I went to the Franprix just down the block this afternoon to get a few groceries. I had a problem buying apples. Most grocery stores in France require you to weigh fruit or vegetables that are sold by the kilo at a electronic scale, which then spits out an adhesive price tag that you stick on the outside of the plastic bag holding the fruits or vegetables. To get the right price, you have to look at a list of all of the fruits and vegetables, which is located on a large panel, then press the correct one in order to get the price tag to come out of the machine. I had bought 5 fuji apples, but I couldn’t find fuji apples listed on the scale. Since items are not necessarily listed in any kind of order (although generally it’s fruits, then vegetables, by alphabetical order, in French, of course), I thought I’d just missed it, so I looked more carefully through the list again. By this time, a line was forming behind me, so trying to be courteous I removed my bag from the scale and told the man behind me to go ahead. He asked me what was wrong, so I told him that I couldn’t find fuji apples. He mumbled something about apples being apples and then went on his way.
The same man, who looked to be in his mid-60s, and had a slightly odd affect, was behind me in the checkout line. At some point he asked me (in French) if I spoke French, to which I replied (in French) “a little.” The rest of the conversation went like this:
Man (in English): You speak English. Are you Scottish?
Me (in French): No, I’m from California.
Man (in English): You should’t tell people you are from America. The French hate Americans.
Me (in French): I don’t find that to be the case.
Man (in English): The French hate Americans because they are capitalists. I hate Americans, too. I hate you. You are my enemy.
At this point, I was halfway through bagging my groceries, and was half-stunned, half-irritated. The checkout woman looked slightly embarrassed, although I couldn’t say if she understood English or not. I had that brief instant where I had to decide whether to say anything and, if so, figure out what it would be. I quickly concluded that engaging this person in any further conversation would be pointless, so I finished packing my groceries and left.
The experience left me more sad than angry, but perhaps I should look on it as an educational experience — for the first time, really, in my life, someone hated me enough to tell me so purely because of some characteristic that I had no control over, my nationality. But me, a captain of world capitalism? And by the way, it isn’t as if the U.S. invaded France and forced capitalism down the throats of a resisting population.
Still, it bugs me. And come to think of it, it wasn’t the first time in my life that something like this happened. When I was about 4 years old, I lived in Libya, because my father was in the Air Force, and we were stationed at a base near Tripoli. One day I was in the village and an Arab man spit on my head. I still remember vividly the scene, the awful feeling of the warm, wet, disgusting spit dripping off my head, smelling to tobacco, the dry dusty brown ground, the white robes of the women nearby, the adobe walls of the village, and I remember immediately bursting into tears, because what had happened was so shocking and so incomprehensible. I understand it now, or at least the politics of it. But in some ways, it was just like the guy in the Franprix, someone taking out some past anger on someone completely undeserving of it, and who, in the context, couldn’t do much to defend themselves.
Categories: France, Travel -- France
Tags: anti-americanism, capitalism, France, United States