Paris treizième

It is daytime, and I am walking along the grand Avenue d’Ivry toward the metro station Olympiades in Paris, 13th arrondissement. For over a century, this section of the capital—beginning from the roundabout Place d’Italie, extending up the grand Avenue d’Italie and Avenue de Choisy, bordered by the Avenue d’Ivry and the ringed Périphérique—has been named the Quartier Chinois, or “Chinese Quarter.” The streets are abuzz with dialects of Cantonese, Teochew, Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Thai. Populations of Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian origin run most of the local stores and have children in France who stay and reside in the same quarter, along with the métissed (mixed) Chinese from French Polynesia, Guiana, and New Caledonia. The influence of the Quartier Chinois also extends to the south toward Ivry-sur-Seine, where many live in the brutalist Étoiles d’Ivry building designed by Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet; and Vitry-sur-Seine, known to French voters as part of the historical “banlieue rouge” for electing communist mayors.

This is one image of what it is like to be Asian in France. Here, one is not asked where one is from; elsewhere—at the supermarket, post office, bar—one is often designated origine asiatique. In France, this term (like noir, for being in any way Black) is a catch-all for having or appearing to have any East Asian ancestors and could evoke a host of associations: Indochinese, tourist, student, sex worker, restaurant worker, communist, dissident.

From the mairie (town hall) of the 13th and the bus stop connecting to Les Gobelins, I pass the modern shopping center d’Italie Deux, KFC, and nondescript-looking bistros. Beside Hotel Neptune, sitting on the Rue Godefroy, tourists photograph the placard dedicated to Zhou Enlai, who stayed there between 1922 and 1924; Avenue d’Italie and Avenue de Choisy run from this roundabout toward the ring of Paris, where flower shops and Monoprixs gradually turn into Laotian- and Vietnamese-run primeurs (produce vendors) selling watermelon, coing, and rambutan; Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai restaurants; an Exo Store; and Tang Frères, a French Asian supermarket, founded by Sino-Laotian immigrants in the 1970s, which sells a mix of Indochinese and vaguely West Indian foods to take away (nems, samoussa aux legumes, accras de morue). There are two major public libraries specializing in Asian languages next to the metro stop Olympiades: the INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) and the Médiathèque Jean-Pierre Melville.

Every February, a parade takes place for the Lunar New Year, celebrated by Sinophone people of Southeast Asian origin around the world. Today, Asians pass sub-Saharan Africans on the streets, coming from the state-run foyers (temporary residences), the foyer Auriol, quai de la Gare, and foyer Chevaleret.

Map of Chinese settlements in Paris from 1976 (Chinese Vietnamese “boat people,” colored orange) to 2001 and onward, purple.

Chinese Immigration

France now has slightly over 100,000 immigrants of Chinese origin, according to the INED (National Institute for Demography). Moreover, Chinese immigrants are one of the largest and growing “ethnic” groups in contemporary France, often running the tabacs (local convenience stores selling cigarettes) previously owned by Portuguese and North Africans.

The oldest Chinese community settled not in what would become the Chinese Quarter but in the Arts et Métiers district in the 3rd arrondissement. During the first decade of the 20th century, the first family arrived on the corner of rue Volta and rue au Maire to work in the leather goods trade. Similar artisanal activities continued until the 1990s, then were replaced by commercial enterprises; meanwhile, the wealthier and better integrated Japanese, who came to Paris to open specialty shops during the postwar Japanese economic boom of the 1970s, were based in Rue Saint-Anne. During World War I, a total of about 140,000 Chinese laborers (the Chinese Labor Corps) served on the Western Front for the United Kingdom and for France in the country’s northern region of Noyelles-sur-Mer. Those who continued working in France after the war then settled in the 12th arrondissement, where a smaller and more industrial Chinatown, not the current Chinese Quarter, also formed around the Gare de Lyon.

