Coffee with Francois Yang
by Jiaqi Kang
This interview was originally published in Issue #6 “CLEAR (清)”. Get it now on BLURB.
I’m running late for my rendezvous with Chinese-Taiwanese-Swiss-French director Francois Yang, which wouldn’t be that bad if I hadn’t already requested for the meeting time to be pushed back so I could have lunch with my friends at a vegan restaurant in Rive droite.
We’re to meet at the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical park near Paris’ 13th arrondissement, an area famous for its large Asian population. As I speed down the Quai Saint-Bernard looking for the park’s entrance, I send him a message in French on Whatsapp: “Hi Francois, I’m at the garden, on the side near the river.”
“I’m on the other side,” comes the reply.
“Shall we meet in the middle?” I send a photo of the garden map with a finger pointed at the location I want. That gives me time to pay a quick visit to the public toilets before rushing past rows of trees, benches, and families taking advantage of a free Saturday afternoon to bask under the mid-September sun. I find Yang hovering near the entrance of one of the botanic greenhouses.
We greet each other — we’ve already met once, at the Geneva premiere of his film, in which one of my classmates from Chinese school had been an extra — and I hand him a small gift for his second child, who has just been born. Yang suggests that we sit down and takes me to the Grand Mosque just across the street. The Mosque has a wonderfully colorful restaurant where one can sip sweet tea and take in the heavenly smell reminiscent of strawberry candy, but, at that time in the day, it’s completely full. Instead, we find a table outside a café on Rue Cuvier that gives a view of the garden wall hugged by overflowing foliage. Yang orders an allongé and I get a mint tea, and we get straight into it, with Yang switching into lilting French-accented English.
We begin with Yang’s background, and as it turns out, his family has quite a unique immigration story: his maternal grandfather arrived as a Philosophy student in Switzerland in the 1930s, hosted by a bishop who wanted to convert Chinese people to Christianity. For a while, Yang’s grandfather moved often between the comfortable base of Fribourg and the bigger city of Paris, where he was studying for his PhD. His daughter — Yang’s mother — was born in 1939 in Paris. Yang’s grandparents and uncle stayed in Paris for the duration of the Second World War, experiencing the occupation by Nazi Germany, leaving his mother, who was ill at the time, with a Swiss family in Fribourg. “After the war,” Yang tells me, they reunited with his mother, but his grandmother passed away. “[My grandfather] went back to China and he said to my mother, ‘Oh, I’ll come back in two years.’ But he never came back.” This was probably due to the outbreak of civil war in China at the time. His mother stayed in Fribourg, where she eventually got her doctorate degree in economic sciences, specialising in the people’s communes of 1960s China and met Yang’s father, a Chinese-born Taiwanese student who was attending the university.
Yang was born in 1978. Growing up in Fribourg, he and his brother were the only Chinese kids at school. He was raised in a Christian family (though he’s no longer as religious) where he spoke French rather than Chinese. “I think the language comes from the mother, and if the mother speaks the language then maybe I would have learned. My mother doesn’t speak Chinese. She looks Chinese,” Yang adds, trailing off. As he recounts his childhood, he comments that some of the bullying he’d experienced at the time “wasn’t a problem, because we were not conscious about this kind of ‘racism’. It was forty years ago.”
Even in the present, I agree that countries like France and Switzerland tend not to be as race-conscious as the United States. In March 2017, a Chinese father of five, Shaoyou Liu, was killed by police — who claimed to have misinterpreted the scissors that he was using to cut fish for dinner as a lethal weapon — in his own home in the 19th Arrondissement, across town from where Yang and I are sitting. In a May 2017 interview with Al Jazeera, Rokhaya Diallo, a journalist of Senegalese descent, contrasts the way incidents such as Liu’s murder, and the violent police assault of black teen Theo, are handled by French media, which doesn’t usually explicitly mention racism, contrasting the extensive dialogue about police brutality and white supremacy in American media. Diallo says, “[France is] ‘color-blind’. We’re supposed to all be French. It’s taboo to mention people’s races.” As a European myself, I often see how differently race is perceived and handled on both sides of the Atlantic. I ask Yang about it, and he says that, when he was 17, he studied in Los Angeles for a year: “People asked me if I wanted to join the Asian clubs and I said, ‘No, I’m not Asian.’ I think it’s very different when you are in Switzerland and you have no Asian friends. You don’t want to promote your own culture.” Yang had never really labelled himself as ‘Chinese’, preferring to try and fit in with the rest of his friends.
After attending ECAL — the arts and design university in Lausanne — where he studied directing, and then studying at the Fémis — the film and television school in Paris — Yang worked with French-speaking Switzerland’s broadcasting company, Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS). He made two documentary shorts for the RTS, the first about an interracial, international wedding, and the second about new recruits to the police force (including a half-Haitian law graduate), revealing his early interest in the interactions between cultures. “So the producer said, ‘Oh, you have a Chinese heritage. Maybe you should do something with China,’” Yang tells me with a laugh. “I said, ‘Yeah, maybe, maybe not.’”
He did end up making the 2009 television documentary Rêve de Chine (Chinese dream), about a Swiss family learning to adapt to their new life in China — an immigration story that is the opposite of Yang’s own. To make the film, Yang had to learn Chinese, which he had never done before even though his father was a Chinese teacher. When he finally visited China for the first time, he said that he fell in love with the country. “It was amazing, because people were all excited about the new development in China.” Unlike boring Europe, where everything had already been built, “in China, everything was possible. There was a lot of energy around people. But I think it wasn’t the real China, because I was with expats and richer people — not the usual people,” he admits.
