Paris, the Shanghai of the West
As the hype piled up about Shanghai being the Manhattan of the East, the quintessential 21st century city; while Singaporeans flock there in droves to "tap the market"; while every third kid at one of the tonier American colleges is mugging Chinese characters, I decided that I would hole myself up in the has-been citadel of culture of a crumbling Europe, the museum-city a century past its prime - Paris.
One of my Chinese professors told me that when she went to grad school in Chinese back in the 80s, it looked like she was taking the nobler route, immersing herself in the dusty heritage of an ancient civilisation then suffering the fallout of a failed exercise in radical social reform; whereas her East Asian Studies contemporaries studying Japanese were seen as dirty businessmen looking to "engage" Japan and thereby get their grubby hands on a prime piece of Bubble Tokyo. Now the situation is the exact opposite, of course: students of China now all look like the investor-opportunist sort who can't wait to sink the roots of their shiny new skyscraper HQ in Pudong, whereas Japanese scholars are silently imbibing the culture, in spite of grim economics, as Tokyo goes the way of a moribund West Europe.
So while devoted Francophiles will bemoan the passing of some mythic Jazz Age Paris, or American Expat Paris, or Cubist Surrealist Paris; while Paris falls out of favor because it looks increasingly dowdy (especially in relation to a Cool-Britannia London), shouldn't it be that it gains in cultural cred because it's stagnating? You certainly don't go to do business in Paris; you couldn't care less how the Bourse is doing! If you go to Paris, it has to be because you want to drink in that delicious cocktail of decay; to recover the "authentic"; where crass commerce counts for less, and witty banter more; where life is distilled into an espresso cup, written in the crumbs that fall from your crusty baguette. To go to Paris when it is no longer fashionable, to visit a great city when it is slightly out of phase - that's when the air is heavier with myth and memory. This is just an extension of that adage about the pleasures of anticipation, the disappointment of fulfillment, and, finally, the further pleasures of reminiscence. To walk Paris in 2005 is something like time travel armed with a stack of postcards or old photographs: where have these images gone? And why do you cling to them more resolutely - "no, no, this is the real Paris" - when you have a completely different city in front of you?
2
With all that talk about global cities nowadays, four favorites always seem to make the list: New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. You know how they write it up in style magazines or couture articles or architecture journals: "this swanky new watering hole in downtown Guangzhou could make you believe you were in St. Germain," "taking a cue from hip London gastropubs, this newcomer to the Chiang Mai dining scene..." It's a magic invocation, to even look like you've borrowed a signature aesthetic or intangible spirit from the Big Four. Of the four, though, I don't think Tokyo deserves to be there - if only because the "global" bit is problematic. If we're talking about expat numbers or accessibility to foreigners, Hong Kong or even Singapore might be a better choice. And that's only if we force ourselves to pick an Asian candidate. LA's diversity outshines any Asian city, ditto San Francisco, although it's more a global village than a global city. New York and London are probably unshakeable choices. And then there's Paris. First of all, I think it definitely helps to be a declining colonial force. As the messy processes of post-colonialism kick in, suddenly there's this huge influx of subjects from your former possessions; people you once enslaved and subjugated return with a vengeance, intent on filling jobs you no longer want to do yourself, flooding your markets with cheaper goods that they made themselves, perhaps. There you go, instant diversity, a London full of Indians, Kenyans, Jamaicans. Paris overrun by Vietnamese, Algerians and Senegalese. Everywhere you turn there's a curry house, or a sheesha bar, or a banh mi counter.
