Lire et vivre par empathie: Un entretien avec Clement Baloup (Reading and Living through Empathy: An Interview with Clement Baloup)

Abstract

In this interview, I provide a brief summary of Clément Baloup’s biography and the themes and aesthetic techniques predominant in his work to date. Then, Baloup and I discuss his recent graphic novel, “Viet Kieu Memoires: Taiwanese Brides,” which focuses on the women who migrate to Taiwan for marriage, and a collaboration he is currently working on. The two projects are linked, as is much of his work, in their focus on the experiences of Vietnamese diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Baloup refers to cross-border marriage migration as a “profound societal crisis,” and much of our conversation centres on the ethics of addressing such subjects in the graphic novel. Based on months of research and interspersed with ethnographic interviews conducted in Taiwan, the fictional narrative that unfolds in Baloup’s richly illustrated book strikes a delicate balance between reportage and fantasy; it also demonstrates a metaliterary recognition of the limits of the graphic novel and the novelist himself to represent and respond to the problem of cross-border marriage migration between Vietnam and Taiwan.