Japanese American writer and artist Shizue Seigel trades the romanticised Paris of her teenage dreams for the reality of a city shaped by colonial histories and contemporary migrations. Arriving in 2019 with mobility challenges, Seigel discovers vibrant communities of colour thriving in neighbourhoods absent from typical tourist itineraries. Her search beyond the “cool grey” institutional façade reveals how migrants maintain ancestral values while adapting to French society’s complex dynamics of inclusion and otherness.
In October 2019, I could finally afford to visit the city of my youthful dreams. As a Japanese American teenager in the late 1950s, I had equated Europe with the “civilised world”—so different from my childhood in California farm labour camps, skid rows, and Army posts. I pored over art books and films and lingered in museums, trying to absorb an unreachable world. Paris symbolised both resplendent glamour and revolutionary egalitarianism, contradictory currents that seemed to cancel each other out into sceptical ennui by the 1970s.
Was I going to visit a dream I’d outgrown decades ago? Six decades of inner-city wanderings, Sierra backpacks, and budget travel in Mexico and Asia had taught me to that I could learn as much on the streets as in the museums. In the U.S., my work involved helping give voice to people of colour. I was curious about how Parisians tracing their roots back to colonised Africa and Indochina felt about living in France. But I only had ten days: not enough time to get my fill of either museums or back alleys.
The lead-up to the trip was dogged with disaster: Air BnB cancellations, postponed travel dates, Notre Dame ravaged by fire, and too much work to have time to resurrect my high-school French or conduct research into France’s post-colonial complexities.… The stress of last-minute catastrophes brought on crippling arthritis that made it hard to get up and down stairs. Since most stations didn’t have elevators, I wouldn’t be able to use the Métro to explore ethnic enclaves in the outer city.
Arrival: First Impressions
I was in such pain that I had to reserve a wheelchair to get through SeaTac and Charles de Gaulle airports. The brown-skinned service people at both were more than kind, but while the U.S. workers appreciated being recognised for their work, the French seemed so accustomed to being invisible that they were positively wraithlike, even when I reached out with smiles and generous tips.
On the stairs exiting the Métro, white tourists and locals poured impatiently past us as Ben struggled with both our suitcases, and I teetered up the rail-less stairs on my cane.
“Puis-je vous aider?” a greying Arab man asked, taking a suitcase from Ben’s hand and carrying it up the steps. When we thanked him, he shrugged. “It’s just the right thing to do,” he said, reminding me of immigrant friends in San Francisco who viewed small kindnesses between strangers as moments of shared humanity, a refusal to surrender ancestral values to the pressures of a self-absorbed society.
Our Bohemian Garret
Our Airbnb was in the heart of Paris—on the Left Bank near the Seine and the Pont Neuf. To get there, we turned down a curving alley lined with tall, 18th-century limestone buildings fortified with high walls and heavily barred windows. Through a thick wooden door, we entered a building that was barely twelve feet wide, with peeling grey-and-white walls and a steep stairway that spiralled up in a squashed oval rather than a circle. We finally arrived three storeys up at an unpainted, weather-worn door with ancient, hand-forged hinges. Surprisingly, the inside of the door was reinforced by a vertical enamel bar housing a stainless-steel lock and no less than three deadbolts. I wondered whether the overly fortified door arose from lived experience of crime, or the kind of mistrust born of race and class divisions—and a fear of the unfamiliar.
The long, narrow apartment seemed like a true La Bohème artists’ garret with hand-hewn beams, uneven floors and thickly plastered walls that leaned in from a mansard roof. From what must have once been coachmen and porters’ quarters, we looked down at a tiled courtyard framed by a glass conservatory and a grand L-shaped townhouse rising four storeys from high-windowed salons on ground floor through upper floors that diminished height up to the low-ceilinged servants’ quarters. The whole complex was positively palatial. I could imagine persons of consequence alighting from their carriages or Bentleys, depending on the century, and sweeping up the grand entry stairs in long satin gowns. I doubt they gave much thought to whose sweat paid for their finery.
