[ESSAY] “The Chinese Girl in Paris: An Unfinished Portrait of China” by William Grice

^{“Je te souhaite une vie heureuse”, a final dispatch from Paris before the correspondence fell silent.}

Letters from Rue de la Sourdière, a full moon over Hanoi, and the haunting, lost horizon of a friend’s sudden silence. In a world where politics has a way of following us home.

An Address in the
First Arrondissement

Somewhere along Rue de la Sourdière, the exact number matters only to memory, lies a doorway.

Hidden in central Paris, it was down this narrow road that someone I once cared about lived.

Her rooms, I suppose, cannot have been grand, but ensconced as they were between the grandeur of Place Vendôme and the Louvre, and just a few minutes’ walk from the Seine, they must have possessed a quiet, Parisian art de vivre all their own.

I found myself thinking of her again recently while working on an article, drawn back to the memory of a pen pal I had known only as S——.

Before she emigrated to study at Sciences Po, she had lived a world away, and I wrote of the letters we exchanged during her years at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.

Later, in Paris, I gather she formed an attachment to a Franco-Bulgarian gentleman.

When her letters eventually fell silent, perhaps because she had been swept up by this new life, I felt rather like Conway in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, helplessly watching a connection slip away, much like the elusive Lo-Tsen and Shangri-La itself. I was reminded of a line from the book:

It seemed to him that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.

I bore her no ill will, of course, and even now remain fond from a distance.

And yet, I confess, the case of S—— has never quite closed in my mind: a study in mystery, an unfinished portrait of someone who remained, to the end, utterly fascinating and contradictory.

I could draw some grand comparison between the modern Chinese woman and Communist China, but that feels clichéd and blunt. Too Orientalising, even.

Moreover, if Hilton’s Shangri-La was a Western invention, an Orient of impossible beauty, mystery, and escape, it highlights the danger of projecting our own fantasies onto distant people and places.

We are tempted to make them into stories before we have truly understood them, a tendency I carried with me last summer while travelling the long road from Shenzhen to Hong Kong.

I kept thinking about S——.

“It is not down
in any map;
true places
never are.”

So wrote Herman Melville of the fictional island of Kokovoko in Moby Dick.

Sitting on the coach crossing into Hong Kong, Melville’s line came back to me, bringing with it the memory of a full Mid-Autumn moon hanging over Hanoi.

When I had sent S—— a photograph of that light years ago, she replied that it was strangely warming to think of her standing beneath that same pale light, as if the distance between us were only an illusion.

For a moment, China seemed less a distant country than a place just beyond the dark horizon: unreachable, perhaps, but visible from where I stood. That was something I came to understand about S——. The nearer she seemed, the more elusive she became.

For years, China existed between us in fragments: light, landscape, and conversation rather than abstraction. There was something quite Lost Horizon about my eventual journey there, the feeling of approaching a place that had previously existed only in the mind.

For to seek Hong Kong’s old spirit now is to search for something lost: a phantom city whose liberties have slipped beyond reach, its own vanishing Shangri-La.

Driven by Beijing’s national-security laws, the city has changed: the dissent of 2019 is all but dead, and the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration lies in a grim political grave.

After crossing what felt like a border in all but name, the city hit me like a subtropical London.

I climbed aboard the Peak Tram, built in 1888 to carry colonial elites up Victoria Peak, and found myself surrounded by mainland tour groups, seemingly the lone English face on board.

My local friend offered a quiet, telltale grimace.

Hong Kong is becoming “just another Chinese city”, he muttered.

I thought sadly of S——, who had studied in nearby Guangzhou before leaving China behind altogether. Unlike the loud tour groups around me, her quiet misgivings had sent her abroad.

Still, between British-era streetscapes and quiet repasts of tea and Cantonese pork belly, Hong Kong’s old charm flickers to life. Yet beneath the visual splendour, an unmistakable absence lingers: the slow, deliberate crushing of the very liberties that once made the city unique.

I never asked S—— what she thought of the city’s fate or this strange contradiction, but standing there, I found myself wondering about her again.

She had left Guangzhou for Europe before Hong Kong’s freedoms had been so diminished.