There seem to be different models of globalism-in-the-city, though. My sense is that if in New York you are a third-generation Shanghainese immigrant whose grandparents came in the 50s, that is your identity. Let's look at the Chinatowns, I think their situation reflects this. In Manhattan it's that downtown warrened mess around Spring St et al; in London it's that two-street-thoroughfare plus several alleys (really small, this one) just off of Covent Garden and Theatreland. But it's in Paris where you'll find the leafiest, airiest, most pleasant Chinatown of all - although it really is more of an Overseas Chinese Town - but more on that later. Paris in fact has not one but two (and some would say three) Chinatowns. The biggest one is in the 13eme, a roughly fifteen-minute walk south of the Latin Quarter, a vague triangle shape bound by the Avenues de Choisy and d'Italie, and in the south by Boulevard Massena. Despite the signs changing language once you cross Place d'Italie, there is not much of a sense of an otherplace. In Manhattan once you hit Chinatown the streets are suddenly grittier, there's more trash lying about, the smells are invasive. In Paris you saunter along wide tree-lined boulevards. The architecture, too, is striking. Instead of the low-slung and closely packed shophouse-like layout you find in New York and London, le quartier chinois in Paris is a series of brutalist concrete housing projects interwoven with the usual five or six storey apartment blocks; but there are also sizeable tracts of individual houses, and some landscaped condominiums. It seems like some of the Parisian knack for human scale and gentleness has rubbed off on the 13eme. This Chinatown has been Pari-sized, generously expanded to Paris proportions - which means wider thoroughfares, more sauntering and loitering space. And this is pretty much my tenuous point, that in some way or another, even after a possibly longer history of immigration, the Chinese diaspora in New York and London still seem to inhabit the margins of the city, or at least a slightly grimier share of it; whereas Paris seems to have allowed the Chinese more space to develop, so that finally they become not just strangers in permanent transit, but normalized Parisians who also happen to be ethnically Chinese. And by extension, while the usual case is for these Chinatowners to identify precisely with this marginal state, to carve out a mini-state within the city, Paris's 13eme seems to "remember old Shanghai better than Shanghai itself," to recreate more convincingly and less violently the image of a faraway Asia, a bettered and more harmonized vision (whose truth value is however questionable) of all that cheaply romanticized Eastern glamor sold to the West by Wong Kar-Wai movies or Shanghainese cigarette poster pin-up girls. The 13eme seems to simultaneously evoke an erstwhile Shanghai and a present-day Paris; it is a foreign elsewhere as well as an elsewhen. And, in addition to all that, maybe it's also just Paris.
One of my Chinese professors told me that when she went to grad school in Chinese back in the 80s, it looked like she was taking the nobler route, immersing herself in the dusty heritage of an ancient civilisation then suffering the fallout of a failed exercise in radical social reform; whereas her East Asian Studies contemporaries studying Japanese were seen as dirty businessmen looking to "engage" Japan and thereby get their grubby hands on a prime piece of Bubble Tokyo. Now the situation is the exact opposite, of course: students of China now all look like the investor-opportunist sort who can't wait to sink the roots of their shiny new skyscraper HQ in Pudong, whereas Japanese scholars are silently imbibing the culture, in spite of grim economics, as Tokyo goes the way of a moribund West Europe.
So while devoted Francophiles will bemoan the passing of some mythic Jazz Age Paris, or American Expat Paris, or Cubist Surrealist Paris; while Paris falls out of favor because it looks increasingly dowdy (especially in relation to a Cool-Britannia London), shouldn't it be that it gains in cultural cred because it's stagnating? You certainly don't go to do business in Paris; you couldn't care less how the Bourse is doing! If you go to Paris, it has to be because you want to drink in that delicious cocktail of decay; to recover the "authentic"; where crass commerce counts for less, and witty banter more; where life is distilled into an espresso cup, written in the crumbs that fall from your crusty baguette. To go to Paris when it is no longer fashionable, to visit a great city when it is slightly out of phase - that's when the air is heavier with myth and memory. This is just an extension of that adage about the pleasures of anticipation, the disappointment of fulfillment, and, finally, the further pleasures of reminiscence. To walk Paris in 2005 is something like time travel armed with a stack of postcards or old photographs: where have these images gone? And why do you cling to them more resolutely - "no, no, this is the real Paris" - when you have a completely different city in front of you?
