Chinatown: A Way of Life : ‘Family’ Goes Beyond Area’s Boundaries

In the old days, after school Lilly Mu Lee would pick her way along dirt roads to reach her father’s herb shop in Chinatown. Her father was “the herb doctor,” and his place a local hangout. Elderly men sat there, reading Chinese-language newspapers, drinking tea or smoking their water pipes. When the girl came in, they tweaked her cheeks and always said her nose was “too flat.”

Lee remembered this as she sat amid the carved wood and gold decor of the Golden Dragon restaurant recently. The traditional lion dancers had come and gone, signaling the beginning of the annual fund-raising banquet for the Chinatown Public Safety Assn. A parade of politicians, including Mayor Tom Bradley, were promising support for a permanent police station the safety group wants built in Chinatown.

The thin, elegant Lee only half listened. The Chinatown she knew has changed many times since that complex of pagoda-roofed buildings with shops and restaurants opened on North Broadway in 1938.

50th Anniversary

On its 50th anniversary, the once-homogeneous community whose residents came from Canton and all spoke the same dialect has long since given way to a diverse group of Chinese from many places, as the growing number of signs lettered in Vietnamese attests.

Once, the 58-year-old said with a trace of sadness in her voice, “I knew every store, every waiter. Now, I come back here. I’m a stranger in my own town.”

Nevertheless, Lee is one of a persistent group of activists who watch over the small community north of City Hall because of the symbolic role Chinatown has assumed for the more than 200,00807432038California.

This gathering of 250, and a similar number down the street at another restaurant, would raise $19,000 that night toward the police substation. As a group they were largely professionals--doctors, lawyers, bankers--who did not live in Chinatown, which has about 10,000 residents. They tended not to work there and spoke English rather than Chinese.

They were not likely to benefit from a police station, but this is one of Chinatown’s current causes, so they were there. Such causes are part of the social fabric of Chinatown. This one shares the stage with efforts to bring more parking, more recreational facilities for children, better housing and a cultural center.

Causes are one way local Chinese bring together different groups, who may come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, Indochina or the United States.

Heads Board of Governors

Lee, who lives in Los Feliz and has a real estate firm in the Hancock Park area, had agreed to head the safety group’s board of governors because, she said: “How can you say no to your family?”

And Vincent Hing, a third-generation Chinese-American born and raised in the Silver Lake area, became president of the safety group’s board because, he said, “Our heritage is epitomized by Chinatown.”

Like many young professionals who have shouldered civic chores in Chinatown, Hing, a 34-year-old insurance broker, said he also got involved to dispel the outsider’s image of the Chinese, he said, as “reticent to draw attention, not protest.”

When it was his turn to speak at the banquet, he noted the presence of Bradley, Los Angeles Assistant Police Chief Robert Vernon and two city councilmen, and said pointedly:

“Over the next year, I’d like to see a permanent police substation on Hill Street,” and added, after a pause, “and I’d like to see an Asian-American who is a captain of the LAPD or better.” The highest ranking Asian officer is a lieutenant.

“It’s easy enough to pay lip service,” David Bow Woo said, surveying the politicians who had come, “another thing to get actual responses.” A corporate attorney with a Chinatown firm that is believed to be the largest Asian law firm in the country, with 12 lawyers, he is an example of a new breed of professional, as opposed to the merchants tourists see working in Chinatown.

The reason is that there is so much money there. The 21 financial institutions in Chinatown are estimated to have more than $2 billion in deposits.

The safety group has been trying to pay for a property on Hill Street, a crumbling old house that, thanks to land values in Chinatown, they had felt lucky to get for $630,000.

Mayor Pledges $30,000

The mayor pledged $30,000 in operational expenses that night as the group ate from large platters of pan-fried pork, crispy chicken, steamed cod and black mushrooms.

But the Community Redevelopment Agency, which allocates money to Chinatown as a redevelopment area, has refused to release $350,000 in bond money already designated for the substation to help buy the house.

“CRA is saying, you build the project, you do everything, get everything completed in advance, then we’ll put our money in,” Woo said. Instead of its traditional respectful pose with city officials, he added, “The community is having to grow up and realize you have to fight.”

So far, the largest contributors to the cause had been two who had more commonplace occupations--the owners of a Chinatown grocery store and a gas station--though appearances can be deceiving.