Had she sensed something that I had not?

What had made S——, and other Chinese people like her, begin looking elsewhere for a future?

If I wanted to understand why she chose France, I had to stop seeing it as the simple inverse of the Orient. Back in Paris, she would find that Europe harboured a political darkness of its own, after all.

I wonder if she ever felt Hong Kong’s phantom there.

Or Shangri-La’s.

^{Remnants of British rule: the 1888 boundary marker of the Governor’s Lodge and the Osborn VC statue, standing watch in Hong Kong Park.}

What She Found
in France

When S—— left Guangzhou for Paris, she stepped into a country that prizes public debate above all.

I once joked to S—— that she ought to make history: master French, join the Foreign Legion, and claim her passport the old-fashioned way, “Français par le sang versé”, that is, “French by spilled blood”!

She politely declined the suggestion.

Yet I had voiced what I suspect is the quiet hope of many international students: stay on after graduation, find work, perhaps marry, and build a life anchored in a Western democracy.

Or maybe I am being insufferably ignorant.

Talk to many ordinary Europeans or Brits and they will tell you that our continent is going down the pan. But to many young Asians, the West still retains an undeniable appeal.

These Chinese students in Britain and France are, to my mind, a rather different kind of arrival: ordinary young people carrying quiet hopes and private anxieties into a shifting Europe.

The rightward lurch in French politics is now impossible to ignore, however, and for people like S——, its consequences are beginning to appear in tougher immigration and residency rules.

For someone trying to turn a temporary education into a permanent life, those changes are not abstract. They are bureaucratic boundaries around the future she might have imagined.

She had left China seeking refuge in French intellectual life.

Staying now means navigating a gauntlet of civic exams and shifting language thresholds.

An Unfinished Portrait

But perhaps I am falling into the old trap once more: shaping S—— into a story before I truly know her, turning a real person into evidence for an argument she never agreed to make.

In any case, my travels finally brought me home to an island, looking across the water once more.

Brisk, salt-sweet air bit my face as slate-blue waves crashed over Bembridge’s shingle, grinding the dark pebbles beneath a heavy roar. I messaged S—— across the grey stretch of the English Channel: I was just over the water if anything went wrong, and perhaps we would still meet.

Whether she “fît la morte” later or simply drifted away matters little now. Realising that she was not quite the romanticised figure I had constructed probably saved us both from an illusion that could never hold.

Whenever I tried to make S—— explain China, I always had to return to the girl herself.

On the surface, she possessed an almost comical serenity: sweet, composed, and endlessly careful with words. I am again reminded of Hilton’s description of Lo-Tsen in Lost Horizon.

She stood for him as a symbol of all that was delicate and fragile… Sometimes he would address her in a way that might, if she had cared, have led to less formal conversation; but her replies never broke through the exquisite privacy of her thoughts, and in a sense he did not wish them to.

Press her to take a position, however, to exist in the open, and the fine porcelain mask shattered.

She would sidestep every rational argument, drop a provocative remark, and vanish into the ether, perhaps cross, perhaps embarrassed by her lost composure. Yet, to me, her spell held like opium.

But I am doing it again. My continual error lies in treating S—— not as a person, but as an uncharted Orient: a distant mystery to be mapped by foreign eyes, until she moved to France.

There is humour, then, in S—— falling for a country where verbal sparring is a national sport. For someone so earnest, confronting a passionately political, literary culture must be trying at times.

One wonders whether France’s Gallic passions could ever breach her boundaries, set like the mountain pass shielding Shangri-La. It matters not.

Alluring yet guarded, she remains forever suspended between the real and the imagined. China will continue to elude our gaze in much the same way, and some portraits are best left unfinished.

^{Memories, reconstructed. The same full moon hanging over Vietnam and China, and a silhouette moving quietly through a city she would eventually leave behind.}

^{How to cite: Grice, William. “The Chinese Girl in Paris: An Unfinished Portrait of China.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Aug. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/08/29/chinese-girl-in-paris.}

William Grice is a British writer and English teacher based in the Far East, and a British Army Reservist. He writes on education, migration, and geopolitics, with work published in outlets including American Thinker and EL Gazette. Visit his website for more information.