When I was very young, when I was 11, I lived in Saarland, and it’s very close to French borders. Actually, in our schools we taught German, and then French, and then English, in that order. So I traveled with my parents through Luxembourg to Paris, to these nearby regions; we see a lot of different cultures intermingling each other.
Because my father’s research subject was on the Tiananmen student protest, we also ran into a lot of people who were exiles because they demonstrated in Beijing, so they were exiled from their home. They cannot return anymore. They were just university, college students. They studied law, the physics, or the soft sciences, sociology, so they were themselves very much still learning.
I saw that people in the Saar-Lor-Lux region received them very friendly, and taught them what they need to know from the European values. We debated all the time how to democratize an oppressive regime, because obviously the massive protests did not work, so what would work? That has influenced me ever since.