After World War I, another major wave of Chinese immigrated to France thanks to the Mouvement Travail-Études (Work-Study Movement), a series of government-backed programs that brought Chinese students to France and Belgium to work as a way to pay for their education in French culture and Western science, and included future CCP leaders Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. The mass arrival of these students precipitated the creation of two important institutions that still stand. First is the Franco-Chinese Institute of Lyon, created in 1921 to prepare Chinese students for entry into the French academic system, and still dedicated to fostering ties between China and France. Second is the Musée historique de l’Amitié franco-chinoise in Montargis, about an hour by train from the south of Paris. From 1912 until 1927, some 300 Chinese students—male and female—stayed there to learn French Marxism, even while “sweating and working in factories.” These Chinese migrants’ study sharply contrasted with the experience of their counterparts in the US, who were influenced by the philosophy of “worshiping money” (baijin zhuyi) and wanted to build a “capitalist” China on the American model when they returned. Among the students during the Work-Study years, several Chinese leaders organized protests against working conditions and racism and were deported for their troubles. Still, Deng Xiaoping remembered his time as one of the 300 at the Musée fondly, as he found the organizing tactics to be useful after returning to China.

Among this generation of migrants, a number were artists, coming on grants to study French and European painting techniques. Some even achieved commercial success and were in some cases naturalized as and married to French. These include the “three musketeers” of East Asian abstract expressionist art, coveted by major European auction houses and held by the Musée Cernuschi and Musée National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, the two major French collections of Asian art: Chu Teh-Chun (1920, Anhui Province, China–2014, Paris), Wu Guanzhong (1919, Jiangsu Province, China–2010, Beijing), and Zao Wou-Ki (1920, Beijing, China–2013, Nyon, Switzerland).

Most, however, did not make it to the top rungs of intellectual and artistic society in either their adopted country or their land of origin. In addition, the bulk of immigrants classified as “Chinese” in France were not Chinese at all; rather, they were Southeast Asians repatriated after the decolonization of Indochina. This wave of mass Asian immigration began in the mid-1970s, with refugees fleeing the political situation in the region: wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, followed by the rise to power of the communists in these three countries resulting from US intervention in Vietnam. Arriving in Paris, the refugees settled mainly in projects designed to house many people and equally. The lives of these “Chinese,” who nonetheless played a role in France during the time of decolonization, are the least documented.

Students, Dissidents, and Intellectuals

Wherever they came from across Asia, working class, professional, and family expatriés settled in Paris’s 13th arrondissement; Asian students, meanwhile, flocked to the 6th arrondissement. That was because foreign students had an incentive to reside near the universities where they studied. But it was also due to the abundance of cheap and uncomfortable real estate in the quarter, where wealthier landlords in Haussmannian buildings rented their spare attic flats, called chambres de bonne after the in-house maids who lived there to service the bourgeoisie in lower stories in an earlier century.

During the decades-long civil war and the American intervention in Vietnam, more than 20,000 Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese (including Chinese Vietnamese) students selected France for their studies. The temporary settlement of these people waiting for the end of the war became permanent in 1975, after the communists took power, and after Indochina as a whole experienced regime change, political turmoil, and economic upheaval. Students immigrating for these reasons resided in the Maison de l’Indochine, renamed Maison des étudiants de l’Asie du Sud-Est in 1972. This was one of the campus residences of the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, a university housing project constructed in the interwar period designed to host international students. They also lived in a foyer dedicated to Vietnamese students at 80 de la rue Monge in the Latin Quarter, steps away from another famous foyer of Lebanese students at 15 rue d’Ulm.

On a promenade in the Latin Quarter, situated on the Left Bank of the Seine and “heart” of the city, we see evidence of Asian students’ living quarters and intellectual endeavors among other students, many known for dissident activism (major associations were the North African Star [ENA], National Liberation Front [FLN], Arab Workers Movement [MTA], and Association Générale d’Étudiants Indochinois [AGEI], alongside independent activists from Senegal, China by way of Vietnam, North Africa, and Latin America). Many former foyers still house students with refugee status in France, while some dirigeants (leaders) are commemorated in the names of small streets changed in recent efforts to recognize African war heroes, on plaques, and on posters advertising missing persons and strikes among today’s student activists.

