The other Le?Pen

I had the chance to spend time with RADII , a multi-brand media platform of artists, writers, and creators dedicated to providing a window into the Asian youth cultures.

In that video interview released this week, Richard Lai was mainly interested about the reasons why I moved to Shenzhen 17 years ago, digging into my childhood and why I ended up spending most of my adult life in Shenzhen and why I have been involved in the mobile phone / IoT industry thanks to a father who worked at France Telecom.

In that retrospective, I am sharing for the very first time a personal note about my paternal grandfather?—?Robert Le Pen.

The singularity of my grandfather is that he fought WWII in the Far East as a French navy sailor in what was Indochina at the time.

Robert was born in 1920 in Morbihan Brittany, and enrolled in the French navy at the age of 17.?

When you live abroad, the first legitimate question that comes from the autochthone is “where are you from?” and in my case, it’s usually followed by “are you related to Jean-Marie / Marine Le Pen?” which I also encounter in my homeland country France for obvious reasons.

The answer is "France and not directly" but I usually follow this up with that joke “even though from Adam & Eve, I am closer to Jean-Marie than you ??”

That said, Robert and Jean-Marie were distant cousins. My grandfather passed away when I was 18 and when he was on his death bed, I decided to write back his war memoirs he initially wrote on a typewriter in the early 80’s so I could digitalize it on a floppy disk at that time, I offered that new printed version on Christmas eve to my grandmother a year after and last year, I inherited back that book after she passed away.

Long story short, I decided it was time to rewrite it again this Summer with the help of war historian, David Maurizot, that my journalist friend Didier Pujol introduced and this time, I made a real book out of it which I offered to my family members few weeks ago during Christmas.

His autobiography recounts his stay in the Far East from 1939 to 1946. He does not forget his companions, particularly his many comrades who lived by his side during the good times, but also, alas, in the dark days. In his war memoir, he only recount a small part of the life of a crew aboard a warship and the sometimes eventful shore leave of the sailors.

Robert Le Pen spent over six months as a prisoner of the Japanese and was freed on 12 September 1945 exactly ten days after the surrender of the Empire of Japan in World War II was formally signed by Emperor Hirohito on 2 September 1945, ending the war.

On April 1, 1946, at nine o’clock, “LE SéNéGALAIS” casts off. He stands on the deck, taking one last look at the city of Saigon, which soon fades on the horizon. It is now just a memory.

A new life begins…