The townhouse was currently rented to a toy company whose employees left promptly at 5 pm, while the garret was ours for the cost of a budget hotel in Fresno. Twenty years before, a Frenchwoman had bought the apartment with her divorce settlement so she could walk to her municipal clerk’s job. After she retired to Lyon, she rented it out to supplement her modest pension. I wondered what other stories were layered behind the city’s cool grey walls.
The Sanitised Playground
The toy company wares showcased in the conservatory were designed to instil whimsy and creativity in well-behaved children with too many toys already. Brightly coloured games and building toys featured strictly geometric circles and squares enlivened by a riot of zigzags and polka dots. The dolls were pale pink princes and princesses clothed in muted pastels. Only the vivid animals swinging through lush jungle foliage looked like they were having any fun. Traditional French parenting techniques operate within le câdre, a clear and non-negotiable frame of parental directives, within which children are expected to be largely independent and autonomous. American parents seem much more emotionally available, particularly in communities of colour, where expectations arise out of love and hope and not the need for social respectability.
Across the street stood a cool-grey school with three floors of tall, many-paned windows. From our third-floor vantage point, the playground looked like a fishbowl surrounded by a twelve-foot stone wall topped with spiked iron fencing. Pretty hard to sneak out of that school! Middle-school students, mostly brown or Black, were let into the play yard one or two classes at a time. The boys kicked a soccer ball around, while most of the girls chatted under a pristine glass canopy. Several students wandered off by themselves, standing under a tree or facing a wall, not engaging with anyone.
The building was so grand that I wondered if it were a private school, but I later learned it was a Local Unit for Educational Inclusion (ULIS), a government middle school for 300 students with “severe learning disabilities.” Some had physical or cognitive challenges, whilst others were immigrants struggling to learn French language and culture. Public education in France has been secular since 1882, when teaching was redirected from religious morality to secular “moral and civic instruction.” People could exercise religious freedom in private, but in public, everyone should identify as “ordinary citizens” — French, not Ukrainian, Algerian or Vietnamese, not Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim.
But in practice, freedom of religion and speech have not been applied equally. Despite lawsuits and protests, many Catholic institutions continue to receive government subsidies as historic architecture, while Islamic institutions are disproportionately penalised. Tragically, despite the 2015 killings at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and the 2020 beheading of a teacher by a Chechen graduate of the ULIS program, Charlie Hebdo’s demeaning cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed are still taught as examples of speech to which no one should take offense. I was appalled by this outright dismissal of another group’s values. It felt akin to calling blackface, Stepin Fetchit, and Charlie Chan “free speech.”
During World War II, American caricatures of the Japanese as slant-eyed, bucktoothed warmongers had fuelled public support for mass incarceration. What price was France’s Arab diaspora paying for official insensitivity? Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time or language skills to delve into the many-faceted complexities of cultural politics.
The Paris I Was Taught
For the first few days, Ben and I worked on long-distance work tasks in the morning before taking long walks along the Seine past the cool grey limestone institutions that lined the river like bastions of French authority: the former mint; the L’Institut de France, housing the Academies of the French Language, of Belles Lettres, of Beaux Artes, of Sciences, and of Moral and Political Sciences; a military museum; and the Louvre, crammed with the spoils of monarchy, imperialism, and colonialism.
We bypassed them in favour of Realist, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art from 1848 to 1914 at the Musée d’Orsay and contemporary art at the Centre Pompidou. It’s ironic that artists of the Salon de Refusés, rejected by the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the time, have become the new establishment, elevated into gilt-edged commodities that every tourist must see. In contrast, the Pompidou has been under attack since its inception for turning traditional architecture inside out. But displaying normally unseen ductwork and piping on the outside of its glass and steel façade can be interpreted as an homage to the unseen labour that keeps the cool grey city going.
