Despite occasional complaints of a similar sort when I am at home in the States, I generally have a sense of Americans' recognition that Asian immigrants are here to stay. This is sadly not the case in France. The excuse that the French are simply not habituated to seeing Asian inhabitants in their country is hardly viable when every métro ride and stroll in Parisian residential neighborhoods has shown me Asians carrying groceries rather than cameras and souvenirs, when the Vietnamese restaurants on every block are clearly managed by working people who live there. Despite the clear presence of permanent immigrant communities, the narrative that gets imposed on all our Asian faces is that of the wealthy Japanese tourist, there to appreciate the charms of French culture, to fertilize the Champs-Elysées market with his ever-strong yen, and most importantly, to leave when his vacation is over. The Asian immigrant communities, largely consisting of the formerly colonized Vietnamese, are seldom recognized as a permanent component of the French population. Watching a brief interview with a woman of Vietnamese descent born and raised in France, my French host mother marveled at the elegance of her French diction. "Incredible!" she said. "She speaks French better than me!"
Not only do these immigrants speak French fluently; several have published novels and poetry in French. Especially in the past two decades, there has been an abundance of literary production by Asian immigrants living in France. There has been little critical attention to this body of writing in both France and the United States. Ironically, Asians have been writing in French since 1913, the beginning of French colonization of Vietnam. During the colonial period (1913-1940), French was the language of education throughout Vietnam. Throughout this period and especially during the struggle for national independence, many Vietnamese novelists published works in French that addressed the experiences of colonialism and resistance. Exhibiting the influence of French structuralism, the bildung in these plots came from the negotiation of the oppositions between Orient and Occident, tradition and progress, familial duty and individualism. Most importantly, the major authors of this period, including Cung Giu Nguyên, Pham Van Ky, and Pham Duy Khiem, romanticized pre-colonial Vietnam's nature and folklore, but at the same time, recognized the impossibility and undesirability of returning to the nostalgized state. In a nonfiction work on Vietnam, Cung Giu Nguyên supported Vietnamese independence, but emphasized that historical entanglements precluded independence from being a simple return to traditional Vietnam: "Modern nations, whether they like it or not, now find themselves implicated in economic and political systems." These authors depicted and identified with a Vietnamese cultural identity, however impossible to recover, as distinct from the French culture imposed on them. While these authors are reluctant to valorize a particular cultural essence, they often locate their own existence as at least physically and geographically distinct and separate from France. For example, in the Prologue to Pham Van Ky's Celui qui regnera (He Who Will Reign), the author writes, "I have always existed, be it in my ancestors' dream or in my country's air."
In France, the phenomenon of postcolonial literature has always been synonymous with "Francophonie," the literature in the French language outside of France. In fact, the Francophone literature of Vietnam, the Antilles, and North Africa have all grown out of anticolonial struggles in which a resistance to the French accompanies the assertion of one's separate national identity. In France, nonwhite Francophone writers are thus associated with one of these "elsewhere" nations, and not with France itself. But at the same time, there is a critical tendency to exclude the immigrant writers from the category of Francophone writers, precisely because of their existence within French society. Jack Yeager, the only critic who has published a book-length study of Vietnamese Francophone literature, claims that the study of Vietnamese Francophone literature as a distinct category is grounded in a cultural identity that arises specifically from the struggle for independence such that any literature written by Vietnamese residents of France is likely to be assimilated into the body of French literature itself:
As for the Vietnamese living in Paris, they will eventually be absorbed into the cultural mainstream, diluting the uniqueness of their culture and background. Already there are people of Vietnamese ancestry who, having been born and raised in France, speak French as a primary language, and very little, if any, Vietnamese. This process appears irreversible and seems destined to put an end to Vietnamese Francophone literature.
But writers of Asian ancestry living in France tend to be organized more by their ancestral countries of origin than by their current diasporic situations. The most likely place to find French books by Asians permanently living in France is the section titled "Extreme-Orient" in many a Parisian bookstore. While Yeager is correct in recognizing that the literature of Asian immigrants is different from that of Vietnamese francophones, it is doubtful that these authors are actually being absorbed into a cultural mainstream such that their culture, their background, and their racialized identity is diluted in the world of French literature.