Life in the 5th, bordering the 6th, was conveniently fluid between the student quarters situated in typically dense alleyways and bookshops serving as gathering spaces and publishing houses. In the foyers, rooftop flats, and specialized bookstores, foreign students and dissident intellectuals collided since they could walk from home to school to bookshops and cafés. Known as the home of classical Parisian faculties, particularly the University of Paris Sorbonne before the famous “scission” of the faculty in 1968, the neighborhood was flanked by the quais of the used booksellers selling used editions of Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), Gallimard, and social sciences books; universities; student foyers and apartments; cultural centers; specialized restaurants and food stores; and specialized and antiquarian French and foreign language bookshops. These establishments included, famously, Shakespeare and Company, the philosophy bookstore J. Vrin, the orientalists along Gay-Lussac, the more recently established Portuguese Brazilian Librairie Lusophone, and Les Éditeurs Réunis, a bookshop and publishing house specializing in Russian and Eastern European materials, run by a Lithuanian Jew. Among them, two shops were sympathetic to and involved in the lives of the (Indo)Chinese and dissidents: You Feng and the Librairie Le Phénix.

Opened in 1976, Librairie You Feng was founded by Pan Lihui, a person of Chinese descent born in Chaozhou (province of Guangdong) who immigrated to Cambodia and then to France at the age of 16 for his studies at the French Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO). Lihui is renowned in French sinological circles, and was knighted as a chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (like the other Franco-Chinese household name anecdotally a friend of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, born in Nanchang, China, and naturalized French: François Cheng). But at the beginning, even the act of importing books from China was arduous. Lihui remembers, “Nous allions tous les jours à Orly chercher des journaux et des magazines envoyés de Hongkong, comme Le Quotidien du Peuple, le Ta Kung Pao (L’Impartial), le Wen Hui Bao, etc. Ils arrivaient avec 2 ou 3 jours de retard. Les livres, eux, se vendaient peu. Nous ne gagnions que 200 francs (30 euros) par jour, ce qui était insuffisant pour couvrir nos frais.” (We went to Orly every day to pick up newspapers and magazines sent from Hong Kong, such as Le Quotidien du Peuple, Ta Kung Pao [L’Impartial], Wen Hui Bao, etc. They arrived two or three days late. Books, however, sold poorly. We earned only 200 francs [30 euros] per day, which was not enough to cover our expenses.)

Soon, though, the Librairie You Feng had two different branches: one on 45 rue Monsieur le Prince in the 6th, focused more on scholarly books of interest to a university audience; the other, at 66 rue Baudricourt in the 13th, focused on spirituality, writing, and practices for the local audience, stocked with medicinal treatises, literature, and works on sinology, as well as copies of Mao’s “Little Red Book” and contemporary publications of the CCP-aligned Foreign Languages Press in China. From early days, at the location in the 6th, Chinese students gathered to read publications from abroad, to speak in their mother tongue, and to obtain news from home, sitting on stools and drinking tea while the French university students marched to protest along the Sorbonne. Select intellectuals of Asian origin, including Chinese people born in Southeast Asia, who succeeded in becoming French universitaires, relate being solicited to protest by their French counterparts while studying at the public research library in the Pompidou during May 1968, when French students demonstrated in Paris with images of Mao, chronicled by Jean-Luc Godard’s film La Chinoise (1967).

Librairie You Feng. Photograph by Melanie Shi.

The other “Chinese” bookstore was Librairie Le Phénix, at 72 boulevard de Sébastopol in the 3rd arrondissement, a more commercial area flanked by the traffic around Châtelet. Like Librairie You Feng, Librairie Le Phénix drew both Chinese students and French interested in Chinese communism (though was perhaps more frequented by the French). It was founded by the French PCF activist Régis Bergeron, a French teacher in China and an advisor to foreign language publishers in Beijing. Once the Cultural Revolution began, Bergeron reportedly carried stacks of Chairman Mao’s selected works, with abundant copies of the “Little Red Book” translated into dozens of languages.

In 1989, Librairie Le Phénix hosted protests against the crackdown on students’ occupation of Tiananmen Square. But in 2015, the shop was purchased outright by the People’s Republic of China. For years, the PRC—inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the Paris Commune—consistently sent envoys from the Ministry of Foreign Relations, bringing books, disks, opera, and sometimes outright propaganda to Europe as a part of a cultural diplomacy effort to prove the success of revolution in China. Today, the Librairie Le Phénix continues to operate as a bookshop specializing in “Asian material.”

