Passage National Church
The Passage National Church consists of two churches that ensure respectively the Sinophone and Francophone worship: the ECMCF (Sinophone) and the Evangelical Protestant Church of the Way (EPEC). On Sundays, the younger people meet on the ground floor for a French/English mass, while their mothers meet upstairs for a Mandarin mass and to sing. The women I met at this Chinese mass came from the city of Canton and from Hong Kong.
After the French/English mass, I was able to speak with the young people who were there. One man told me that his mother was Taiwanese and his father French, so he feels mixed even in blood, and he can’t separate his two identities/cultures. There was a woman from Guyana, where there is also a large Chinese community. Her parents are from Qingtian and Zhejiang (near Wenzhou). There was a woman whose parents were Teochew from Laos. There were also some people with a Chinese parent and a parent from ex-Indochina.
They said that previously, there were many people from Southeast Asia, but now, there are more and more Chinese from mainland China. They also found that Asian immigration came after Maghrebi immigration, so Asians are a little less integrated.
When talking about discrimination, people said that apart from racism, there was North/South discrimination, Paris vs. the countryside, and many other things too. Everyone agreed that there were always small racist remarks at school, but over time, people grew up and there were fewer of them. They said that most of the time, they did not react in situations of racism. They also said that people who come from China may respond less because they are less used to expressing themselves, but this is a generalization that is not necessarily true. Someone else who grew up in a rougher neighborhood responds with bad words because she is used to it.
A woman was even called ugly by the school photographer. Growing up, her father told her that she always had to do more because she was not "in her country." She wanted to be white, so her father told her to be proud of being Chinese, and she was for a while, but now at work, she’s trying to erase her differences. After she started dating a white boyfriend, her father didn’t talk to her for 3 years.
Racism sometimes manifests itself in strange situations. One person said that someone told him 'sorry' in the metro, but afterwards she said 'ah, I am not going to say sorry because you are Chinese.' One person also recounted an experience of racism with another Asian person who was adopted. This person called him "Chinetoque" (a racist slur in French), and he replied that he didn’t speak Chinese either, because he was second-generation Chinese. Finally, a woman said that when she had won a contest, someone had asked her two questions: "Did a man help you?" and "Did your origins help with your creativity?" So instead of acknowledging that she had won through her own efforts, this person attributed her victory to a man and then to her origins.