2
With all that talk about global cities nowadays, four favorites always seem to make the list: New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. You know how they write it up in style magazines or couture articles or architecture journals: "this swanky new watering hole in downtown Guangzhou could make you believe you were in St. Germain," "taking a cue from hip London gastropubs, this newcomer to the Chiang Mai dining scene..." It's a magic invocation, to even look like you've borrowed a signature aesthetic or intangible spirit from the Big Four. Of the four, though, I don't think Tokyo deserves to be there - if only because the "global" bit is problematic. If we're talking about expat numbers or accessibility to foreigners, Hong Kong or even Singapore might be a better choice. And that's only if we force ourselves to pick an Asian candidate. LA's diversity outshines any Asian city, ditto San Francisco, although it's more a global village than a global city. New York and London are probably unshakeable choices. And then there's Paris. First of all, I think it definitely helps to be a declining colonial force. As the messy processes of post-colonialism kick in, suddenly there's this huge influx of subjects from your former possessions; people you once enslaved and subjugated return with a vengeance, intent on filling jobs you no longer want to do yourself, flooding your markets with cheaper goods that they made themselves, perhaps. There you go, instant diversity, a London full of Indians, Kenyans, Jamaicans. Paris overrun by Vietnamese, Algerians and Senegalese. Everywhere you turn there's a curry house, or a sheesha bar, or a banh mi counter.
There seem to be different models of globalism-in-the-city, though. My sense is that if in New York you are a third-generation Shanghainese immigrant whose grandparents came in the 50s, that is your identity. Let's look at the Chinatowns, I think their situation reflects this. In Manhattan it's that downtown warrened mess around Spring St et al; in London it's that two-street-thoroughfare plus several alleys (really small, this one) just off of Covent Garden and Theatreland. But it's in Paris where you'll find the leafiest, airiest, most pleasant Chinatown of all - although it really is more of an Overseas Chinese Town - but more on that later. Paris in fact has not one but two (and some would say three) Chinatowns. The biggest one is in the 13eme, a roughly fifteen-minute walk south of the Latin Quarter, a vague triangle shape bound by the Avenues de Choisy and d'Italie, and in the south by Boulevard Massena. Despite the signs changing language once you cross Place d'Italie, there is not much of a sense of an otherplace. In Manhattan once you hit Chinatown the streets are suddenly grittier, there's more trash lying about, the smells are invasive. In Paris you saunter along wide tree-lined boulevards. The architecture, too, is striking. Instead of the low-slung and closely packed shophouse-like layout you find in New York and London, le quartier chinois in Paris is a series of brutalist concrete housing projects interwoven with the usual five or six storey apartment blocks; but there are also sizeable tracts of individual houses, and some landscaped condominiums. It seems like some of the Parisian knack for human scale and gentleness has rubbed off on the 13eme. This Chinatown has been Pari-sized, generously expanded to Paris proportions - which means wider thoroughfares, more sauntering and loitering space. And this is pretty much my tenuous point, that in some way or another, even after a possibly longer history of immigration, the Chinese diaspora in New York and London still seem to inhabit the margins of the city, or at least a slightly grimier share of it; whereas Paris seems to have allowed the Chinese more space to develop, so that finally they become not just strangers in permanent transit, but normalized Parisians who also happen to be ethnically Chinese. And by extension, while the usual case is for these Chinatowners to identify precisely with this marginal state, to carve out a mini-state within the city, Paris's 13eme seems to "remember old Shanghai better than Shanghai itself," to recreate more convincingly and less violently the image of a faraway Asia, a bettered and more harmonized vision (whose truth value is however questionable) of all that cheaply romanticized Eastern glamor sold to the West by Wong Kar-Wai movies or Shanghainese cigarette poster pin-up girls. The 13eme seems to simultaneously evoke an erstwhile Shanghai and a present-day Paris; it is a foreign elsewhere as well as an elsewhen. And, in addition to all that, maybe it's also just Paris.
posted by D at 08:45
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