May Ngo (MN): Can you tell me how you first got interested in this project? And what the project is?
Jean Alex Quach (JAQ): For my Master’s thesis, I did a documentary series of five video portraits of people from the Cambodian diaspora in France and I asked each of them to cook a recipe and tell me the story behind it. Because it was not easy for me and for the people I interviewed to talk about exile and their personal stories, I decided to use food as a medium to talk and share about life experiences. This was a path to talk about intimate stories without directly confronting it.
Using food was a way for me to have access to the story, to these stories. In one of the videos that I did with my mum, she was talking to me about how her grandmother was making rice flour at home during the war—how It was a lot of labour. It was very interesting, because I thought myself: Oh, my mum has this knowledge, but she doesn’t use it in Paris because we live in a different context where she can just go outside and buy rice flour. This knowledge is part of our history, how could we reactivate this knowledge that my mum brought from Cambodia?
From there I started my diploma design project. I started to do some research about rice and its origin and history and in doing some research, I found by chance, a video on YouTube showing that we actually produce rice in France—in Camargue. It’s a very specific region in France where rice is able to grow and when I dug a bit into its history, I learned that it was linked to France’s colonial past. Starting from that, I wanted to explore this story. I wanted to anchor my project to a wider context, the wider context of French colonialism.
MN: Can you tell me more about this history of rice production in Camargue?
JAQ: Rice production in the Camargue region dated back to the 16th century, but at the time it was only used as feed for animals. It was only during the Second World War that rice production really increased and was produced for human consumption, because during the Second World War, during the German occupation in France, shipping lines were cut so no boats could arrive and there was a food shortage.
At the time, there were about 20,000 Indochinese workers who were there, initially working in the weapons factories in France during the Second World War. They were stuck in France, because there wasn’t a way for them to go back to their country. And so, about 500 of them were used, let’s say, to try rice production. And it was very successful. After the war, the rice production industry really increased up until the 60s.
MN: With the workers, did come over voluntarily to work in those weapons factories initially? Were they paid? What countries did they come from?
JAQ: Initially, they came from what we now call Vietnam, at the time it was called Cochinchina, and there were also about a hundred of them from Cambodia. Initially, colonial France framed it as asking people in the colonies to help France, but only 10 or 20 percent of them came voluntarily. They were people who could speak French, who were intellectuals. And the other 80 percent were forced to come. France officials went to the villages and they said to the families that the eldest son should come with them to work in the factories in France.
So, I don’t know if we can say that it was forced labour because they were still paid. They were paid in two ways. Firstly, they were directly paid by the French government; but secondly, they would only get their money when they went back to their country. But some of them never got the money they should have. Moreover, the treatment and living conditions once they came to France were not always good and some of them even died here.
I just looked up the definition of forced labour. And it is, any context where individuals are compelled against their will to work or provide services using force or coercion. So, it doesn’t matter whether they received money or not for their services. It’s about the fact that it’s against their will. Also in this case, they didn’t often get paid properly or completely. So yeah, it was a kind of forced labour, because some of them got stuck here when France was occupied by the Germans. They should have gone back to Vietnam because it was the end of their contract but what happened was that the French government didn’t care, so they were stuck. The French government didn’t know what to do with them, and there was a food shortage, so they sent some of these workers to do agricultural work, with five hundred of them ending up in Camargue.
And most of them didn’t stay in the region afterwards, some went back to Vietnam, some moved to other places in France. That’s why I was surprised to not find many descendants of these Indochinese workers when I went to Camargue.
This history is not so well-known in France, not just in this instance, but all the forced labour imposed by France on other colonies, particularly during the world wars. Going in the field, and doing some interviews, I found out that there were several published books and movies that were talking about this story today in France, and that they really helped to mediatize this story. But I’m interrogating, who is telling the story and for whom? How is this colonial history of France shown in the mainstream media? Much of the time in France, and in occidental countries, white people think of themselves as “neutral.” They think that everyone can speak about everything without any consequences. But they don’t know that it’s a privilege to take the space and give their opinion on their oriented point of view, when we, children of immigrants, are struggling to have access to these stories, to talk about the topic of racism and identity. How is this fair, when we are the children of these post-colonial wars?