Restaurants

When arriving in France, those immigrants who were not artists or leftist activists made their living via food services. Vietnamese immigrants often served as cooks for French families. Another option was to open a specialty restaurant. The first Chinese restaurant, L’Empire Celeste, opened in 1912 and is still in business in the Latin Quarter at 5, rue Royer-Collard. By 1939, according to Michelin, there were five classic Chinese restaurants in Paris that could have been Chinese or Indochinese—the Chantang, the Chou Chen, the Lotus, the Pékin, and the Shang-Haï—all located in the immediate vicinity of the Sorbonne.

The pay for a cook was not high. Yet because the cuisine served was inexpensive, these restaurants also became important spaces of congregation for students. Reflects Nguyen-Tu Hung, a Vietnamese-born writer in Paris, “Dans la rue M. le Prince, existait également un restaurant Chinois, peut-être le meilleur restaurant chinois du Quartier Latin, le Dragon d’Or ou Kim Long. Le prix y était un peu cher, mais on y mangeait de bons plats chinois. Quand on venait en groupe on pouvait se partager un bon plat de Dorade grillée à la sauce cantonaise à un prix abordable.” (Along M. le Prince Street, there was also a Chinese restaurant, perhaps the best Chinese restaurant in the Latin Quarter, the Dragon d’Or or Kim Long. The prices were a bit expensive, but we ate good Chinese food there. When we came in a group, we could share a good dish of grilled sea bream with Cantonese sauce at an affordable price.)

Others share similar recollections. For the Chinese expatriate writer and aesthetic philosopher Zhu Guangqian (1897–1986), who spent time living in Paris and in Edinburgh, these Chinese restaurants serving cuisine du pays were so popular among the Chinese that they served as barriers to social integration; hence the Latin Quarter was its own Chinese Quarter: “Very few students manage to merge into [French] society and see it from the inside. In fact, apart from a few comments on the weather exchanged with their landlord, they rarely have any social interaction [with the French]. The Quartier Latin in Paris is almost a Chinese world, where people eat Chinese food, meet other Chinese, and talk Chinese all day long” (342–43). Others suggest that the same restaurants were frequented by other students, even militants from Latin America dispersed throughout the city, who liked to try new foods: according to the Peruvian Sorbonne student Armando Bazán, they were “attended less by the Europeanizing Chinese than by South Americans and French who love the exotic,” as well as Africans and Antilleans who may have known Chinese cuisine by way of Hmong and Laotian immigration to Guiana and the French departments of Outre-Mer. Specialized cuisines were thus a means for immigrants to make a living as well as for students, potentially of all origins, to meet.

Restaurants serving other types of Asian cuisine—Afghani, Tibetan—like Kootchi in the 5th arrondissement, and Lhassa, amid a row of Tibetan restaurants on the Montagne Sainte Geneviève—were opened and operated respectively by immigrants from Afghanistan and Tibet who came to France as refugees beginning in the 1960s and did not integrate with the Chinese. Nonetheless, Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants achieved the most commercial success. Following the explosion of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s coinciding with the wave of immigration from former Indochina, they had to expand outside the Latin Quarter to the financial and commercial arrondissements, like the 11th, 12th, and 15th, which is why, in addition to a boulangerie, tabac, post office, and grocery store, there is a Chinese restaurant or traiteur on almost every block of modern Paris.

Lhassa, 13 rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève 75005. Photograph by Melanie Shi.

Empire Celeste, 5 rue Royer-Collard, Paris 75005. Photograph by Melanie Shi.

Ton Hon, 17 rue Royer-Collard, Paris 75005. Photograph by Melanie Shi.

French Theory

The recollections of French theorists attest to the confusion about these immigrants, their lives, where they were from, and whether their lives were comprehensible to the French, despite the fact that their culture was an obvious source of inspiration. How many restaurants were there? And what type of Chinese restaurant were they referring to, Indochinese (a typical Parisian traiteur, serving riz cantonnais, loc lac, and pho alongside nems and bites to take away), Japanese but owned by a Chinese, or Chinese Chinese?

The Chinese restaurants appear in the memories of the generation of the 1960s, even if their names are forgotten. Roland Barthes, who gave his seminars at the Collège de France, was famously interested by the semiology of Japanese food, which he found to be the source of a primordial and sensual “fineness” in L’Empire des Signes (presumably he tasted this cuisine during his multiple trips to Japan, as the Japanese restaurants in Paris were and are largely not actually Japanese). Julia Kristeva also ended up preparing Bulgarian plates with “champignons chinois.”

