People of Chinese descent have long faced prejudice and violence in France. But today a new generation is staking out its rightful place in society. By Tash Aw
On 7 August 2016, Zhang Chaolin, a 49-year-old tailor, was savagely beaten by a group of youths in Aubervilliers, a deprived suburb on the northern outskirts of Paris – the latest in a string of violent aggressions against ethnic Chinese. Like the other victims, he had been targeted because of the widely held belief that members of the Chinese community habitually carry large amounts of cash (and that they are docile and unlikely to fight back; that they are reluctant to report crimes because they are in the country illegally, or cannot express themselves properly in French; and even if they do, the police do not take them seriously; or, simply, that the Chinese “keep themselves to themselves”).
The following year, on 26 March, 56-year-old Liu Shaoyo was preparing dinner for his children in his apartment in the 19th arrondissement in Paris when the police arrived at his home following a call from neighbours (the nature of the complaint remains unclear). The precise sequence of events is disputed: his family insist firmly that he had merely been gutting fish and had answered the door while still holding a pair of kitchen scissors; the police claim that they had acted in self-defence. Either way, they opened fire, killing Liu.
After I became a full French citizen at the age of 18, I started to think more deeply about my identity – about what it meant to be French, and also Chinese. By that time, I and all my cousins and friends, people who’d been brought up or even born in France, had experienced racism in France – casual insults, people mocking our accents, or more serious incidents like being robbed because we were seen as weak and docile. And then, during the Beijing Olympics, we saw how the French media talked about China and the Chinese, as if we were one kind of people, who acted in the same way, always in the image of the Communist party.
“For me, the demonstrations were a form of revenge. For the humiliation that my parents experienced. That I’ve experienced. The humiliation of being rendered invisible, of not being listened to. The humiliation that Chinese people go through every time they are aggressed in the street, which is a continuation of the marginalisation my parents lived through.
“The rise of China has been complicated for us. Before that, no one really noticed Asian people – we just got on with our lives in a nearly invisible way. Then I began to hear overtly racist comments – the Chinese spit everywhere, they’re filthy, they’re money launderers. The most negative phase was in 2008-9, during the Beijing Olympics, when suddenly the old ‘Yellow Peril’ fears were everywhere. All the time, we had newspaper stories headlined “China: conquering the world”. There were TV programmes like Envoyé Special, which killed Chinese delicatessens almost overnight by screening ‘exposés’ on hygiene standards. My parents ran one of those delis, so I should know.
“We were taught next to nothing about Vietnam, which was after all one of France’s most important colonies for 100 years. Colonial history – France’s relationship with countries that would provide large numbers of its minority populations – wasn’t taught much at school, which was a shame.
No matter how you feel inside,’ my father told me, ‘when the world looks at you, they see a Chinese person.’ It was around that time too that I began to realise that all the things I’d accepted as normal – people mocking Chinese accents to my face, even though I speak just like any other French person, casual comments sexualising Asian women and desexualising Asian men – were micro-aggressions, and that I had to embrace my culture, instead of reject it.
差別や歴史問題など、フランス出羽守がなんか言ったら、参考にしたい記事ですな。
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