The Toronto Star: An Asian in Paris

May 8, 2017

Paris — When I moved to Paris around seven years ago from Toronto, I arrived woefully unprepared.

I anticipated homesickness. Language barriers. And loneliness. But naively, I failed to consider the challenge of being a visible minority in a country where race relations are fraught with tensions.

I would soon learn that under the veneer of cosmopolitan diversity, lies an undercurrent of long-simmering fear and distrust that manifest themselves in often nuanced, sometimes patently racist ways.

In his victory speech Sunday, Emmanuel Macron vowed to unify the fractured, divided country he’s inherited as the new president of France.

But it’s a mammoth undertaking that will require some honest soul-searching. And I’m hoping it will lead to — what I, an outsider, sees as — the root of one of the country’s problems: namely, the lack of integration.

Consider the fact that many of the terrorists who carried out the spate of attacks in 2015 — the Charlie Hebdo offices, Jewish grocery store, Bataclan and the Stade de France — were not immigrants, but homegrown terrorists and French nationals.

While the Front National uses a discourse of fear to incite distrust toward Muslim immigrants, little is said about the fact that it was their own — disenfranchised, French-born men — who carried out the deadliest attacks on French soil.

And it’s not just Islamophobic sentiment that divides the country.

Read more at https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/05/08/an-asian-in-paris.html