From the 1960s until today, the typical “Asian” restaurant in France has offered the following plates: pâtés impériaux (nems), lôc lac, pho, pâte impériale, canard laqué, potage pékinois, riz cantonnais. The latter, not actually a dish consumed in China’s Guangdong province, was an invention purportedly introduced to France by Vietnamese immigrants.

In France, the term “origine asiatique” is a catch-all for having or appearing to have any East Asian ancestors and could evoke a host of associations: Indochinese, tourist, student, sex worker, restaurant worker, communist, dissident.

Other thinkers from this generation described Chinese restaurants as well as things that were Chinese situated specifically in Paris. We know by way of Elisabeth Roudinesco, the Romanian-born psychoanalyst, that the École normale supérieure professor Louis Althusser liked Chinese cuisine—“Je me souviens fort bien de la publication de Glas en 1974. L’ouvrage était surprenant, complexe, déroutant et Louis Althusser l’avait soigneusement déposé sur la table basse de la pièce où il recevait ses visiteurs. Un jour que je venais à l’École, pour aller ensuite déjeuner avec lui dans un restaurant chinois qu’il aimait particulièrement, je me mis à lire Glas, livre à deux voix et à deux mains: deux colonnes, l’une consacrée à Jean Genet et l’autre à Hegel. Le savoir absolu d’une part, entre dialectique de la raison et hommage à Antigone, sur fond de déconstruction généalogique de toutes les ‘saintes familles.’” (I remember very well the publication of Glas in 1974. The work was surprising, complex, disconcerting, and Louis Althusser had carefully placed it on the coffee table in the room where he received his visitors. One day when I came to the École, to go and have lunch with him in a Chinese restaurant that he particularly liked, I started to read Glas, a book in two voices and two hands: two columns, one devoted to Jean Genet and the other to Hegel. Absolute knowledge on the one hand, between dialectic of reason and homage to Antigone, against a backdrop of genealogical deconstruction of all the “holy families.”)

Jacques Derrida, who was the roommate of the sinologist and Marxist historian Lucien Bianco while they studied together at the École normale supérieure, also evokes Chinese cantines. In the preface to Bianco’s Aux Origines de la Chine Contemporaine, an economic history of China, he recalls discussing the difficulty of learning the Chinese language with Bianco in Chinese restaurants, in both Paris and Prague: “Nous sommes, je le rappelle, en 1953–1954, bien avant la vague maoïste qui déferlera vers la fin des années 1960. Mais j’ai du mal à comprendre où il puisera, lui, les forces nécessaires. Les miennes me paraissent nulles en comparaison, je démissionne d’avance. Mais comment fera-t-il, me dis-je, lui, pour s’approprier cette culture, et d’abord pour apprendre cette langue, à la parler et à l’écrire? Car il a raison, il faut bien commencer par là. Sans rien comprendre, donc, comme toujours, et en restant sur place, je ‘suis’ ses progrès, si on peut dire, de près mais de loin, jour après jour. Il travaille tout près, sur la table à côté, et je me rappelle encore mon émerveillement quand je l’entends un soir parler couramment le chinois dans un restaurant près de la gare de Lyon, puis, beaucoup plus tard, après la ‘révolution de velours,’ dans un restaurant chinois de Prague.” (This was 1953–1954, well before the Maoist wave of the end of the 1960s. But I have trouble understanding where he will find the necessary strength. Mine seems worthless in comparison, I resign in advance. But how will he, I ask myself, appropriate this culture, and first of all learn this language, to speak it and write it? Because he is correct, we have to start there. Without understanding anything, I “follow” his progress, closely but from afar, day after day. He works very close by, on the table next to him, and I recall my wonder when I heard him speaking Chinese fluently one evening in a restaurant near the Gare de Lyon, and then, much later, after the Velvet Revolution, in a Chinese restaurant in Prague.) Lacan, whose preferred restaurant was actually the French bistro La Calèche, situated minutes from his office at 5, rue de Lille, mythologized the Chinese menu as a metaphor for the miscommunication between the analyst and analysand: “‘Eh bien! il y a cette complication—c’est là ma fable—que le menu est rédigé en chinois.’ Il poursuit: ‘Alors le premier temps, c’est de commander la traduction à la patronne. Elle traduit—pâté impérial, rouleau de printemps, et quelques autres. … la traduction ne vous en dise pas plus … vous demandiez finalement à la patronne—conseillez-moi, ce qui veut dire—qu’est-ce que je désire là-dedans, c’est à vous de le savoir.’ Voilà donc pour le premier temps de la fable, lequel nous enseigne déjà sur le paradoxe du désir.” (“Well! there is this complication—this is my fable—that the menu is written in Chinese.” He continues: “So the first step is to order the translation from the boss. She translates—nem, spring roll, and a few others. … the translation doesn’t tell you any more … you finally ask the boss—‘Advise me,’ which means—“What do I want in there? It’s up to you to find out.”’ So much for the first part of the fable, which already teaches us about the paradox of desire.)

