Reflections After 4 Years Living in France
🔈 audio version available
🔈 Prefer listening? Press play above to listen to my voiceover.
Four years ago I stepped foot into France sporting a short pixie haircut, wearing a big American smile, and holding my first long-stay French visa.
I was newly married to the French guy I’d met in London only 2 years before, I didn’t know French, and I was interviewing with dozens of French tech startups.
My oh my, how much has changed in 4 years.
Year 4 has been all about emerging into my multicultural identity and deepening friendships. I had some big career moments as an artist and decorator, and I began travelling again (a welcome experience after spending the majority of my first years in France under the heaviness of the Covid era).
On Living
Identity
This year I stopped using the language others were using to define me.
I took control of my narrative and found language that feels right to me in my identity definition. I identify as multicultural and mixed.
I stopped using terms that many monocultural and monoracial people have said to me in years past.
I realized I don’t identify with terms like “half-Asian” or “half-Vietnamese”. The use of the word half makes me feel that I am not whole.
Side note: why hasn’t anyone ever said I was “half-White” or “half-American”?… Hmmmmm … let’s let that sink in…
My mother is Vietnamese, I am Vietnamese. My father is American, I am American.
I also realized I don’t identify with the term “mixed race” because it leaves out many of my heritages and aims to categorize my cultures into racial groups. The word race does not allow for the distinctions between my Jewish, American, French, and Vietnamese heritages in the same way the word culture does.
Moving to France, adding in a new culture to my multicultural mix, and learning a new language helped me re-evaluate the words I was using in my native language to define myself.
Friendships
With no family in or around Paris, my support system nearby are my friends.
I had a serious health issue this past winter that magnified how important my friendships have become. I left my doctor’s office last December having had the type of conversation that leaves a mark on one’s life, my flow of time being punctuated with a definitive before and after.
I found and still find it impossible to tell my friends who aren’t based in France what’s been going on with me health-wise. I’m not comfortable crying on the phone in the same way that my tears seem to fall freely in person.
The pauses during an emotionally difficult conversation in person are often met with moments of physical comfort. When the same conversation attempts to take place over video, those pauses tend to be filled with words that can only fall short, with both ends of the call grasping for the impossible — physical touch.
My friends here were the people I cried with. They held my hands when I told them I was scared. They brought me flowers. They hugged me while sitting teary-eyed at our favorite cafés. They told me everything would be okay. And they were right —I’m thankfully feeling much better these days.
My best friend lives in Toronto and I haven’t seen her in person since her wedding in 2018, yet we do keep in touch everyday. Our friendship has grown and blossomed through the years, regardless of the distance between us. We send each other boxes with random little gifts from our respective countries, with explainers of what’s what, where we found them, and why they made us think of them.
In recent years, she’s had two kids and our friendship has surprisingly benefited from our time zone differences — I’m almost always available if she’s up with her kids in the middle of her night or her early morning hours since I’m 6 hours ahead.
Family
My immediate family has gone through a lot of changes since I moved to France in 2019.
In the past 4 years: I got married and moved to France. My brother and sister-in-law had 2 children. My mom retired. My dad retired.
There’s been a lot of figuring out who we all are in these new roles and identities. It certainly hasn’t always proven easy for me to navigate as the only one living outside of the 20-mile radius in Maryland where the rest of my family resides.
Since the start of Covid in 2020, I’ve visited the US twice for 4-6 weeks each time (unfortunately I did get Covid on one trip) and they have yet to visit France again.
I try to plan my trips to the US so that I see my family, my friends, and also get a chance to explore on my own. In my 20s I lived in Washington D.C., all of my friends lived nearby, and I saw my family in Maryland most weekends.
Now, most of my close friends whom I used to see daily in D.C. have moved to new cities — they’re spread across New York, Toronto, Chicago, Arizona, and LA.
There’s a few locations I can visit to “have it all” and fill my cup with love from family, friends, and adventure.
Toronto is a perfect location because my best friend lives there and my parents voluntarily take a 9-hour (!!) drive up from their home in Maryland to spend a long weekend with me.
New York is also great because I can visit friends, bop around the city, then take the Amtrak down to Baltimore to see my family.
