Lausanne turned out to be a forced pause in my new life.  I was on crutches and it rained six days out of seven for the month I was there.  I did a couple of minor outings on weekends – mostly shopping related, but a bit of tourism as well – and I hobbled up to the local grocery store every other day to buy what we needed, filling up my backpack and hobbling back down. 

I did one major trip up into the mountains on one of the few sunny days.  Two lovely, accomplished people, a couple who discovered my web site and wrote to me, invited me to their studio in the mountains close to Gstaad.  The train trip from lakeside to the foothills of the Alps was breathtakingly beautiful; from the pure blue of the lake to the snow of the midlands to the green and white of the Alps, all in the course of an hour or so, like a time-lapse film collapsing the seasons.  The train itself was magnificent, testimony to the wealth of Switzerland and their willingness to invest in basic infrastructure. 

I know next to nothing about Switzerland, so these are just my fleeting impressions, but everywhere I looked I saw excellent trains, buses, subways, rarely filled to capacity.  The train into the mountains stopped at every little village – you push a button to get off – but it was not even half full on the day I took it.  A rich country with people who pay their taxes (or who take in money from the rest of the world) and are not stingy about spending on public needs.  I have not spent much time in Norway, which is also famous for this, but Switzerland seems to be in the same league.

Otherwise, I think my month in Lausanne is the only time in my life I literally watched the leaves change color, as I sat in my bedroom office, working and reading and looking out the same lovely window.  I felt sorry for myself once or twice, but at the same knew that I was lucky that I fell at the end of my trip to Colombia, which meant that I was cared for in Switzerland and recovered in a building with an elevator.  Of course, it would have been better not to fall, but I did.  As I said in my first post for this blog, “If you can only walk with a cane, you walk with a cane.”  Nonetheless, I can easily imagine settling down in Lausanne for its calm beauty and its convenient location:  I can be anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, or I can just go sit by the lake and enjoy the view with a glass of wine.

Paris was a welcome return to life.  I arrived by train on a rainy Thursday afternoon at the Gare de Lyon.  I was still on crutches, but there were at least 150 impatient Parisians waiting for a taxi, and I didn’t want to play the cripple and demand special treatment, so I took the metro and eventually arrived at my Airbnb close to Nation. 

The next morning, Paris was glistening as the sun came up over streets still wet from the night’s rain.  I went out to in search of an ATM and breakfast at the same moment that parents were taking their kids to school, everyone impeccably dressed, both adults and children, with that particular Parisian attention to style – just the right scarf or shoes, everything well-pressed and neat, the same as everyone else yet with a touch of flair that says, “Here I am, look at me.”

In the streets, bicycles vied with one another and with cars; one middle-aged rider flew past the crowd, pumping hard, his yellow raincoat fanning out behind him like wings ready for take-off, his face determined as he savored his victory.  Paris is always competition and performance.

Later that same morning, I took the subway across the city to visit the American University of Paris, at the invitation of a colleague who teaches there.  There must have been another downpour while I was in the subway, and when I came up the stairs the sun had just broken out, and the reflection on the Seine was almost blinding.  The scene was postcard pretty as I crossed the bridge into the 7^th arrondissement, with Bateaux-Mouches doing their maneuvers on the river and tourists stopping for selfies.  I passed an exquisitely beautiful woman dressed in hijab and the latest fashion, testimony to Parisian possibilities that not all of France can bring itself to embrace.

The American University of Paris was a revelation to me.  It is a sort of boutique university nestled among the elegant buildings of the 7^th, some 1,400 students, I believe my colleague told me.  The students come from all over the world, some from countries that are falling apart – Lebanon, Afghanistan – meaning they cannot go back.  The school is aggressively protective and international and teaches students how to prepare and market themselves for the worlds of business, diplomacy, and government. 

I was most impressed by the quality of the students and the engagement of the professors and staff.  They were the opposite of blasé.  It turned out that the day my talk was scheduled talk fell on a holiday, but my colleague sent out an email to rally the troops and 20 students willingly showed up to listen and engage.  My colleague proved to be generous to an extreme, not only with her students but with me as well:  she proposed that AUP archive my web site (it’s true that I should secure it somewhere), and offered students and technical assistance for another project I have been mulling over:  interviewing Chinese intellectuals on topics other than Xi Jinping and Sino-American relations – their academic/intellectuals careers, their life histories, their favorite recipes…

At lunch the next day, I met with Frédéric Martel, a journalist who wanted to interview me about my book that had just come out in France.  [Note:  I have chosen not to reveal the names of colleagues and friends I mention in this blog, affording them an admittedly thin veil of privacy, but as you will see, there is no point in not identifying Frédéric Martel].  I had been too busy to google Martel; it turns out that he is a public intellectual of considerable renown in France and elsewhere, having written best-sellers on how gay culture is changing the world and on homosexuality in the Vatican, at the same time hosting talk shows on France Culture and lecturing at various universities throughout Europe.  In retrospect, I am embarrassed not to have known who he was. To his credit he took this completely in stride and we had a lovely lunch in a famous traditional restaurant in the Marais.  For an illustrious journalist/public intellectual, Martel is a good listener, something quite rare, in my experience.

The plan had been for Martel to record an interview with me either at the restaurant or at his nearby apartment but discovering that my spoken French was better than expected, he decided to invite me to the studio the following evening to do the interview live.  I was of course flattered by the invitation and accepted.

