In the corner of my vision, I saw one of them step away from the group. The days were cold, and I was wearing a scarf, whichβit took me a moment to realizeβsomeone had just yanked on, hard, from behind. As I turned around, stumbling, I saw the rest of the group making its way toward me.
I ended up losing my pursuers among the corridors of the Forum des Halles. He was alone, as though waiting for someone, standing on a street corner. I knew that some of them, maybe most of them, thought of racism as something that happened to Arabs and Blacks.
Or perhaps the reason I kept the incident to myself had less to do with them and more to do with me. Being around my friends was my antidote to the racism I encountered, my protection from it, in a way. In the company of my friends, I became one of them, French like them. I perfected my accent, scoured dictionaries, and never read a book without taking notes, so that when my friends blanked on a word, they often turned to me for the answer.
I had no wish to compromise the image they had of me. It makes me wonder: Would my friendship with my French friends have been the same if we had spoken English to one another? Given that most of them have fluent English, such a scenario is not, I suppose, impossible. Which leads me to ask myself: Was I friends with them for the French they spoke, or for them?
Where does the language end and the friendship begin? In some ways, I understand why so few Asians who are victims of aggressions in France go to the police. I started learning French at the age of nineteen, half a lifetime ago, as an entirely personal choiceβone of those fateful and fortuitous encounters that can forever alter the trajectory of a life, like stories of love at first sight, except that mine was with a language.
