ASIANTOWN : Commercial-Cultural Complex Expected to Anchor Southland’s Next Chinatown
Frank Jao and Tony Lam have a vision.
When they look down Bolsa Avenue near its intersection with Bushard Street in Westminster, they see a huge commercial and cultural complex that, when completed, will cover 20 acres and house 440 retail shops. They describe it as an anchor for Southern California’s next Chinatown--and “Little Saigon” just doesn’t express the reach of the dream.
“We want to call our community Asiantown--not ‘Little Saigon,’ which is too negative and reminds people of the bad experiences from the (Vietnam) war,” said Lam, a leader in Orange County’s Southeast Asian community and former president of the county’s Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce.
Financed by wealthy Taiwanese and local Indochinese investors, the $30-million development is intended to be a cultural center for Southeast Asians and a commercial magnet for the county, say Jao and Lam, drawing shoppers from miles around, just as does Los Angeles’ Chinatown 40 miles to the north.
There are those who caution that there are hazards in too much ethnic commercial growth too quickly in an area previously dominated by blue-collar, white residents. But most of the reaction to Jao’s grand scheme--from Westminster’s City Hall to the shops along Bolsa Avenue--seems to be positive. And already the vision is well on its way to becoming reality.
Jao launched the first phase of his project in 1985, when he opened a shopping center called Asian Village in the 9200 block of Bolsa Avenue with 160 shops and restaurants. Directly across Bolsa Avenue, to the south, is the next phase: Asian Gardens, a 150,000-square-foot pagoda-like structure that Jao says is within two months of completion. Already, he says, nearly 90% of the building has been leased.
Once completed, the huge, two-story structure will house 200 boutiques, ethnic shops and cafes. Four main restaurants will cover 4,000 to 16,000 square feet each, and there will be an additional banquet area for 2,000 people.
Custom oil paintings, handmade tiles and restaurant decorations are being imported from Taiwan. To help promote cultural activities, there is a performing stage surrounded by a water pond.
City officials in Westminster, where there has been some friction in recent years between longtime white residents and the quickly expanding Southeast Asian population, are supportive of Jao’s plans, largely because of the anticipated tax revenue the project would bring to the financially strapped municipality, Mayor Elden Gillespie said.
“Their money is the same as anyone else’s,” Gillespie said. “Asiantown will bring a lot of people, and anybody that wants to develop Westminster--well, I love them.”
John M. Liu, a professor of comparative culture at UC Irvine, is among those who sound a word of caution about the possible repercussions of such rapid growth, pointing by way of example to hard feelings in recent years in Monterey Park between white residents and a rapidly growing Chinese population there. In that city, Liu said, there have been numerous incidents of racially motivated vandalism, arson and “some Klan activity.”
“In some ways the area resembles Monterey Park due to the rapid progress and ethnic change,” Liu said.
The growth along the stretch of Bolsa Avenue in Garden Grove and Westminster that has come to be known as Little Saigon has been fast, furious and somewhat unfocused. Before 1978, large sections of Bolsa Avenue were lined with bean fields and half-empty shopping centers. But a rapid influx of Indochinese immigrants changed all that, and by 1984 more than 200 shops and restaurants owned by transplanted Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian merchants covered the area. This year, that number is expected to reach 760, according to Jao.
The sprawling shopping district is a major commercial center for Orange County’s estimated 100,000 Southeast Asian immigrants--the largest such concentration in the country.
To some, Asian Gardens is the next step in a natural progression of growth for the area.
“Building the area is like building a beautiful house,” said Winston Luu, a computer sales executive in Santa Ana, “At first you invite people to come in, but you don’t have the right furniture yet. But slowly but surely you make it comfortable for everybody.”
Said Bill Hong, who has owned and operated the Hong Kong Low Restaurant in Los Angeles’ Chinatown for 31 years: “Vietnamese have been so successful with their shopping malls they now need to put a place like Chinatown in Orange County. And instead of catering to Vietnamese only, it’s much better to have a lot of people come from all over the state to visit.”
David Lee, owner of General Lee’s Restaurant in Chinatown and a prominent figure of that community’s Chinese immigrant era, said: “We’re not the eager beavers like the Vietnamese. It took us years, more than a century to build Chinatown. These Vietnamese are so successful they’ll probably build theirs in a decade.”
While Asiantown will offer the Vietnamese respectability and become a showplace of ethnic pride, counseling psychologist Gene Awakuni said, “It’s happening so rapidly you really shake up the status quo.
“The ethnic enclave in Westminster is like Koreantown (in Los Angeles) where you find people who want to remain in their particular culture of ethnic origin,” said Awakuni, who is teaching a course in Asian-American psychology at UCI while finishing a doctoral program at Harvard University. “They want to feel comfortable and shop and talk to people in their own language.
“You not only have people interested in the commercial trade, but you have the families in the area. In Westminster, what will happen to the whole cultural character of the neighborhood when outside tourists start to come in?”
Jao, the 38-year-old developer of the projected cultural and commercial mecca, arrived in the United States in 1975 from South Vietnam with 50 cents in his pocket. After toiling on an assembly line, he worked for a real estate office and then started his own business.
Watching patterns of immigration into Orange County, he believed then that the area along Bolsa Avenue soon would become a commercial center for the Vietnamese, in much the same way that areas of New York City became identified with the Chinese, Italian and Irish immigrants who settled there.
Jao’s firm, Bridgecreek Development Co., now owns and manages about eight shopping centers in the area.
The third and final phase of Jao’s master plan will expand Asian Village, the shopping area directly north of the Asian Gardens site. It is scheduled for completion in July, 1988, and will increase the total number of shops in Asiantown to the magic number: 440. The third phase also will include its own cultural gem: a Buddhist temple.
“I felt that, as a developer, we needed to fill a need for the community with a temple as well as a commercial need,” Jao said proudly.
But what developers must keep in mind, Luu said, is that if they’re going to build a Buddhist temple, “They should build a church too,” said Luu, the computer sales executive.
Luu, who owned computer stores in Los Angeles’ Chinatown and Monterey Park, cautioned that becoming too ethnic, too Vietnamese-oriented, would hinder Asiantown’s progress. For instance, he said, Chinatown has about three Buddhist temples, but also at least five churches.
“You’ve got to keep the doors open to all and not frighten away non-ethnic people,” Luu added.
While the majority of Vietnamese are Buddhists, some follow Taoist and Confucian beliefs. And many are Catholic.
Orange County’s Southeast Asian community has never had a large meeting place or cultural center to call its own, Lam said. Annual Tet observances have been held at a Westminster park or at a stadium in Santa Ana, in a predominantly Latino neighborhood.
This past January, however, Lam and Jao persuaded community leaders to hold the three-day Tet festival in the parking lot of the still unfinished Asian Gardens, and more than 70,000 people of many races attended.
The festival was so successful, Lam said, that already there is talk of an even bigger event next year, with “more fireworks than Chinatown, a bigger dragon parade than Chinatown and more people. We finally will get to enjoy Tet any way we want.”
