If I could have, I'd have bought his painting on the spot I did not want to leave it behind. He'd left Vietnam in the late 1970s as a refugee with his family, and his painting depicted a luminous impasto ocean at night. At the first one, A2Z Gallery, I stood a long time, desperately moved, in front of a vast all-black painting by Bao Vuong. I visited several galleries that have taken part in Asia Now, joining both Parisian and tourist art viewers. The exterior of Phở Tài, beloved for its Vietnamese food Joann Pai What these people are, of course, really, really bent on learning: What am I, since I'm so visibly, obviously other? Meanwhile, at parties in Paris, at dinner tables, these same people have told me how racist America is, and isn't it lovely to be in France, a country with no racism? But no, where am I really, really from, people still persist in asking. “ California.” “ San Francisco.” “I grew up in LA.” I get increasingly, stubbornly precise: Oh, a small town half an hour from LA. On large populated Paris avenues, I've been followed and chased by men calling, absurdly, “Ching chong!” It's in Paris that I developed a firm rule of declining to tell a person I've just met where I'm “really” from. Nowhere else have I been catcalled so often with hollers of “Ni hao!” and “Konnichiwa!”-salutes in languages I don't speak. I grew up in a part of the United States with a plurality of Asians, and Paris is where I began learning firsthand just how exotic I can look to some white people. It's also a city where I've contended with frequent and vocal racism-more, perhaps, than in any other city where I've lived. Intrigued and with mixed feelings: Paris is, unoriginally enough, a city I deeply love.
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