June 23, 2002

The Academie Francaise, the quasi-official arbiter of the French language for France, but also a good part of the French-speaking world, has a new member, but he’s not your everyday French writer like most of the other thirty-nine members of this respected but somewhat staid four-century old institution.

After the naming of an African academician, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and of an American member, Julien Green, the Academie Francaise has chosen to include an Asian member, Francois Cheng, 73, a Chinese poet, novelist, essayist and translator, as well as specialist of Asian art. Born in China in 1929, Cheng sought political refuge in France 53 years ago, just as Mao Zedong was taking over control of the Chinese mainland and turning it into a People’s Republic.

Francois Cheng was the first to be surprised by the decision of the Academie’s fathers to open up its prestigious doors to the frail nondescript poet and translator whose first French-language book was published only in 1977 when he was 48.

That work, L’Ecriture poetique chinoise (Editions du Seuil), proved so successful it opened up the doors to the French publishing world, where Francois Cheng went on to produce an award-winning novel, Le Dit de Tianyi. Published in 1998 (Editions Albin Michel) when he was 69, tells the rather autobiographical tale of Tianyi, a man sitting atop a cultural divide, going back and forth between his biological roots in China and the culture of the West which permitted him to survive. As in the case of Francois Cheng, he was made to understand in 1954, when he planned returning home to his native Nanchang, that the door was solidly shut, and that he might very well be able to return, if ever he persisted ... thirty years later.

Which is what Francois Cheng decided not to do, choosing instead to emulate George Orwell in Down and out in Paris, and make his living in whichever way he could, washing dishes in the dank underground kitchens of a good many of Paris’ 5000 Chinese restaurants. Finally he fell upon la femme de sa vie [the woman of his life], whom he married in 1963, a union which allowed him, eight years later to acquire French citizenship.

In reacting to his nomination, all the usually tight-lipped Francois Cheng would say, in his usual pithy style, was that “I experience great joy before this generous and sympathetic gesture by the Academic Francaise towards the culture of China. It’s a gesture of sharing that crowns a half-century of passion for the French language.”

The words could also very well summarize the story of Francois Cheng’s last novel, just published by Editions Albin Michel: L’Eternite n’est pas de trop (Eternity is not too much), an historical account that also deals with culture shock, of a seventeenth century meeting between a Taoist painter and a European Jesuit, all of this against the background of the collapse of the Ming dynasty.

It’s as if Francois Cheng were making the same argument made by one of his illustrious predecessors in the Academic Francaise, Leopold Sedar Senghor, the Senegalese poet and statesman who held, and increasingly so over the years, that the only way for the great civilizations to survive — that is, if they want to — is to adopt the idea of metissage: bring in new blood, graft itself onto the world’s other great civilizations, above all not attempt to stand on one’s own — as if one civilization were greater than another — but rather, and above all, do like academicians like Senghor and Cheng and make the all-important assumption that all civilizations are great, that they are interdependent in such a way that without the others, none of them can really ever stand alone.

Writer’s email: PaulMichaud@compuserve.com

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