In attempting to resolve the classificatory homelessness of Asian immigrant French literature, one can consider the parallel discourse of Asian American literature and the debates over its status as "American" literature. America, like France, has a history of regarding Asian immigrants as eternal foreigners; this has led Asian Americans to defensively assert that we are indeed "American." However, to focus excessively on the American in Asian American makes it difficult for us to justify the choice to study the writings of Asian Canadian, Asian Latin American, Asian Australian, and Asian French writers within a common methodological and critical framework. Are the thematics of marginalization, exclusion, and ambivalent assimilation based on race unique to American culture and history? Recognizing the collective experience of displacement, discrimination, and assimilation of the racialized subject in a prevalently white national culture, many Asian American literary scholars have recently proposed broadening the category "Asian American" into the category "Asian diasporic." At the 1994 meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies, several papers considered Asians as a diaspora, a scattered community of Asian subjects throughout the globe displaced in various American, European and other non-Asian cultures.
In celebrating the pluralistic inclusiveness of this category, one notices key differences between Asian French immigrant literature and that of Asian Americans. While Asian American writers do not necessarily attempt to assimilate their literature to fit established American models, they maintain a stake in defending that their writings, however ethnically specific, ought to be considered "American" in a place rhetorically billed as a pluralistic nation of immigrants. In France, Asian immigrant writers do not posit this same relation to French cultural identity. Ya Ding, a native of China now living in Paris, has published five novels in French over the past decade. All these novels take place in China in periods ranging from the Cultural Revolution to the present. Only one of his novels, Le jeu de l'eau et du feu (The Game of Water and Fire) takes place in both Beijing and Paris. The protagonist, an organizer of the student protests at Tiananmen Square, flees to Paris shortly thereafter and embarks on several romantic liaisons with French women through which he negotiates his own identity as a Chinese expatriate in Paris. While he realizes that he is never going back to China, he finds his identity in France as the writer of all of his Chinese experiences, aided by Chinese myths and metaphors of water and fire. In his work, as in the work of poet Phan Kim Diem, there is a conscious thematization of the state of being without country, without positive appropriation of the current home, France, as one's own nation.
Ya Ding's protagonist, while no longer part of China the political entity, stably and consciously occupies a Chinese cultural identity. In contrast, in the novels of Linda Lê, there is little direct occupation with the experience of being Asian in France. In fact, only one of the characters in her three most recent novels has a clearly Asian name. But her constant uses of stream-of-consciousness narrative, and the theme of death as a certain troubled relation to the self, echo the more experimental forms of Asian American writing that bring out the fragmented and displaced diasporic subject. In her most recent Les dits d'un idiot, (The Words of an Idiot, 1995) completely without punctuation, the paralyzed narrator stumbles through excessive monologue to describe his mother, who, through her various maternal and romantic relations, explores her problematic love of self. The theme of the parental relation as an interior self-relation echoes the ambivalent attitude of the colonized subject towards the figure of authority. For example, while postcolonial writers may protest the hegemony of the paternalistic European culture, they realize that having been colonized, the language and other dimensions of the culture have already become part of the apparatus of protest. In Les évangiles du crime (The Gospels of Crime, 1992) Lê presents a series of four stories of death, all of which posit murder and suicide as specific power relations to another part of oneself. To claim these speak to the problematic and fragmented identities of racialized members of the Parisian population requires an allegorical reading that pronounces race where it is not specified. The necessity of such a reading points to a reluctance to address race at a literal, visible level. In any case, both the emphasis on an immigrant's Asian cultural identity and fragmentation of selves that are not racially specified function to negotiate around a French identity in which Asians are not integrated.
The refusal to see Asian immigrants as French signals a dangerous and irresponsible tendency on the part of the French to forget their colonial past. Many scholars of Francophone postcolonial literature point out that France's approach to its colonies was assimilationist; mainly through educational institutions, they intended on making Africans and Asians "become French." But as Homi Bhabha points out in "Of Mimicry and Man" in The Location of Culture the desire to assimilate the savage is always an ambivalent one that says "But not quite!" when the racialized subject begins to mimic the French language and demeanor too perfectly. The Vietnamese immigrant communities and the interaction of their culture with French culture are direct results of the French presence in Indochina, and the voices emerging from these and other diasporic communities are not merely foreign presences, but presences resulting from France's historical desire for cultural dominance and assimilation. While France does not have America's history of at least pretending to be open to immigrants of all colors and kinds, this participation in the historical realities leading to the formation of diasporic communities demands a reexamination of what, and whom, "the French" include.
By Julie C. Suk