On Working
Sometimes I forget I haven’t been doing this whole art and decoration thing for very long. I applied to go back to school in 2019, graduated with a masters in interior decoration in the spring of 2021, and started my business in the summer of 2021.
This past year was a great one for me professionally. I proudly established collaborations with brands in France and the US for art, home decor, and apparel. My designs are in hundreds of homes and closets across the world.
I don’t take enough time to recognize how challenging it was to go back to school with the coursework in a language I didn’t know, to start a business in a new country during a pandemic, and to be making a profit since my first year in business.
My work highlights from this year include:
Launching the Shana Weisberg x ArtWallz Paris wallpaper collaboration.
Collaborating with Lama Factory to offer ready-to-hang framed art prints. The prints and frames are handmade to order in Paris.
Launching the Shana Weisberg x Linen The Label apparel, tabletop, and bedding collection.
On Travelling
The doors to the world seemed to open up again this past year, allowing for the possibility of “pre-Covid” like travel once more. We went to London, Barcelona, and New York.
London
We met in London in 2017 and hadn’t been back in a few years. We love London because it’s familiar yet decidedly different.
I get to speak English and I’ve never lived in London so it maintains this aura of adventure, a feeling that too often fades when I’m visiting a place I’ve also once lived.
We stayed at Inhabit Hotel, a “wellness focused design hotel” that lived up to its description. We ate my first ever Sunday Roast at the pub where we went on our first date and we retraced our first date steps through Hyde Park.
We grabbed coffee at Omotesando Koffee and went to Japan House, a Japanese cultural center filled with art, homeware, books, and food. We had incredible dinners at Berenjak and Din Tai Fung, and visited the Museum of the Home and the chinoiserie room in the V&A.
We ate at Dishoom Kensington, their Art Deco and jazz-inspired location, where I indulged in their unlimited house chai, black daal, and cheese naans as I do on every trip to London.
I came back to Paris on the Eurostar with my small suitcase packed full of Fortnum & Mason teas as well as a dozen English books from bookstores like Foyles.
Barcelona
I tagged along on one of T’s work trips to Barcelona. While he worked, I was out and about and found a cable car that kept me well entertained one day.
It was my first time in Spain and I was surprised by how much Catalan and Spanish I understood. To me, the languages were so similar to French.
We visited La Sagrada Familia, ate paella at Peix Vela overlooking the beach, frequented Hidden Coffee Roasters for our morning coffees, ate an incredible meal at the gorgeous La Dama, and visited the Design Museum of Barcelona.
We also went to El Nacional, an Art Deco inspired space with four restaurants as well as bars. WOW. I loved the design. And most importantly, I loved the food.
I didn’t fall head over heels for Barcelona, but being there has me interested in visiting more places in Spain, especially Seville.
New York
Being in New York with a French husband is like being in Paris with an American wife.
Run-of-the-mill things like hot dogs, brick buildings, fire escapes, bagels, and massive cups of coffee become novelty through the eyes of my Frenchie. He takes photos of donuts in the same way I take photos of the Eiffel Tower.
I ate my best meal of the year at Tomi Jazz, a Japanese jazz club with a speakeasy vibe in Midtown. I went back to Saigon Shack for a delicious bowl of pho and a Vietnamese coffee, and ate at Time Out Market as well as Super Taste in Chinatown.
I shopped at my New York favorites like Saturdays, Neighborhood Goods, Soho Home, Moussy, Goods for The Study, Äland, and Awoke Vintage.
We took the Staten Island Ferry to get a free view of the Statue of Liberty.
And we finally went on the Roosevelt Island cable car (an odd quirk of mine is I love a funicular or cable car moment while traveling).
That’s all from me for this year’s reflections! Share your thoughts in the comment section and answer this question:
QUESTION: If you have friends or family living far away, what’s one small thing you can do to connect with them?
My answer is I would send them a little gift in the mail from a local boutique that made me think of them.
Many of my American friends in Paris love a Trader Joe’s care package — we brag to each other when we get our hands on TJ favorites like Everything But The Bagel seasoning or Speculoos Cookie Butter — and we proudly wear our Trader Joe’s tote bags with our otherwise Parisian uniforms of white sneakers and vintage Levi’s 501s.
Talk to you soon,
Shana