A Paris musician's story: 'I got rid of everything Asian-related so I'd seem as white as possible'
By Léa Dang
As part of Mediapart's ongoing series about everyday hate in France, Céline, aged 24, who is now a musician in Paris, and who was born in France to a French father and a Mongolian mother, describes how she suffered from racism during her childhood in the west of the country. The harm was caused, she says, by racism in general and prejudices about women of Asian origin in particular, prejudices linked to the hyper-sexualisation and fetishization of the body. Léa Dang reports.
“I was ashamed of my mother's accent.” When Céline, who was born in France to a Mongolian mother and French father, looks back on her early days at school she remembers that she tended to ask for her father to come and collect her. “As soon as I started going to class I no longer wanted to speak Mongolian,” recalls this 24-year-old artist who grew up in the small town of Redon in Brittany in western France and who now lives in Paris. “I got rid of everything Asian-related so I'd seem as white as possible. I was, for example, very interested in Anglo-Saxon culture and I got close to my father.” This eradication of a part of herself was to last for years.
