O n 7 August , Zhang Chaolin, a forty-nine-year-old tailor, was savagely beaten by a group of youths in Aubervilliers, a deprived suburb on the northern outskirts of Paris β the latest in a string of violent aggressions against ethnic Chinese.
As it turned out, Zhang Chaolin only had a packet of cigarettes and some sweets on him. He died as a result of his injuries five days later. The following year, on 26 March, fifty-six-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 Shaoyo. Much of what I heard in the speeches that day, as well as in newspaper reports and on social media, felt tragically familiar to me: the cries of a people who felt that they had been ignored by the state.
We work hard, we keep out of trouble, no one gives a damn about us, we have to struggle all by ourselves. These were the sentiments I grew up with in my ethnic Chinese family in Malaysia β a sense of frustration and suppressed pain that informed my view of the world. But there was also something totally foreign to me about these protests: the open dissent. Pushing back against hierarchy and authority. The protesters were overwhelmingly young, incredibly vocal and, in some instances, willing to resort to violent action β the very opposite of how overseas Chinese communities, the centuries-old immigrants known as huaqiao β have traditionally behaved.
In short, the demonstrations seemed to be distinctly French. I had been as surprised as most people to learn that France has the largest ethnic-Chinese population in Europe. There were other surprises too. But as I got to know members of the various Asian communities in Paris, I discovered that I had been guilty of overlooking a fact that should have been obvious to me, of all people: that the overwhelming majority of Cambodians and Vietnamese in France are of Chinese descent.
