We had our HiA meeting with Mike Allen, our "San Franciscan Nick" who had already welcome us in his Oakland house for a briefing on Berkeley and San Francisco thanks to the documentary "Berkeley in the 1960S". So, we met him twice this week: first for a reception at the German Consulate and second in SF MOMA and Yerba Buena Gardens.
The reception opened with a very intersting note by Pr. Takaki who talked to us about the history of immigration in the US, namely on the Pacific coast, and on what was multiculturalism in the US. It was extremely interesting and lively. I think what Professor Takaki had been through found echoes in our own experiences: the opening chapter of his book relates a story of a cab driver who was surprised by Mr. Takaki's skills in English and continues on the fact that the driver seemed even more surprised when the Professor revealed that the secret to his skills was being American. I remember that during the core program, some fellows mentionned a few anecdotes like these that happened recently in their respective countries. So once again we thought about what it means to be an American, a German, a Dane, a Pole, a Dutch or a French. Pr Takaki used this nice linguistic image of epistemology, or "how we know what we know", for his demonstration and this is closely linked to our definition of an American or a Dane, how do we come to the fact that someone fits or not in our image of a Dutch? What kind of information shape our perceptions and assumptions to what a German should look like? to how a Pole should sound like? to how a French should behave? I confronted these questions 3 years ago when I first came to California: I was surprised by the Asian population and soon understood that most people were not Asian but Asian-American and I understood it through many clumsy (and certainly annoying) questions similar to the taxi driver's; and even though my parents had been asked the same thing in France..
Friday, we still very much focused on perceptions thanks to Matisse, whose works are exhibited at the Museum of Modern Arts. We saw the the way a same model was shown on a painting and on a scultpure, and the difference between both of them. Through an interactive tour, we also saw the different ways people reacted to it and how things like sensuality and depiction could be completely different from a person to another. This sounds obvious when it comes to a piece of art; whether it is music or a painting: people agree to disagree and accept the difference. Now, why isn't so obvious when it comes to people, communities, neighborhoods, religions, skin color?
We then went to Yerba Buena gardens to talk about the different feelings we had about Matisse and the other exhibitions and to plan the coming events. In the garden we were once again confronted to difference: a man was talking to himself right next to us and it seemed that he had a lot to tell to himself, and that he was not happy about himself. It gave us the opportunity to understand some of the comments made by one character of the documentary we watched at Mike's: some people in the Bay Area have uncanny behaviors BUT we should keep in mind that we refuse to fall in stereotyping and we should respect differenceS. However nobody can disagree on the fact that people talking to themselves are somewhat turning into a majority-minority category in this part of the Golden State..and maybe the reasons why these people end up doing this and living in the streets is a more interesting question to address.
It has already been 2 weeks since we all landed in San Francisco, time is flying and so were we yesterday riding down the hills of San Francisco! --It was another story when we had to bike up the hills... but that was awesome! Thanks Doreen, Julia, Gregor, Ingmar, Jedrek, Johannes and Pawel: it was so much fun doing this with you.
We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and ended up in very nice Sausalito for lunch...I mean burgers, pizza and ice cream. ;-)
As we are HiA, we could not prevent to have a dicussion on the economic condition of Poland hoping that it would follow the Irish path, and on the reason why so many German people were studying in Warsaw..Neither the Germans or the Poles came up with a precise answer but we ended up on the thought that Poland's place in Europe was growing and that many people were interested in researching the numerous layers of this topic. Plus, German-Polish relations are far better than French-Polish ones...No comment.. I love Asia, Jedrek and Pawel and I am not even afraid of the Polish plumber!!
Soraya
