hyphenated identity, as well as an insider knowledge of that European city brimming with a steady supply of parties and ghosts.
There is a price to pay to live in a city so often fantasized about.
At the start of the book, the narrator, Blatand—whose Scandinavian first name is only revealed towards the end, blurring identity lines further—hits a roadblock both with his unfinished dissertation and his troubled relationship with Japanese art student Fumiko, his girlfriend of a year. Her uncomplicated Japaneseness clashes at times with his more fragmented origins. Unlike Kim himself, the protagonist is an adoptee who grew up in a Danish family with no Asian connection. Blatand thus voices the rift between his skin color and European sense of self:
Although I looked Japanese on the outside, I didn’t feel it, had never felt it. At the same time, the doubt always remained that I was not who I thought I was, that, unbeknownst to myself, I was an impostor, a fake. I feared I was no one, in the end.
Even his lover Fumiko, who ran away to Paris to forget about anything Japanese, only to fall in love with the Japanese-looking narrator, tells him when she meets him: “But you look so Japanese!”
At the beginning of the book Blatand has an expired ID, the sign of a decidedly confused identity. Kim likes to sprinkle such nuggets of ironic dry wit, for instance, to spice up the otherwise mundane description of “a crumbling twelve-story building named for a dead post war French writer I had never read.”
Although Blatand’s romantic connection with Fumiko sets the timeline of this bildungsroman, which spans his young adult years until his forties, and is divided between “Fumiko”, “Before Fumiko”, and “After Fumiko”, we never get to know much about her, except that she loves Fuji apples and smokes Marlboro Lights. At times, the chapters feel like short stories stitched together, loosely bound by Fumiko’s ghost sleepwalking through the book, while the narrator carries on with life, goes to translation school and sabotages relationships and jobs with a trademark lack of drive. “I was, if nothing else,” he says, “a modest dreamer.”
But the everyday racism Blatand faces is a constant reality check, which landed its first blow when he was just eight:
a kid I had never talked to punched me in the face because—he explained afterwards—he wanted to see if I could see his fist through the slits I had for eyes.
In an interesting side plot touching on racism between people of color—a topic often tiptoed around—one of Blatand’s friends, Guang-ho, chooses a radical response to the racial bias he suffers from and votes for the French far-right party, as “he found it easier to turn against those whose skin was darker than his.” His decision, although a controversial one, encapsulates an anger and despair felt by many immigrants and descendants of immigrants in Western countries:
he knew that, no matter what, he would never be seen as a French citizen—that to most he was little more than a métèque, no matter how conscientiously he learned the language, no matter how thoroughly he assimilated to the culture.
Kim is at his strongest when, as here, the voices of his characters rise to meet the universality of their pain. His novel appealed to me because of its almost unbearable familiarity, but it also offers to readers who never had to experience discrimination first-hand a valuable insight into their own privilege, showing how pervasive and hurtful micro-aggressions are, even transposed in a city often romanticized for its art de vivre. It is a call to empathy that is worth listening to.
The downside is that some characters, in particular the Asian ones, read more like plot accessories used to confront Blatand with his Asianness rather than fully-fleshed personas. In one instance, he runs away from two Korean women who accost him in the street, before returning to them, in a metaphorical stride summing up his fraught relationship with his origins.
But Kim also casts his gaze outwards, towards a city he called home for many years, leading us from the Quartier Latin to the posh 16th arrondissement. On the novel’s cover, an Eiffel Tower leans like the Tower of Pisa, scribbled over with clashing colors: not your classic Paris postcard. Kim writes what is perhaps the most outlandish description of the Parisian métro I have ever come across:
I breathed in the hot, dry air of the métro, with unmistakable “buttery” odor, which had always puzzled me, if only because no one else seemed to understand what I was talking about.
I don’t either.
Buttery scents aside, reading Kim’s book felt to me like leafing through a dusty photo album, full of Parisian student landmarks: the second-hand books at Gibert Joseph, the cheap meals at the Cité U and other bite-sized details betraying a lived-in city. Yes, Serge Gainsbourg and Charles Trenet are name-checked, as well as mouth-watering mentions of French delicacies such as rabbit à la provençale and vacherin de chèvre, but Kim’s narrative doppelgänger is more likely to eat a kebab than a croissant—a cheap and hearty meal which for decades has filled the bellies of broke students in Paris before him.
There is a price to pay to live in a city so often fantasized about, and one could argue that this novel is a detailed receipt of the cost. Under Blatand’s gaze, the capital of love proves to be a lonely city:
The long solitary walks you took, sometimes until the straps of your sandals dug into your skin around your ankles.
Kim also dissected this crushing alienation in his autobiographical essay When I Lived in French (The New York Review, July 12, 2021):
I loved the language and found a home within it. But France itself, that was a less hospitable place to me.
At home nowhere and everywhere, “third culture kids”, as culturally diverse people nickname themselves, stroll among languages with ease, having been thrown into a multicultural maze from birth onwards. It is therefore not surprising that this becomes Blatand’s bread and butter. As a student, he gets a side job doing translation work for a physicist, before enrolling in a school of translators and interpreters and eventually becoming an English teacher. As Kim writes in the book:
A foreign language allows one to rename the world and everything in it.
Kim himself penned short stories in English and French, and opens his novel with a Korean dedication and a Danish proverb. He detailed in an interview (Poets and Writers, 16 September 2021) how the translation process even helped him write this very book:
when I got stuck on something, I often translated a sentence, a paragraph, sometimes an entire page, into French. In passing through another language, I was able to come up with something new, something I would never have thought of in English.
It reminds me of dialogue from a film (whose title I no longer recall):
—I’m going out.
—Where?
—Into myself.
As someone who also writes both in English and French, I am familiar with this process of juggling words back and forth between languages when stuck in a creative bind. Through this inner dialogue of the selves, Kim has found, amid the cacophony, a cathartic voice whispering how to embrace one’s many ghosts. Rarely have an author’s words seemed to breathe so closely against the nape of my neck. What a haunting feeling that is.