MN: The region still produces rice right now, what kind of rice?
JAQ: When I visited the Centre Français du riz (the French rice center), I learned that many kinds of rice are grown: like short grain, long grain or even red rice. They are trying to develop different kinds and varieties of rice with different textures and tastes. It’s like an agricultural laboratory, where they are experimenting with crossing different varieties in order to develop new kinds of rice.
MN: OK, so can you tell me more about your project with rice, I mean you have a design element to your project, can you tell me what that is and what is the approach or philosophy underpinning your design?
JAQ: For my project, I designed a family of culinary objects that allow people to discover and cook the rice of Camargue in their daily meals and at the same time to discover its history. Like I was saying to you, I was very interested in how food can be used to talk about the stories behind it.
So, for this culinary product range, I created the packaging of different kinds of rice varieties, cooking tools, recipes, and there’s also even a digital interface. They can be used both as a form of demonstration at public events like ‘rice celebration day,’ and in daily life. They allow a perpetuation of memory, to share a story that is not told enough.
What I tried to do in creating these objects was a kind of creolization because I was inspired by popular cooking items that I found in Provence and I picked some items in Southeast Asian cultures. I wanted to create an encounter between these two cultures– I wanted to create like a subculture, a new way to see rice, and not only have it stay in the past, in history. It’s a way to move forward and say, okay, we know about this story. What can we do to create something that is not hiding one part or another, but balancing these two cultures? I think of these objects as a way to create some mediation between them.
At the end of the day, what I think about is how we can use our cultural heritage to highlight our Vietnamese or Khmer or Chinese cultural heritage and to encode it in the French cultural landscape. How do we improve our vision of what French culture is? Because for me, as an immigrant child, I don’t exist in the French cultural landscape. Either there are, for instance, Cambodians coming from Cambodia, or there are white French people. For those of us who are neither of these, how can we use our background to create our own space and our own vision of French culture? That’s kind of what I tried to do with this project.
MN: Is that linked to your what you have mentioned to me before, the third cultural space?
JAQ: Yes. Because for me, being born in France with dual cultures, I’m not totally French, like white French, and I’m not totally Chinese or totally Khmer. So how can we use this third culture to create? Because sometimes, it can be a very heavy heritage to carry, and sometimes we don’t know what to do with it. That’s why the video project I did for my Master’s thesis was a first step towards thinking about this cultural heritage. And now, this graduation project about the rice really helped me to anchor it in a wider context, and say, okay, there is this part of history that we didn’t really learn at school and it’s this part of history I want to use in my design projects.
What I also found beautiful with the transmission through food is that you can always make the same recipe from your family, but it will taste difference. You know what I mean?
Because food is a way to make a culture alive. It will taste different depending on who cooks it. And that’s because culture, for me, is not something that stays still. For me, culture is something that has to move and evolve.
MN: So for you for your definition of like culture, and cultural heritage is something that is always changing and evolving. You know, a conservative idea of culture or tradition is that it stays the same, and we must defend it. But you’re actually saying it’s the opposite, and it’s so funny what you said about, you know, when you cook your mother’s recipes, it will always taste different. And that can be seen as a failure, or it can be seen as actually, that’s the whole point—that you are adding a bit of yourself, that whoever’s doing the cooking is adding a bit of themselves too. And that’s the way recipes get passed on. They evolve as they pass on. Different people kind of add to it – isn’t that what the third space is for you?
JAQ: You know, when I was doing interviews for my videos, I was asking people, what is an authentic recipe for you? And people were telling me, I just tried to remember my mom, the taste of my mom’s dishes, the taste of the food that I was eating when I was a kid. And yeah, maybe it’s kind of a goal, to recreate the taste of what we had when we were a child, but maybe it’s a goal that we can never reach, and you know, maybe we can do it our own way without forgetting about the roots of it.
Jean-Alex Quach’s Instagram page.
May Ngo is a freelance writer and editor. She received the Kill Your Darlings New Critic Award 2021 and Sydney Review of Books Juncture Fellowship 2021. She writes essays, reviews, audio drama and fiction: mayngo.net
