When Chen Yo-jung arrived for a medal-presentation ceremony at the French embassy last week, it took a little effort to stand in the right place.

A longtime diplomat, Chen has attended many medal ceremonies ("France likes to give medals," he said, chuckling at an interview early in the week). Usually he works on the perifery of the stage, helping journalists find their places for pictures and interviews.

This time, he was at the podium.

Chen, a cheery Taiwanese who found his way to an unlikely career as a French diplomat, was honored last week with the French Order of Merit. And while France may be keen on medal awards, Chen's knight-level honor is one of only two medals bestowed by the president of France.

"I never thought this would happen," says Chen, who received the award from France's Ambassador to China Sylvie Bermann on Thursday. (The embassy's legal counsel, Christine DaLuz, also received the presidential medal.)

"My story is the story of a love affair," he said that night. "Especially because I was not born French, I chose to be."

Chen, who will retire next May, got his start in the diplomatic world when he was recruited to be a translator while a graduate student in Tokyo.

"It's seems quite strange to hire a Chinese guy to translate Japanese for French people," he says. But Chen had the tools for the job, after seven years of study in Tokyo and his union with his Japanese wife, Michiko.

Over time, his role as a translator became personal as well as professional. His late father, Chen Ching-ho, used to give an annual family address in the Taiwanese dialect, pausing every few minutes so the children could translate for their respective French, American and Japanese spouses.

Now, his sisters ask Chen to pass messages to their eldest brother. ("He's now French like me, and living in Paris.") The sisters' French has gotten rusty and so has the brother's English, so they don't have a conversational language in common.

And while Chen has five languages in his repertoire - Chinese, English, French, Vietnamese and Japanese - his command of Vietnamese is not as polished as his mother expects. She's the daughter of a Vietnamese scholar, and the Vietnamese, like the Japanese, have strict rules about polite word usage.

"When I reply badly, I get scolded," Chen once told a US reporter ruefully. "She thinks I'm being insolent."

But navigating the challenges of language and culture, after all, has been his life for four decades.

Not long after Chen found himself working for French diplomats in Tokyo, he was faced with a decision. Since he planned to have a teaching career in Japan, and had a Japanese wife, should he take that country's citizenship?

He planned to do just that. But his boss and mentor Jean Pierre Brunet, France's ambassador to Tokyo, had a different idea.

Why not become a French citizen?

"It was a funny idea," Chen says he thought at the time. "I had never even been to France."

But Brunet was keen on Chen's potential future as a diplomat, and repeated the suggestion several times.

"Finally, he said to me, 'It would be a great honor for France if a talented young Chinese like you became a French citizen.' That really moved me."

Chen became French by long-distance in 1981, thanks to the support of Brunet and several French diplomats who had met and respected the young translator.

His career took him next to the foreign ministry in Paris, back to Tokyo as vice-consul and eventually to California and Singapore.

His time in the US was the biggest challenge of his career, he says, because many Americans were angry that France did not support US intervention in Iraq in 2003.

"But I came to appreciate that Americans would really have a dialogue about this. Most of the time, they didn't just call up and yell," he says. "And of course, they had a surprise when the found themselves talking a Chinese man. That really started a conversation on human terms."

You can contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.

China Daily

(China Daily 11/13/2011 page5)