PORTRAIT MADE IN CHINA 62 nous, nous en sommes à débattre sur l’utilité d’y installer une serrure… Et quand on y pense, lorsque l’on s’intéresse à l’ailleurs, ouvrir une porte, c’est tout de même par là qu’il faut commencer… Aujourd’hui, vous sentez-vous chinois par certains aspects ? J’ai passé une partie de mon enfance en Côte d’Ivoire, mon adolescence en France et sept années de ma vie d’adulte en Chine. Je ne me sens ni ivoirien, ni chinois, ni même trop français. Je dirais plutôt que je me sens très attaché à ces endroits. J’y suis chez moi. Ils me « parlent ». Nous avons des choses à nous dire et c’est déjà beaucoup. « Voyager c’est découvrir que tout le monde a tort », disait A. Huxley, formule à laquelle vous semblez adhérer. Pourquoi ? Parce qu’il a raison… Voyager, vivre ailleurs c’est d’abord découvrir que là-bas, très loin, vit un homme qui est si pareillement imparfait qu’il pourrait être notre siamois. Et ça, c’est véritablement essentiel. Avez-vous le désir d’aller vérifier cet adage dans une autre partie du monde ? Oui. Bien sûr. Le plus tôt possible. mai 2010 www.cotemagazine.com « I SOW WHAT I CAN, I REAP EVEN LESS. AND WILL END UP ALONE, MY EYES YELLOW, JAUNDICED, FROM HAVING TOO LOVED LOOKING AT ASIA » VINCENT HEIN systems, shopping centres and skyscrapers that aren't horrible but are always very similar. Here and there, however, you can still see a park, a temple, a restored traditional street, but nowadays you do wonder if those just serve to ease the collective conscience. Your book delivers impressions and observations, never clear, cut-and-dried judgements. So have you become wise or mistrustful ? Neither I hope. The wise bore me and the mistrustful exasperate me ! I try to communicate things as I see them, as I understand them. In France we're always being asked to have an opinion about everything. Although in a way it's making the job easier, or perhaps taking fewer risks, I prefer the much more descriptive approach of Anglo-Saxon writers. And their way of constantly defending the readers'right to formtheir own opinions interests me much more. They open doors whereas we French are still debat-ing whether to install locks. And when you think about it, when you're interested in other places, then opening a door is obviously where you have to start. So do you now feel Chinese in some ways ? I spent part of my childhood in Côte d’Ivoire and my adolescence in France and l've now spent seven years of my adulthood in China. I don't feel African or Chinese or even particularly French. I prefer to say I feel very attached to those places. l'm at home in them. They speak to me. We have things to say to each other and that's already a lot. « To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong […],"A Huxley said. You seem to identify with that phrase. Why ? Because he's right. Travelling, living somewhere else, first of all means discovering that elsewhere, far away, lives a human being who is so similarly imperfect he might be our Siamese twin. And that is truly vital. Do you want to go and check that out in another part of the world ? Yes. Of course. As soon as possible.