Paris, Tennessee
The Eiffel Tower is unexciting – or maybe it’s just the fact that it’s sixty-six feet tall, rusty green, and standing next to a children’s swing-set.
But that didn't stop my mom and me from taking about a million selfies. She was the reason we visited this site. My mom was supervising the physician assistant exams at Bethel University and had invited me to work as a Standardized Patient, a person acting as a patient to test students’ clinical skills.
“It’ll be a mommy-daughter vacation!” she said.
How could I say no?
So, we went to Bethel, located in Paris, Tennessee. But with 10,000 people, one grocery store, and hundreds of confederate flags, it didn’t seem very French. It instead reminded me of Dyersburg, the town where my family and I arrived when we left Pakistan — the town where I was the only Pakistani at school, where “Muslim” was synonymous with “terrorist,” where people told my mother to take off her hijab — the town I left, swearing I’d never return.
My mom parked the car at Super 8, the only hotel in Paris. I’m only here for three days.
We spent most of our three days on campus; my mom proctored, and I pretended to be a 65-year-old widow with dementia.
The old Academy, courtesy of School for Arts
Our tour of the town began after the exam, when we found the Paris Academy for the Arts: the only other building besides a Walmart and a few churches. The rural America I knew invested in football, farms, and faith – not the arts.
Yet the school doors creaked open. Bulletin boards layered with sketches, paintings, and collages that seemed to come from the hands of toddlers to adults covered the walls. I walked through a classroom with half-finished easels that still smelled of fresh paint. We tiptoed through hallways lined with bookshelves, and I brushed my fingertips along taped-up spines of sketchbooks. Our voices echoed in an empty dance studio.
Who founded this school — and why? Where are its students? Did they leave? Will they ever return?
When we left, it felt like a fever dream.
I stood in a parking lot with my mom, staring up at the yellowing panels and cracked windows of her apartment complex from when she studied at Bethel two years ago while I was a high school freshman living with my grandparents and my brother in another town. I’d never visited her while she was here: we didn’t have a car. She’d never told me about her apartment when she called me. She never told me about the hip-height of weeds she had to walk through every night, just to deal with roaches and the tiny microwave that left food cold. I was busy figuring out how to survive without my mom — learning how to cook my own food, asking friends to drive my brother and I to the grocery store, and watching a plumber on YouTube when the toilet broke.
And we stood here, staring. My mom now had her own house, job, and life in a new city, far from here. And me? I was off to Duke.
“Can we go inside?” I asked.
“No.” my mom said, “Someone else lives there now.”
On the last day in Paris, we visited the town's gem: the “Eiffel Tower.” We shivered in the wind that soon turned into rain, standing before the tower. The LED lights lit up at sundown, like an overgrown Christmas tree, shining blue on our grinning faces.
My mom and I will probably never return to Paris, TN, but revisiting a town that reeked of hardships of our past and let us explore, laugh, and find bits of joy there — it shows me how far we’ve come.