My family, like many in this city, has diverse roots. Dad was born in China, but at two years old he was adopted by a French couple who brought him to Paris and raised him in their culture. They named him Michel Hersant, which is also my name. Mom, on the other hand, was born near Alkmaar in the Netherlands and grew up in a Protestant household until she was nineteen. She lived two-thirds of her life here and was able to completely lose her accent. What she never let go of was her culinary ways—she loved her bread and cheese and her good pastries—and her morals. As was the custom of her hometown, she left the curtains open to show the world that we had nothing to hide. My father didn’t practice any religion. She was an actress, he, a playwright. They met in Latin America during the staging of a play he had written and in which she’d been cast as the lead. That was six years before I was born, that is, almost forty years ago. Since then they were never apart, except during the few times my mother went back to visit her country or traveled for work. Throughout my entire childhood and part of my adolescence my parents formed an indivisible block, a wall without a single crack against which it was impossible to rebel. More difficult for me than the mixing of origins and cultures was being the only child of a couple so fused together. I believe that this union was the product of the very peculiar dynamic between them. Despite the love my grandparents showed my father, there was still something orphan-like about him. To him, his wife was another fake mother who was growing him, in his professional life as much as his love life, in a psychological uterus from which he’d never be expelled. Building this house in Montreuil had been her initiative, and it was her masonry skills, typical of Dutch women, that kept it standing for years. I’d always assumed they’d grow old together, in love: he increasingly Asian, gently watering the young plants in his garden; she baking pastries in her checkered apron like the plump little old women in fairy tales. However, there was a moment that cast doubt over all my assumptions. I, who had been intently observing them for seventeen years, started noticing in them alarming changes. Movements in the lives of human beings, according to an eminent Chinese oracle, begin below the surface, and therefore their origins are difficult to place in time. So I can’t say exactly when the signs of discontent first appeared in my father’s behavior. Nor do I know if it had always been there, dormant inside him, or if my mother and I, external catalysts, had caused it. What I can say is that as he aged he began to show an interest in his Asian roots that he’d never had before, a kind of personal and secret quest that he didn’t want to share with us.