As majestic as Haussmann’s Parisian cityscape was, it felt cold, formal and very white. If there were a multicultural arts scene, I wasn’t finding it. Where were the lively street murals and posters of San Francisco and New York? In central Paris, I saw only two tiny Asian stickers near the ULIS school, a mural of a beautiful, brown-skinned woman defaced by a tag on her nose, and an angry samurai face on a construction wall. Did the expatriate arts scene of James Baldwin, Nina Simone and Richard Wright exist only as pricey walking tours of what used to be?
Glimpses of Otherness
The Latin Quarter and the Marais, once cheap neighbourhoods for artists, had long since been taken over by sleek shops and tourists. The few people of colour I saw in the inner arrondissements were street vendors and shop assistants, often college students hired at minimum wage because they were multilingual. France was not welcoming to foreigners of any colour, they said. Even Italians and Belgians who’d lived in Paris for many years felt othered. A server in a tourist restaurant said Nigerian migrants could get better jobs because they’d been taught in English from childhood. If she could find work in Nigeria, she said, she’d prefer to live there. Instead, she visited every couple of years and sent money to her family to build a house where she hoped to retire someday.
Quai Branly was a revelation in a different way—a stunning building, glorious gardens—and a massive collection of ethnic art so vast it felt like a gigantic appropriation. The tone of the labels was offensively patronising, celebrating the collectors and objectifying the collected communities. I wondered what happened to Melanesian and Dogon societies after they were deprived of ancestor poles and funerary masks to anchor them in their lineage and summon the strength and wisdom to move into the future.
My Japanese immigrant grandparents, like many migrants of colour, brought their ancestral values to America through household shrines and temples, annual festivals, language schools, and community organisations and businesses that still survive today. And we Americans of colour have shared in overlapping struggles for civil rights, political representation, educational diversity, cultural transmission, and representation in the arts that have collectively broadened what it means to be “American.”
I was excited at first by Rue Dauphine’s row of international eateries and shops, but on closer inspection, it felt like an expensive, carefully curated zoo featuring one of everything international: Khao Thai, Fajitas Mexican food, Pizza Marinara, BigBang Korean BBQ, Mofo Gasy food of Madagascar, O-Kome authentic nigiri, Côté Tibet, Laouz Algerian pastries and tajine. The businesses were glossy, pristine, and pricey; the few customers mostly tourists. I felt a stab of sympathy for the Sichuanese saleswoman on display in a luxurious habitat of embroidered satins. In a mix of broken French and pantomime, she conveyed that she’d lived in France for seven years. She had few customers and an unkind boss. She felt trapped by language, but her two jobs conflicted with language classes. She spoke little French or English, and her Sichuan Mandarin dialect was different from the Mandarin spoken by most Parisian Chinese.
In contrast, a nearby shop felt like a cultural celebration of Uzbekistan. It offered a range of clothing and jewellery from €1,500 vintage ikat robes to bowls of affordable coral and turquoise beads. The friendly, open-faced clerk was the owner’s nephew, helping between college classes in computer science. The shop was momentarily empty, so we compared our experiences as the descendants of immigrants. Then I asked him where I could find ordinary people of colour in Paris.
“Les Asiatique en 13e, 17e y 19e arrondissements; les Maghrebi en 18e, 19e, and 20e arrondissements; les Africains en Goutte d’Or,” he rattled off.
I pointed to my ears ruefully and showed him my notebook where I’d written “Goot Door???” He laughed and intoned slowly, “Goutte d’Or… near to Chateau Rouge.”
In Search of Colour
The bus to Chateau Rouge took us from the haute bourgeoisie of the 1st Arrondissement to the petite bourgeoisie of the 18th. My spirits lifted momentarily as briefcases gave way to workmen’s caps, and couture was replaced by bulky overcoats and sensible shoes. The passengers were still mostly white and unfriendly, but I began to understand their air of sour disapproval.
For centuries, whether they were ruled by the left or the right, the Nazis, or the monarchy, the Parisian working class had little hope of upward mobility, only an inherited mistrust of change and loss. They’d grown up in a society where their choices were limited. Now they were fearful that strangers were coming after their jobs. Since our trip, support for Marie Le Pen and Donald Trump has swelled amongst those who cling to the past and blame change on immigrants and people of colour, instead of examining the real causes of negative change.
