From one ‘other’ to another
On representation in stories. Also, Deutschland, here I come!
On March 18, a tweet caught my eye. A German journalist and friend had posted this:
In a small town in Saxony, it’s almost like it’s 1933 again. Pogrom atmosphere. Frightening and disgusting. https://t.co/o0ts4ZuGJh
The newspaper article that the Tweet linked to documented the ongoings in a small Saxon town, Dippoldiswalde, Germany. Far-right extremists had incinerated the building of a businessman who’d been planning to sell parts of his properties to the city for migrant housing.
While the arrival of 1.1 million migrants in Germany last year resulted in a lot of civic engagement in this little town, it also inspired others — a sizable, bigger group — to campaign against asylum seekers. They organized far-right rallies and joined anti-migrant groups on Facebook. Some encouraged the general public to “beat [the migrants] to a pulp” upon sight because calling the cops “wouldn’t do nothing anyway.”
The 1,480-word-long story chronicled the ongoings in this town quite aptly — the fear and hate that the arrival of the migrants had brought about was visceral. After decades of rescinding its past, Germany found itself leaning towards the right.
While this itself is a worthwhile exploration, one thing did seem a little odd.
The story didn’t feature a single migrant voice.
The following weeks I started looking for German news coverage that featured migrant experiences. I signed up for migrant-related Google alerts. I tried to search German newspaper sites for old and new articles. I spoke to childhood friends in Frankfurt, Germany, where I grew up to listen to their impressions of what they thought a migrant is or was based on the media coverage they had been consuming.
Maybe my methodology was fraught but I struggled to find migrants featured in stories as three-dimensional human beings, portrayed in nuanced and complicated ways. In most articles, they barely spoke. In some they committed horrible crimes or assaulted each other. In others they were silent bystanders. They were given the roles of monsters or victims. Their existence changed German individuals and their lives, but they themselves seemed to lack agency. They represented an “other” observed in a sociological manner by German journalists for German audiences.
This lack of diversity of points of view is reflected in German newsrooms. According to one article in the Tagesspiegel, people of color make up 2–3 percent of journalists. But one in five Germans — roughly 15 million people or about 18.8% of the German population — have what Germans call a “migration background.”
My parents are two of them. It is their story that really compelled me to become a journalist. And it is their story that is helping me understand why I need to leave my job to try and amplify voices that are similar like theirs to other Germans.
My father came to Hannover, Germany, in 1972 at the height of the Vietnam War. He had never really spoken to my mother, Lua Nguyen Thi, before he left Saigon but they knew each other casually. He had nursed a crush on her for quite some time. Of course, he only realized how much he liked her after he had moved 9,500 kilometers away. So he decided to write her a few words. That is how they fell in love — over the course of a nine-year-long letter exchange.
He came back twice during those nine years: once to date her (they watched Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times at the cinema in Saigon; he picked her up after school). The second time, after the Northern Vietnamese took over the South, he came to marry her. She became pregnant with my brother Luan while their home country — now a postcolonial socialist republic — was trying to find its new political identity. That is when my parents decided that they needed to start a new life in Germany.
My mother arrived in Germany as a refugee. Ernst Albrecht, the governor of
Lower Saxony had announced a program that would allow for roughly 1,000 Vietnamese refugees to come to his state. My mother was resettled in Hannover, where my father had been studying.
She arrived in a refugee camp in December 1981. She remembered it being cold. It had been snowing that day. She had only seen snow in the photographs my father had sent with his letters or in movies like Dr. Zhivago. My father picked her up and thus they began a new life in Germany, finally together after 9 years of separation throughout the Vietnam war.
They spent the next couple of years living in my father’s dorm room while he was finishing his studies. The first few months, everything just frightened my mother. She stayed indoors while my father was at university and went to night classes after he had come back to the dorms to watch Luan. They would eat at the university’s cafeteria to save money.
Bit by bit things got better. My mother learned German and my father bought her a bicycle so she could get around the city. There were a lot of Germans who helped them: volunteers who taught them German, people who would give them baby clothes and food. They received money from the government for basic living expenses.
There were also people who didn’t like them. My mother remembers going to the foreigners’ registration office where office workers looked at them like they were beggars, she said. My father was told to get up from his seat on a tram once. The woman pulled out her German passport and said to him: “This seat is mine.”
Their first few years in Germany, my parents lived a life that was largely hidden from Germans or masked in a language that the Germans didn’t understand. There were a few who were patient enough to see my parents tackle, struggle with, and eventually master the punishing and cruel beast that is the German grammar. But largely, the stories of their lives took place in the communal kitchen where they fed my brother ramen noodles, or inside the dorm room where this family of three was sharing a twin-sized bed.
Now, they’ve been in Germany for more than 40 years. They live in Frankfurt where my mother runs a restaurant and where my father works as an aeronautical engineer at his own company. For decades, my parents worked seven days a week. Thanks to their hard work, their son Luan is running an NGO doing humanitarian work in Vietnam and I’m a journalist in New York. They were able to support our extended family, too.
But they recently told me that they still feel like outsiders. Other Germans don’t see them as Germans and the country they left in the 1970s and 1980s is no longer what they remembered it to be. Now they sit in the middle and don’t know where to go.
My parents’ experience can only make me wonder how some newly arrived migrants have been adjusting. 1.1 million of them arrived in Germany last year. The logistics of their lives are governed by policies and economic forces; their personal well-being by the circumstances of their assigned homes, their new neighbors and the people that happen to be part of their lives. How are they doing?
It’s been hard to find answers to this question via Google.
Today, I am leaving my full time job to follow up on this question. In a few weeks, I’m headed to Frankfurt and to Berlin to report out stories I first found during a vacation in April.
I’m not sure what will happen after this summer but what I do know is that representation matters — both in the newsroom and in the stories we tell. It’s time to put my money where my mouth is. And so I’m working with a number of American and German outlets to publish data- and documents-driven stories about migrant experiences told in a variety of media. I am also hoping to put together a number of multimedia and data journalism workshops for diverse journalists in Germany, too.
Nuance is hard and it’s getting harder as we find ourselves consuming news through the one-sided timelines curated by algorithms. Keeping your attention span is even harder.
But let me try to fight for that little bit of time you have every day to make sure you get to know this new crop of future Germans.
Further reading
What to do when your workplace is too white by Stephanie Foo
Diversify journalism with me
Building diverse newsrooms
From Nieman Reports: Newsrooms find a diverse masthead means better coverage and new audiences
Parts of this essay — the bits about my mother — will be edited and published in An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees, a book and an illustration exhibition on the history of migration in Europe, designed for migrants and refugees by Magnum Photos and Cortona On The Move. Thanks to my mom and dad for making me try harder every day. Feel free to get in touch: info@lamivo.com
