There is a part of Paris that does not look like Paris.
You step out of the metro at Place d’Italie, walk south down Avenue de Choisy for ten minutes, and the city changes. The Haussmann buildings stop. The wide boulevards narrow. The roofs disappear. In their place: high-rises. Concrete towers in the thirty-storey range, set back from the street behind raised plazas, named for Olympic cities — Tokyo, Helsinki, Mexico, Sapporo, Athens — a Cold-War-era monument to the idea that the world could meet on the same field, eventually filled by refugees from countries the field had not yet accepted. The pedestrian level is on a deck two storeys above the road, in the way that pedestrian levels are arranged in Hong Kong and Singapore. The light is harder here than in the rest of Paris. The air smells different. This is not Paris in any version of Paris a postcard has bothered to record. It is Paris as the city tried to be in 1970, and failed.
The Olympiades complex was designed by an architect named Michel Holley in the late 1960s, the same generation of French planners who had spent the 1950s reading Le Corbusier and watching Singapore and Hong Kong build the vertical cities of the postwar future. The pitch was that Paris had to modernise — that the Haussmann city, the medieval city underneath it, the river it sat on, would be left behind by the rest of the world if Paris did not rebuild itself in the air. A vertical Paris. A Paris of platforms and walkways and views. The model was, more or less explicitly, Hong Kong.
Parisians, on being shown the result, declined.
The apartments did not sell. The towers stood half-empty through the mid-1970s, with the deck-level shops shuttered and the elevators running for the few residents who had moved in — most of them ex-civil-servants who had bought off-plan and were now quietly reconsidering. The complex was an architectural success on paper and a commercial failure on the ground. The future of Paris that Paris had been promised did not arrive. The future, for several years, sat empty.
And then, between 1975 and 1980, several hundred thousand refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos arrived in France. A substantial number of them were ethnic Chinese — Chiu Chow, Cantonese, Teochew — who had been forced out by the fall of Saigon and the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the long slow Cambodian disaster. They needed housing. Paris had a complex of empty modernist towers in the 13th that nobody else wanted. The match was made.
The first family-run supermarket in the neighbourhood, Tang Frères, opened in 1976 in a former parking garage on Avenue d’Ivry. The Tang brothers were Chinese-Cambodian refugees from Phnom Penh who had been in the rice trade in Cambodia, and who started in Paris by importing a single container of jasmine rice from Thailand. The supermarket is still there. It is now the largest Asian retailer in Europe by sales. The Tang family is, by most plausible estimates, one of the wealthier families in France. Their first warehouse was, until the rice arrived, the basement of a building the previous French tenants had abandoned for being too modernist.
By 1985, the Olympiades and the surrounding triangle between Avenue de Choisy and Avenue d’Ivry had become the largest Asian neighbourhood in Europe. It still is. The buildings the French had refused to live in turned out to look, to the new residents, almost exactly like the buildings they had grown up in. The vertical Paris nobody had wanted to live in suddenly made perfect sense to people who had spent their lives in high-rises in Saigon and Phnom Penh. The deck above the road, the elevators, the long shaded walkways — all of it was a Paris that worked, but only for a population the Paris of the time had not anticipated.
The neighbourhood today is not, strictly, Chinese. There are Cambodian kuy teav shops where the broth has been simmering since six in the morning and the herb plate beside the bowl is the size of a dinner plate. There are Vietnamese pho counters operating out of converted garages. There are Lao pastry stalls. There is at least one Teochew restaurant that has been making the same five dishes since 1982 and the same family is making them. There is a Chinese restaurant called 華都酒家 — Hua Du Jiu Jia, which means roughly China City — that sits on Avenue d’Ivry under a 1980s neon sign in a style of typography that exists nowhere else in Europe except above other Chinese restaurants. The signage looks like Hong Kong. The architecture looks like Hong Kong. The street level smells like five different countries at once.
Once a year, on the lunar new year, the city of Paris officially notices the neighbourhood. There is a parade. The mayor attends. There are dragons. There are lion dancers. The CRS — France’s riot police, in full body armour — line the parade route in the manner French riot police line every parade route, with the same expression. Senior French politicians who would not normally find their way to the 13th come for two hours and stand on a small reviewing platform and applaud the lion dances in a way that is, to anyone who has watched them applaud anything else, slightly forced. There are fireworks named after a different calendar. The Cambodian grandmothers along the route are selling pomelos at twice the usual price. For one weekend, the assembled accident is the official version of Paris. Then it goes back to being unofficial again for three hundred and sixty-three days.
And on the wall above 華都酒家, set into the white concrete two storeys up, there is a small ceramic mosaic of a steaming bowl of noodles.
This is a Space Invader piece.
Space Invader is the French street artist who has been installing tiled mosaics on the walls of Paris since 1998. He works anonymously — no public name, no public face, an entire oeuvre catalogued under the conceit that he is invading cities one wall at a time. There are now well over a thousand Invaders across Paris, more in Tokyo, dozens in Hong Kong and Bangkok and Marrakech, several even in Mongolia. He has a numbered grid system. Collectors track them on a phone app. They are, at this point, a Parisian institution, in the way that pre-modern Paris had cathedrals and modern Paris has wine bars.
The noodle bowl is one of the few he has installed that is not a video-game character. He made it specifically for the Chinatown. Steam rising off a bowl of broth, two chopsticks resting at an angle across the rim, the whole composition rendered in the same tile-pixel style he uses for every other Invader, except instead of an alien from 1978 the subject is what you can order downstairs.
Two cultures, three metres apart. The Space Invader on the upper wall — French street-art convention, 1990s, the work of an artist who has more or less defined what a Parisian wall is allowed to do for the last twenty-five years. The neon sign on the lower wall — Cantonese restaurant convention, 1980s, the kind of lettering a sign painter in Hong Kong would have signed off on the same week, with the same paint, on the same kind of building. Neither of them planned to end up next to the other. The 13th arrondissement is the place in Paris where they did.
I stood across the street one Tuesday afternoon and watched for a while. The dim sum carts came out at three. A man in his sixties wheeled a cassette player onto the pavement and started playing a recording of a guzheng. Two French teenagers arrived to photograph the Invader and walked past the restaurant underneath it without looking. A Cambodian grandmother coming out of Tang Frères with three plastic bags of pomelos asked me, in fluent French and a quiet voice, whether I was a tourist or here for the noodles. I said the noodles. She nodded. She said: the soup is good upstairs. She said it the way someone tells you the weather.
That is the thing about Paris that most travel writing misses. The city did not become itself on purpose. It is the assembled accident of everyone who has had to live in it for a hundred and fifty years and made adjustments. The Olympiades was a failed Parisian future. The Space Invader was supposed to be a joke about American video games. The restaurant is on Avenue d’Ivry because Avenue d’Ivry happens to be where the empty apartments were. The Cambodian grandmother knows the soup upstairs is good because she has lived next door for forty years. Each of those decisions was made for an entirely separate reason.
The grandchildren of the refugees who moved into the empty towers in 1976 are now in their twenties. They were born in the 13th. Their accent is pure Parisian. Their Cantonese is fluent. They walk past the Space Invader on their way to the métro every morning. They have never noticed it. The accident has finished becoming the city.
The result is one of the more accidentally beautiful corners of Paris. The only thing that connects any of it — the noodle bowl, the neon sign, the soup upstairs, the grandmother, the grandchildren who walk past her, the failed future, the very real present — is the wall of one building in the 13th arrondissement, three metres of white concrete, and the patient willingness of a city to be wrong, for forty years, about what it was supposed to look like.