My China: Aloÿse De La Faye

As deputy to the Cultural Attachee, fashion stylist and local musician, Aloÿse De La Faye lives on the flow of Franco-Sino culture. She tells My China of her early struggles, and her future aspirations in preserving what she feels is a vital link to Asia’s tribal past.

 

Originally, I really didn’t want to come to China. I graduated in Burmese as an interpreter in the Eastern languages school of Paris. I thought, if I am a Burmese interpreter, I’ll never have to work in an office. After working in Burma for a year with The Red Cross, political restrictions were tightened, and I was forced to return. I studied music instead and became a musician, performing cabaret in Paris. The girls around me were career dancers, but I didn’t feel like I could spend my life doing it. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my conervative family – I felt increasingly frustrated in France.

Someone suggested I do an internship in foreign affairs. I thought, I am 27, what am I going to do an internship for? But I applied for two, one in Thailand and one in Beijing. I looked closer and found that I might be working on the French cultural fair in China. It’s very big, I mean I really big. I wrote a letter: “I’m your girl, I need it, I don’t speak Chinese but I speak Burmese and I am sure that I can be fluent in Chinese within one year. You won’t regret it. I’m your girl.” I got the position.

I arrived in 2008. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t who I was. I had just got off a plane full of football fans, drunk and ready for Olympic football. I was taken direct to the embassy and I slept on the sofa in the entrance for five hours. In some ways I was a refugee, fleeing from my problems, washed up on a beach, exhausted. Looking back, I was saving myself, literally. In French, to fly away and to save yourself is literally the same word – sauvée.

 

At the end of my internship, I was offered a formal position, and, after seven years I became the deputy of the cultural attache. China is not repressive for a foreigner. Sometimes people come here with misperceptions, or are still finding their way, and they come up against walls, or can feel taken advantage of, but this is natural in growing up, and this human resistance is misinterpreted as cultural.