Arriving at the studio, I was surprised to learn that I was not the only guest and that in fact the show – “Soft Power” – was one of those talk shows where people compete for the microphone and joke with one another and the host, covering the issues of the day in a rapid and pleasant banter.  Joining in this banter was of course beyond me; I understood what everyone said, but not the issues they were talking about, or at least not enough to have anything to say. 

Part of the show involves pitching the cultural products of the week, in this case, Madonna, who was giving a concert in Paris that night, the new film “Napoleon,” with Joachim Phoenix, and my little book, published by the Collège de France.  I could barely suppress a giggle when I realized the company I was keeping.  In any event, I patiently awaited my turn, a ten-minute interview, banter-free, and then left.  The show airs Sunday evening, and a colleague later told me that although people don’t listen to the radio that much anymore, this show remains popular, and people tune in while they do the dishes and prepare for the week to come  You can listen here, if you are interested; I start at the 55 minute mark. 

I greatly appreciate Frédéric Martel’s interest and invitation, both because it surely helped to sell my book, and also because it gave me the opportunity to be a talking head, a member of the French cultural elite, or at least to observe them from close range.  Being parachuted in and then bailing out immediately made my head spin a bit.  The painfully long walk back to the subway station brought me back to earth.

Paris was also about friends, old and new.  I’ve been coming to Paris off and on for 25 or 30 years for work, and some of my best friends are here.  One is probably the most competent and capable person I know, and with whom I had the honor and pleasure to collaborate on several projects ten or fifteen years ago.  He is also extremely busy, as one might imagine, yet he took the time to come and see me as I waited for my train to Barcelona Tuesday morning, testimony to his fundamental decency and kindness.  I don’t know if the French still do statues for their heroes, but my friend deserves one for the many battles he has fought for his ideas, his colleagues, and his students. 

As for new friends, a young Chinese woman responded to my blog invitation to get together for a coffee or a beer in Paris, and we met for brunch a sunny Sunday morning.  I guess she is 25 or 30, in the second year of a master’s program in Paris, delighted with her studies, open and curious about France and the world.  Generational and cultural differences sometimes make conversations like these difficult, but this time it felt like we were old friends, laughing at the same jokes and enjoying the same authors.  As a scholar, I was reassured to know that I read the same things as smart 25-year-old Chinese people – or at least that I’m not missing major authors and debates.  As a human being, I was once again grateful that I had somehow launched a project that brought me in touch with lovely and interesting people.

One friendship turned a bit sour.  I was paired with an old friend and colleague at a Paris institute to discuss the question of the “public intellectual in China,” a topic inspired by my blog and by my book.  I started things rolling, giving my Ted Talk about my project, and when it was her turn, she launched into what can only be described as a diatribe, arguing that since China is totalitarian, there is no public space, which means that there can be no public intellectuals.  Hence, all of the authors I translate are by definition complicit, and I am complicit as well for translating them.  The diatribe went on for perhaps 20 minutes, and was extremely aggressive, leaving everyone visibly ill at ease. 

My reply was essentially:  okay, replace the word “public” with something else, but the fact remains that people write things and people read things that are not regime propaganda, even if the “public space” is not secured by law and if the nature of the space is constantly changing.  This did not satisfy her, and she continued to insist as a political scientist on the need for “clear definitions.”  My reply was that sometimes definitions obscure as much as they clarify, but she continued to contend that the heritage of the Enlightenment was on her side.  To me she was as rigid and doctrinaire as any Party propaganda artist in China, although she was not very artful and I don’t think she convinced anyone.

This was of course unpleasant for me, but I ultimately felt bad for my detractor, among other things because several of her colleagues sought me out in person or by email to apologize for her behavior, and you do not want to be the person for whom others feel the need to apologize.  To my mind, what sticks in her craw is the fact that my site and my project are neutral about China, or at least not constantly hostile to China.  This is true enough, and is in part personal choice, in part dictated by the nature of the project.  In addition, I do not define China as “the China of Xi Jinping and the Party-State,” but see it much more broadly, basing myself on the wide range of opinion expressed in the thousands of pages on my website, among other things.  Xi Jinping might embrace totalitarianism, but much of China continues to resist in one way or another, a resistance which often involves compromises – even moral compromises.  It is too much to expect all Chinese to martyr themselves to Enlightenment ideals because a French sinologist is passionate about the cause.

My colleague’s attack is part of an activist scholarship I’ve encountered in France, the United States, and elsewhere.  Last year, I gave an hour-long lecture at the Collège de France on Jiang Shigong, an influential New Left figure in China whose statist ideas flirt with fascism on occasion.  A French colleague – and friend – accused me of “wasting my time” because Jiang’s ideas are abhorrent.  In this case, my friend was simply wrong; the fact that Jiang’s ideas are abhorrent in no way means we should not read them.  If they have an impact in China, we should read them because they are abhorrent. 

To my mind, arguing whether the Chinese are “right” or not in our political or intellectual context makes no sense at all.  They are not arguing with us, they are arguing with one another, and what is important is to understand the terms of the debate, who is winning and why.  Picking sides from France or the United States only complicates our efforts to understand.  Who wins when one sinologist shouts down another in Paris?  I think I do.