However, Yang confesses, “I’ve always wanted to make fiction films. It’s very hard because it costs so much money. There is a boundary with intimacy in documentaries: for example, you’re very sad because — I don’t know — you’ve lost your precious dog and you’re crying, and I say, ‘Oh, it’s very funny’ and I’m trying to tape you. It might be very rude.” He contrasts this with directing actors in a fiction work: “You have more control over it.” Although his documentaries were primarily just to make a living, they also exposed him to new experiences that informed the stories he wrote. Without the RTS, “I would have never been to China and be able to get into some Chinese, very traditional families.”
“There is a boundary with intimacy in documentaries…[in a fiction work,] you have more control over it.”
Yang’s dream finally came true when he made his first feature film, L’âme du tigre (The Soul of the Tiger), released in 2016. Set in Paris’ 13th arrondissement, it tells the story of Alex, a free-spirited mixed-race young man who is forced to delve into his Chinese heritage as he tries to make sense of the mysterious circumstances behind his brother’s death. Drawing in part upon Yang’s own loss of his brother (whose nickname was Little Tiger), the film is an exploration of the diasporic experience and an expression of what we at Sine Theta have come to call ‘diaspora angst’, where someone struggles to reconcile their Sino and non-Sino cultures into a hybrid identity, or Third Space, as discussed in sinθ #3.
Before L’Âme du tigre, Yang made the 2014 short film Mooncake, which featured many of the same characters and themes, as a way to bring funding for the feature. “This short film actually went to many festivals, especially in the US. In the US, as I told you, they have many Asian film festivals and they are very interested [in] this question of identity and the diaspora.” Later, Yang says, “When you talk about the Asian diaspora in Europe, it’s very much niche.” Although Hollywood still has a huge representation problem, Yang says that it’s better over there than here in France, where you always have to justify why you’ve made a character Chinese. “You don’t have to say, ‘Oh, he came from China. His parents come from China. That’s why he’s Asian. That’s why I have to choose [this Chinese actor over a white one].’” Yang adds: “Maybe in ten years, it will be different, but I don’t know. As a filmmaker, I want my films to be shown.” The problem always comes back to money: it’s highly difficult to put Asian leads in a Swiss film and remain commercially successful. For L’Âme du tigre, Yang added two white actresses in key roles in order to draw a wider audience; and the aesthetics of the cinematography are more to attract Switzerland’s Federal Office of Culture, which prefers to subsidise “artistic” films, than to realise Yang’s own auteurist vision.
“In the US, they are very interested [in] this question of identity and the diaspora… When you talk about the Asian diaspora in Europe, it’s very much niche.”
I ask Yang a question that I myself have been pondering lately: “In an editorial in sinθ #4, fellow editor Iris and I, influenced by Gayatri Spivak’s notions of nationalism, talk about how diasporic people have a skewed perspective on their so-called motherland. We write: Distanced from China chronologically, geographically, and culturally, it is inevitable that we do not perceive the Motherland in the way it exists. Yet the very act of acknowledging that we work in a semi-imaginary dimension allows us to move beyond arbitrary standards of authenticity towards a space where identity is defined only by the way it is constantly in flux. You yourself admitted, during the Q&A after your film’s premiere in Geneva, that you exaggerated the exoticism of Chinese culture to create a semi-fictional microverse in which you explore your themes of family and heritage. But some may accuse you of self-orientalism because it’s not necessarily ‘the real China’, but is more aestheticised. How do you justify this romanticised view of China rather than a more realistic one?”
“[The Chinese diaspora is] very different from the mainland because they came 30 years ago and, like you said, made their own China in their mind [as] some kind of security,” Yang says after just long enough of a pause to make me wonder if I spoke too fast. “The Chinese community in Paris is more traditional and ‘Chinese’ than China is right now because China has forgotten all those customs, I think.” He tells me that he didn’t invent any of the ceremonies featured in L’Âme du tigre, but rather drew upon the knowledge of the actors themselves. “I think there are two ways of treating this theme,” Yang muses: the romantic or the pessimistic. “All the films made in France are about clandestins — illegal immigrants — or Chinese prostitution in Belleville,” which Yang says is cliché and might reinforce stereotypes about the Chinese diaspora in Europe. “Maybe, to show another kind of family that is more educated and more into the arts or taichi, in a more romantic way, [would give the French] a different view about China.”
“The Chinese community in Paris is more traditional and ‘Chinese’ than China is right now because China has forgotten all those customs.”
Thinking of a trailer I’d glimpsed some months back for a film about a Belgian girl confronting her South Asian heritage, I wonder out loud about whether all diasporic artists must, at some point, make art about their diaspora angst. Having waded through mountains of art, literature, and cinema — good and bad — it seems like a sort of rite of passage to make work about being torn apart by two conflicting halves of one’s identity. Yang agrees that “it’s always the same story,” but adds, kindly, “I think everyone has his own way to tell the story.”
Original interview by Jiaqi Kang and edited by Sine Theta’s editorial staff. Medium article edited and uploaded by Jessica Ho. Banner designed by Jessica Peng. Photography by Gabriel Bailey.
Sine Theta is a creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.
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