Belleville, 20ème

Recently, Chinese immigration has concentrated in another neighborhood: the traditionally working class and mixed Parisian north district of Belleville. In 1978 a Chinese restaurant opened on rue de Belleville. Those first migrants came from the Chinese province of Zhejiang, which has no ties with French Indochina; now the newcomers are primarily from the province of Wenzhou.

Not far from the French Communist Party headquarters, one strolls past shops selling canard laqué (Peking duck), young French professional offices, African exotic shops, and North African Jewish-operated restaurants offering couscous and tajine. “Farther down again, after crossing Rue des Pyrénées, you gradually enter the Chinatown that established itself here in the 1970s and has been growing ever since,” recounts Belleville resident Eric Hazan, radical leftist sociologist and founder of the publishing company La Fabrique, who died in 2024. “It gradually thickens after Rue Jouye-Rouve (where the best and friendliest restaurant in Belleville and even beyond, Le Baratin, is located) and Rue Rébeval (where the office of La Fabrique is located). From Rue Julien-Lacroix, the main north-south axis of Belleville, everything is Asian, if not always Chinese—Thais, Vietnamese, […] Japanese, and Koreans have merged with the Chinese flood. Restaurants, food shops, mobile phone dealers, manicurists, massages, costume jewelry, hairdressers, florists—everything is Chinese except for two bakeries, a branch of the Caisse d’Épargne, and a pharmacy—where one of the pharmacists is always Chinese.” Here in Belleville, along the Faubourg Saint-Denis—subject of a series of documentaries in France in 2022, when these Chinese women became a popular media fascination—one also sees prostitutes who walk the streets alongside shoe shops, bistros, and tourists in broad daylight.

Appearing as an Asian woman in these areas of Paris—more so than in the 13th or the 6th—feels somewhat rude, and counter to the desire, as a flâneuse, to observe and not be observed by others. After all, on the streets of Paris, the eye moves toward the female figure, and particularly to one who stands out from others on the street.

Yet time passes a bit differently here, looking down upon the more historic and settled Paris Sud. The Chinese restaurants and their names look obviously different. Storefronts are made of cheap material, quickly constructed, and designed to be taken down; instead of evoking a colony or philology, many now directly reference the food that they serve, or serve food and do not have any storefronts. One also sees more actual Chinese characters, advertising for gig-based labor and studios for rent. It is comforting to be on the street here and be of no ostensible social class or importance.

Walking

The benefits of walking have been touted by prototypically French theorists like Frédéric Gros. Some benefits are physiological (all of Paris’s metro stations recommend that 30 minutes of physical exercise is essential for keeping up one’s physique). Other benefits are less tangible, since the city, particularly the 19th-century one of Paris, is a kind of physical archaeology of memory. Whether one is keen on seeing or being seen, what is interesting about walking as a mode of exploration is what one chooses to pay attention to and knows how to see.

For over a century, Asian migration—from the turn-of-the-century diaspora of the 13th arrondissement to the newer Belleville history of the Chinese and Indochinese—has unfortunately been kept out of most official histories of France and of Paris, in addition to the generally imprecise assumptions of who actually came from China. Yet this hidden history unfolds from walking in the quartiers chics and populaires/mixtes, uncovering a portrait of the lives and history of a complex and atypical immigrant group in Paris. 

Featured image by Melanie Shi