Everywhere you go, from Paris to Los Angeles, from Dakar to La Réunion, you will always find some cheap, colorful and strangely useless objects. 

These memorabilia are not always known as “Chinese” even if “Made in China” and still, there are the humble segment of a globalized Chinese culture.  It is somehow like a scattered puzzle.

My original idea is to collect these objects, to reconstitute their multiple itineraries, but also to meet people and compile vernacular stories about a scattered Chinese identity.

Last winter, I discovered the story of Dayton, depicted in the documentary film “American Factory”, directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert (2019). In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a factory in an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand Americans.

Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America. This story is the starting point of my obsession with the Chinese history of America and about this very intriguing term of “Paper Sons and Daughters”.

The first wave of Chinese immigrants came in the 1870s, after the transcontinental railway connected the Pacific Coast to Chicago, a few years before the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented working-class Chinese from entering the U.S., except men who could prove they were American citizens – the origins of these Paper Sons and Daughters. 

Who are the Paper Grandsons and daughters in 2024 America? What are the pages of their personal Dictionary?

Therefore, my story will be a journey inside the paradoxes of the history of the Chinese in the United States, their link with local realities, the mechanisms of assimilation, appropriation and rejection, and the reconstruction of an identity – new, hybrid, globalized. 

This quest of these global-Chinese “Mythologies” as Roland Barthes depicted them will drive me from Ohio State University to schools and associative spaces, perhaps mahjong clubs and, of course, public spaces and also hospitals, maternities, cemeteries, factories, shops and restaurants.  

As the Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas defines it, parafiction designates a work at the intersection of ethnography, history, narrative, the work of memory and fiction as such. This is the exact literary mechanism that I put in place for this new project I am thrilled to start working on.