Newcomers Changing Face of Chinatown : Communities: Immigrants tied only by a common Chinese ancestry have brought a heterogeneity--and a divisiveness--to the neighborhood north of City Hall.
Gloria Wong, owner of Superior Poultry in Chinatown, rushed to and from the shop’s cash register, her knee-high rubber boots making small slapping noises on the wet concrete floor.
“New Year’s, very busy,” she muttered, as Chinese customers, most of them old ladies in quilted jackets, crowded in front of her register to buy chickens for Chinese New Year--”Year of the Horse” celebrations, which began Saturday.
Behind Wong, four men hacked at chicken carcasses, while another slit the throats of live chickens and heaved them into rubber bins.
The shop, which has been on Chinatown’s North Broadway for 56 years, is symbolic of the traditions that still survive in this largely immigrant community of 12,000.
But in the last decade, an influx of Chinese from several Southeast Asian countries and their investments have dramatically altered the once sleepy Cantonese community.
“The cultural style was fairly homogeneous,” Deborah Ching, director of the Chinatown Service Center said of the past.
Now people of several different nations, tied together only by Chinese ancestry, live side by side, often uneasily and divisively, in the one-square-mile community north of City Hall.
“Now there are Chinese from all over the world,” Ching said. “It’s changed the face of Chinatown.”
One recent morning, for example, Wong--a Chinese raised in Colombia--sold Judy Ma--a Chinese from Thailand--one of her fresh-killed chickens. In the parking lot next door, Adam Luong, a Chinese from Vietnam, sold flowers.
On a nearby corner stood a newly completed retail and office building, whose architect and developer, Raymond Cheng, is from Hong Kong.
The starkly modern four-story building is among several developments that also have transformed Chinatown physically in the last decade--away from the pagoda-roofed buildings put up by Chinatown founders in the 1930s and toward what Cheng calls an “international look.”
While jewelry stores still sell jade, herb stores ginseng and tourist shops the usual souvenirs, only a small percentage of Chinatown businesses are geared to tourism. More merchants now sell T-shirts, suits or dresses--in small, non-Western sizes--as well as household goods, toys and music tapes of Vietnamese or Chinese stars.
They sell from shopping plazas, warehouses carved into individual shopping stalls, and mini-malls where the proprietors tend to be Chinese from Vietnam.
“This is a small Saigon,” Travis Tran said inside his food shop in Saigon Plaza, where merchandise stuffed onto racks or piled on tables spills into the pedestrian walkways.
“What you’re looking to recreate is a high-density shopping atmosphere as in Asia, where they like to shop in the open,” said architect Cheng, who made the first two floors of his new building into a plaza with tiny shops.
Some are not so complimentary of Chinatown’s new architectural style. Wilbur Woo, a long-time banker, said: “It seems to be sort of a mish-mash.”
The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which made Chinatown a redevelopment area in 1980, said more than $100 million in investment money has come into the district in the last 10 years, and property values have tripled. CRA has spent $45 million, much of it, at community insistance, to bolster a shrinking stock of low-income and affordable housing.
While the number of Chinese in the Los Angeles area has grown to about 200,000, other population centers have sprung up in Monterey Park, Alhambra and other areas. But Chinatown has remained both a cultural focal point, because it was there first, and a jumping off point for immigrants.
“It’s been the place for newcomers who have not mastered the English language,” Ching said, who noted that while her Chinatown Service Center staff once only had to speak Cantonese, now they must be able to communicate in a half dozen other dialects, as well as Vietnamese.
While most immigrants a decade ago were refugees from Vietnam, now the 10,000 they serve, with pre-employment counseling, job training, family planning and mental health services tend to be from Hong Kong, mainland China “and increasingly from Taiwan,” Ching said.
“They are low-income, lower-skilled population with the stress of not only transitioning to a different culture but an economic struggle,” she said. “We have increasing requests for mental health services in the area of family violence.”
A committee appointed by City Councilwoman Gloria Molina to advise CRA on Chinatown matters has pressed for improved housing, recreational facilities and parking, as well as a police substation.
CRA has created about 500 units of low- and moderate-income housing, with 301 more units planned. It has spent $4.5 million for a 427-space parking structure and $1 million to expand the recreation center. It has approved $681,000 in loans and grants for a police facility, and $1.1 million has been earmarked for a community and cultural center.
“I think we’ve done a good job,” said Munson Kwok, chairman of the advisory committee.
While many particularly praise CRA for building Cathay Manor, a 270-unit apartment complex for senior citizens, they criticize what they see as a tendency to favor most proposed commercial developments and to allow lengthy delays and cost overruns on various projects.
“The accomplishments . . . were in spite of the project management,” said Sharon Lowe, a local attorney and persistent critic of CRA.
Of six limited-income housing projects supported by CRA, three experienced time delays and ran into financial problems. Community members waited six years before CRA approved $681,000 to augment local fund-raising efforts to build a police facility.
CRA, which must approve all commercial projects within the redevelopment area before building permits are issued, allowed a 198-unit apartment house to be built on a narrow residential street on the hill west of Chinatown’s business core.
Local residents complain the building has dwarfed nearby housing, created traffic snarls on the section of Figueroa Terrace, and that the apartments, with rents to $1,400 a month, are virtually unaffordable to most Chinatown residents.
Leland Wong, a 32-year-old resident who works for Kaiser Permanente, said of CRA’s approval: “They dropped the ball.”
Susan Totaro, CRA’s Chinatown project manager, said the agency had no power to reduce the scope of the project because the land already was zoned for high-density use.
CRA also has been criticized for lack of planning in its Chinatown project. “I don’t see too much being done on an organized basis,” said banker Woo.
Totaro acknowledged that CRA has no economic plan but has followed the recommendations of a marketing study for projects such as the parking facility.
Critics point out that Little Tokyo, a CRA project area since 1970, had a cultural center by its 10th year, built with nearly $2 million in CRA money and about $8 million raised among local and overseas Japanese. Chinatown’s proposed cultural center is only just entering the planning stages. “They (the Japanese) have a cultural center, but the Chinese were here in 1850,” Wong said.
However, local Chinese concede that divisiveness within the Chinatown community has slowed many projects.
Endless arguments over the police substation delayed the CRA’s funding approval, for example. At the final advisory committee meeting on the issue, board member Vivian Chen threw up her hands in exasperation.
“I have sat here for three hours and 10 minutes and all I have seen is a lot of hassling,” she said. “Chinatown isn’t united. It’s like we all have personal opinions and the only way we hash it out is by cutting each other’s throats.”
Some community members are concerned that lingering animosity between partisans of the Republic of China on Taiwan and mainland China will similarly delay the cultural center.
BACKGROUND
The Chinese new year 4688, the “Year of the Horse” in the Chinese lunar calendar, began Saturday. Among the 200,000 Chinese-Americans in Southern California, the event sparks about two weeks of celebration, including the traditional Golden Dragon Parade Feb. 10. A “horse” year, which comes once in every 12, according to Chinese astrology, signals a fast-paced year full of adventure. Those born in a horse year are said to be good conversationalists, hard workers and skillful at handling money--but not always at love affairs. While energetic and persuasive, they can also be childish and manipulative. Families tend to get together to celebrate the New Year, and children receive good-luck money wrapped in red paper.
