PARIS — Viewed from the airless heights where statisticians crunch numbers, the story of the woman I’ll call Lilly Tan is simple. She is an immigrant in France, a single digit among millions for the statisticians, a warning flag to wave at rallies for the xenophobic political parties that grow ever stronger in Europe and North America.
Lilly is a trend. An ominous, unknowable “other” whose identity is summed up in a face and name that aren’t “Francais de souche” – authentically French by rootstock and origin, like a certified Burgundy or Bordeaux. A European version of Sarah Palin’s “real Americans.”
“I listen to these politicians and their endless ranting and fear-mongering, and I know that on some level they’re talking about me,” says Lilly. “But I can’t recognize myself in the picture they paint.”
Her counterparts are found in every developed country today: Latino-Americans stopped by police on the streets of Arizona, Pakistanis in Britain whose every gesture is recorded by the world’s most comprehensive public surveillance system, Turks and Kurds in a Germany where “multiculturalism has utterly failed,” according to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
What trend-gazing overlooks is a fundamental truth about our world in motion, an epic human drama that cannot be reduced to charts and graphs. The epic is written by millions of individuals, all with distinctive and sometimes heroic sagas specifically their own.
As a reporter who has covered this subject on every continent since the 1970s, I’ve never met an immigrant who didn’t have a complex, personal tale. And that, rather than the numbers, was always the real story.
The Truth Lies in the Details
For the statistical record, Lilly Tan is filed among 350,000 ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia who emigrated here after the war in Indochina. In the common view, offered without embarrassment by many non-Asian Parisians, “they are all alike, you can’t tell them apart.”
In fact, Chinese Paris is a living atlas of the greater Chinese world’s enormous diversity, with several distinct sub-communities clustered in their own neighborhoods. The French press has nicknamed the largest of them, the sprawling high-rise Thirteenth Arrondissement, “Hong Kong sur Seine.”
As it happens, there are very few Hong Kong Chinese in Paris. The Thirteenth has a mixed population from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, further mixed by different ancestral origins in southern China and mutually incomprehensible dialects. On the opposite side of the river, there are two smaller settlements inhabited mostly by natives of Wenzhou Prefecture in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang.
Lilly herself was born and raised in Malaysia, where her grandparents fled during the violent turmoil that beset China in the early 20th century. As a child educated in a convent school, she learned to read and write from French missionary nuns. “When I was eight years old, I began dreaming about the France they described, about its liberty, equality and fraternity,” she says.
But nothing Lilly does, nothing she ever dreamed, can make her Francais de souche. Along with millions of Arab, West African and other Asian Parisians, she is regularly stopped at Metro stations by police, or pulled aside by immigration officers at DeGaulle Airport, and asked for documented proof of legal residence.
Each of the city’s major immigrant groups is burdened by its own particular stereotype. The Chinese are regarded as tribal and money-driven. “They are a very cold people, with no life beyond business, and no interest in our culture,” a retired civil servant told me. “They make a fortune and return home as quickly as they can.”
But at 58, Lilly has worked in French companies for 35 years, the last 30 of them as a French citizen. Inspired by an adolescent crush on the singer and actor Yves Montand, she has memorized dozens of classic French dance hall songs. “Once in awhile, if I drink a bit too much wine at a company party or the wedding of a colleague, I’ll sing a couple of them,” she says.
The performance amazes people, as though a Martian had begun reciting poetry. “How could she possibly know those songs?” they ask.
The question says more about the listeners than it does about Lilly. She speaks French flawlessly, with no perceptible accent, just as she speaks perfect English, Malay and three Chinese dialects. There aren’t many professors at the Sorbonne who are her equal in languages.
The closer you look at Lilly Tan, the more the collective statistics that frame trends – and engender stereotypes – dissolve.
There is nothing new about this.
The Sausage and Oyster Invasion
Turn the clock back five or six generations, and the Rue Montogueil, where Lilly lives on the Right Bank, was already a cultural battleground. On one part of the street were Auvergnats, rural folk from south-central France who made their first appearance here hawking country sausages and hams. After a generation of back-breaking work, their children were able to open small delicatessens and cafes.
From the west, in the same years, the sons and daughters of Breton fishermen carried oysters to feed the city’s insatiable appetite for fresh seafood. Rue Montorgueil was the epicenter of the trade, and by the 20th century its once-itinerant oyster-sellers were among the city’s premier restaurateurs. They also introduced the crepe to Paris.
The Auvergnats spoke an obscure patois that virtually no one in Paris understood. The Bretons’ maternal tongue was Celtic. When they became neighbors on the Right Bank, 11 separate language groups were represented in France, broken down into at least 46 major dialects and a hodgepodge of local dialects beyond counting. Only a fifth of the population spoke modern French.
That was the trend 200 years ago, just as it is now: a wave of incomprehensible aliens descending on the city. Fierce personal determination eventually made them synonymous with the French capital’s identity — her cafes and restaurants, her Auvergnat sausages, her Breton shellfish and crepes.
From time immemorial, Europe’s great metropolises have always been laboratories of constant flux and reinvention, not only for newcomers but also for the “native” cultures that surround them.
At the end of the 19th century, Italian immigrants – including members of my own Sicilian family — were widely reviled as low-wage invaders who stole French jobs. In 1893, 50 of them were killed in riots near the southern city of Aigues-Mortes. The presumed killers were tried, but acquitted and set free.
By the 1960s, no one came closer to defining French manhood than Lilly Tan’s favorite actor, the late Yves Montand – born “Ivo Livi“ in Monsummano, Italy, a former dockworker whose parents were peasant broommakers.
Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for the giornaledibarganews based in Barga, Italy (his articles are here) and the New America Media, an independent online publication based in San Francisco that focuses on multicultural media.