I’m grateful that the diversity of my home neighbourhood has taught its residents to respect and learn from other cultures instead of filtering perceptions through the assumed superiority of a static, monolithic America. In my youth, expatriates like Cassatt, Van Gogh and James Baldwin inspired me to become an artist by demonstrating that uncertainty and discovery are the basis of creativity. I see the same risk-taking enterprise among migrants and people of colour in my neighbourhood, who express their creativity in the art of living—from farmers markets to fusion food and fashion, multicultural education, and businesses that keep evolving with their customers.
Out the bus windows, we glimpsed some signs of otherness and hybridity. “ParIstanbul” read a restaurant logo, with a big Eiffel Tower replacing the I. From Château Rouge we entered a neighbourhood serving locals, not tourists. Tucked in a confusing maze of narrow streets between broad boulevards, we found small produce markets, cell phone stores, international money transfer and shipping offices, nail salons and stores crammed with plastic housewares and discount clothing. A scattering of shuttered shops, “for rent” signs and graffiti signalled affordable rents. My San Francisco neighbourhood was similar, but in Paris the shops were largely clustered by countries of origin instead if a mix of Asian, Russian, Arab and Latino businesses.
Ben and I fell into an alley of barbershops and hair salons dedicated to Black hair. When I pointed to my camera to ask permission to take photos, the response was laughter and an emphatic “No!” Respecting their privacy, I settled for photographing the posters touting fades, cuts and braiding in the most intricately astonishing patterns—much more complex than in San Francisco. The next block featured African textiles from batiks to mudcloth. They were small shops catering to the African community who probably travelled for miles to secure special fabrics unavailable in outlying neighbourhoods and towns.
Most of the restaurants were closed until dinnertime, so we were starving by the time we peered into BEST AFRICA, a hole in the wall with a handful of basic Formica tables, a stack of cellophane-wrapped beers and sodas in the corner and a tiny, glass-walled steam table displaying soups, stews, rice and fried chicken and fish. One of the two customers waved us inside, declaring in English, “Best Senegalese food in Paris!” We were intrigued because West African food was hard to find in San Francisco. The server, who spoke Wolof and little French, directed us to two rows of photos posted on the outside wall.
All the dishes looked intriguing, and the price was so low—€6 per dish, compared to €13-€32 on Rue Dauphine—that we expected the portions to be small. We could start with a couple of dishes and order more if we liked them. On the English-speaking customer’s advice, we ordered Mafé, braised beef and vegetables in a tomato-peanut sauce flavoured with bell pepper, onion, garlic, ginger, thyme, curry spices, and bay leaves. Firire was deep-fried tilapia deeply slashed to absorb a rub of lime juice, pepper, ginger, coriander, chili, and Dijon mustard. The fish was served with plantains and cabbage atop perfectly cooked jollof rice, each separate grain flavoured with tomato, onion, garlic, turmeric, paprika, thyme, bay leaf, black pepper, and chilis. The portions were so generous we could barely finish them. And they were so delicious we’d have return to try more.
The tiny restaurant had been almost empty when we started, but by the time we left, every table was occupied, mostly by men and just a few women. Two men arrived with giant suitcases in tow. “We came straight from the airport!” they said. “We’ve missed your food!” They seemed to know the other customers and joined the lively mixture of Wolof, French and other African languages that flowed among the tables. In addition to bountiful plates at bargain prices, Best Africa seemed to be a neighbourhood nexus for jobs and news from home, much like certain restaurants in San Francisco.
More Colour
Two days later, we returned to BEST AFRICA for lamb kebabs and Poulet Yassa, tangy chicken braised with onions, lime juice and Dijon mustard.