Fay and Harry Gee can usually be found at the Kwan Lee Lung Market on Hill Street working 14-hour days. They serve the old ladies in baggy pants and jackets with umbrellas held up against the sun, who are among Chinatown’s most familiar sights.

But the back of the Gees’ market contains a large wholesale operation that distributes to more than 100 restaurants. Kwan Lee Lung is only the latest of a series of enterprises Fay Gee masterminded since she came from Canton more than 30 years ago and started out with a small liquor store on Macy Street.

She does not have to work, she noted, but added laughingly: “I’m a working horse.”

At the banquet, the couple sat with Jimmie Joe, who operates the Texaco station in Chinatown. But that is only one of several properties the Texas-born Joe and his family own there. The Gees and Joe provided most of the cash down payment for the $630,000 house.

However, few of the Chinese who would most benefit from a police substation attended the fund-raiser--namely refugees from Cambodia, who tend to live in Chinatown, and those from Vietnam who run nearly half the businesses.

Hoa Quoc Truong, a Chinese from Vietnam on the safety group’s board, said his countrymen tend not to speak English and therefore avoid gatherings like this, particularly if local officials come.

‘Afraid to Talk to Police’

“They are afraid to talk to police, afraid to talk to people in government,” said Truong, a real estate agent in San Gabriel, who does speak English and has become a U.S. citizen. “All they want to do,” he added, is “survive, to make money.”

The vast cultural differences between the old-timers and the newcomers make fund raising that much harder, Lee said: “It’s like this group going down to Olvera Street asking for money, that different.”

Inability to speak English and avoidance of police are two reasons the safety group believes crime in Chinatown is under-reported. They hope that a substation would bring officers with translators on the scene, closer to the community.

In the first quarter of 1988, Police Department statistics for Chinatown show no murders or rapes, but 18 robberies, 24 burglaries and 202 thefts. Contrasted to other parts of Central Division, Capt. Greg Berg said, “Chinatown is a low-crime area.”

The Chinatown Public Safety Assn. was formed in 1982, largely due to the efforts of Stanley Yep, a local attorney who made this his personal quest. He is executive director of the safety group and does most of the dirty work.

With his cause, he follows in the footsteps of countless other unsung activists who have pushed for improvements in Chinatown. Over the last several years, one group pressed--and got--a Chinese-language branch library after city officials said for years that it was impossible. Another demanded--and got--one of Chinatown’s largest buildings constructed to house senior citizens.

A third successfully fought to make Chinatown a redevelopment project area of the Community Redevelopment Agency, which has allocated about $37 million for various Chinatown housing or commercial developments since 1980.

“Stanley is a one-issue person,” said Susan Hum, chairman of a local committee that advises the Community Redevelopment Agency. She and several other younger professionals are striving for better overall planning in the area. Despite eight years of CRA involvement, she said, “There’s been no planned development in Chinatown.”

Not Enough Security

Yep sits on that committee but takes every opportunity to sound his drumbeat: “Chinatown does not have enough security.” He brings it up, even if it is not on Hum’s agenda, making sure the issue stays on everyone’s mind.

That is typical of Chinatown. For every cause, as Susan Totaro, CRA’s acting project manager for Chinatown, put it, there’s “a Joan of Arc who will do a lot of lobbying, a lot of challenging of the community, saying we should stick together and get this done.”

Since the safety group started, the LAPD installed a part-time substation in 1983 and a foot patrol, even though as Berg said, “The statistics don’t warrant it.”

“The statistics are defective,” Yep said dismissively.

The only police officer killed in Central Division in the line of duty in the last five years, however, was shot to death in Chinatown, responding to a jewelry robbery in 1984. And Detective Ray Paik of the LAPD Asian Gang Unit said Chinese Vietnamese gangs are a problem there.

Yep said, on the night of the banquet, that CRA had been giving him “headaches” because of its refusal to hand over the funds for the substation.

“If they do not release the money, there is a possibility we will not be able to make it,” Yep said dramatically.

CRA Administrator John Tuite said the agency was simply following policy “not to dispense funds until the community backers raise their portion and prove they have the wherewithal to operate the facility.”

Yep smiled and changed his tune. “We won’t fail,” he said. After all, this was Chinatown.