Then we headed east toward Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est. Crossing Boulevard Barbès, we entered the most diverse neighbourhood we’d seen in Paris. In 2019, 41% of immigrants entering France were born in Africa. Half were from French colonial North Africa: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, but migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were increasing. In a dense quadrangle bounded by train tracks to the East, and the elevated railway on Saint Chapelle to the south, rents were 25% lower than the city average. The area was packed with halal butchers, produce markets selling yams, plantains and sugar cane, grocery stores, restaurants featuring food from home countries and several mosques.
Unfortunately, we visited on a Monday, when many businesses and institutions were closed, including the handsome, multi-storey Institut des Cultures d’Islam. Large window graphics showed us what we were missing: a full calendar of activities at their two locations: music and dance performances, lectures, film screenings, contemporary art exhibitions, children’s activities and cultural activities, many in partnership with other local organisations. The Institut also offered a worship space, a tearoom, classrooms for learning Arabic, Wolof, calligraphy and food distribution for those in need.
Also closed was Ayyem Zamen, which means “Good Old Time” in Tunisian Arabic. The large-windowed building lit up a corner with a joyous blue-and-yellow mélange featuring the heads of a scarved woman and a bare-headed man rising out of a steaming cup of brown liquid held by a pair of winglike hands. Above them ran a frieze of fanciful symbols: stylised plants and animals, protective eyes and hands. I learned later that Ayyem Zamen was established in 2003 to help older migrants, who often lacked the family support, income, or language skills needed to prepare for the challenges of retirement. Cheerful surroundings and affordable refreshments countered social isolation while trained social workers helped those who asked to navigate the paperwork they needed to establish eligibility for French retirement benefits.
On the pillar of an empty building, two small posters appealed for help in protesting Turkish attacks in Rojava the Kurdish enclave in Northern Syria, while a large glossy poster on Blvd. Barbès advertised tours to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage.
After crossing sixteen railroad tracks bordered by high, graffitied walls and nondescript apartment buildings, we arrived at a South Asian neighbourhood where Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani businesses tended to cluster together. Shop after shop was filled with saris, kurtas, and Hindu gods, and Pakistani stores selling shalwar kameez and prayer rugs. We found a South Indian restaurant that served a basic thali meal of small vegetable curries and lentil dishes surrounding a mound of basmati rice topped with a crisp, golden pappadum. In India, the meal would have been served on a stainless-steel tray or a fresh banana leaf. Here it arrived on a plastic plate in the shape of a cartoon banana leaf. We were touched by this assertion of cultural identity—we may not be able to keep things as they were, but we can adapt in ways that hold the spirit of the past.
The Eternal Quest
We’d run out of time to explore Quartier Asiatique or diasporic communities further afield. We wondered how various migrant groups were retaining their culture and values and passing them on to succeeding generations. In the U.S., diasporic temples and community centres have finally bowed to generational differences by leavening serious moral and political considerations with fun and family, transmitting culture though food, dance, sports tournaments, and social services, while religious festivals like Obon and Holi bring out joy and connection.
Ten days was not nearly enough time to understand Paris. Every great destination needs to be explored at leisure, savouring both the reasons for its renown and the quiet alleyways that reveal nuance and raise questions. Who decides what buildings and monuments are built and what they symbolise? Whose homes or shops were demolished to build them? Who is permitted to live in what neighbourhoods; what work can they get hired to do?
But without a mastery of French and the languages of the formerly colonised, we would never be able navigate Paris the way we wanted to—by talking to a wide range of migrants and listening to them reflect on how they came to be here, how they live, what’s important to them and what challenges they face.
And to understand context, we’d need to study multiple timelines of French colonialism and trace the convoluted ways that Paris has been shaped by money and power. From Haussman to Corbusier to the present, redevelopment alone has eradicated much of the city’s historic texture.
The dilemma of travel is the more you explore a place, the more you realise you don’t know. But perhaps the intellect can complicate and distance and just being in a place with receptive attention and compassion is enough. My grandparents came from a relatively wordless culture that communicated through eye and heart and gut. Like the Arab man who helped us at the Métro, like our landlady, like the unseen Senegalese at Best Africa, who cooked from his soul, they simply did what they thought was right.
