Chinese Checkerboard : County Is Home to Growing, If Scattered, Number of Immigrants

Back in the days when Ventura was an eight-block town that began and ended in the old Mission area, Walton Jue knew the whole Chinese community.

It was easy, he said, because in 1927, there were only six Chinese residents of the city, and two of them were Jue’s cousins.

That was a low point in the town’s Chinese population, which only years before had been a thriving community of 200 immigrant farm laborers, said Richard Senate, manager of Ventura’s historic sites.

A one-block Chinatown in Ventura that was formed in the late 1870s--complete with a Taoist temple, five laundries and two restaurants, all on Figueroa Street--had slowly disappeared after the founding of Oxnard in 1903.

The Chinese, mostly men, left Ventura to work in Oxnard’s sugar beet factory and resettled in China Alley between 6th and 8th streets on Oxnard Boulevard.

But Oxnard’s Chinese community also began to decline in the 1920s as the Chinese either returned to China to rejoin their families or died here.

The years following Jue’s arrival at this low point in the Chinese community saw a new shift in the pattern of Chinese immigration to the county.

Instead of single men lured by the higher wages that could be obtained in California, more families began making their way from China to establish homes here. Today, there are more than 2,000 Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans living in the county.

No longer centered in one area, they are an economically diverse group who bypassed traditional enclaves in downtown Los Angeles and Monterey Park largely by chance.

They have found niches as small-business owners, farmers, office workers, physicians and high-tech professionals. Although the Chinese say they were drawn by the presence of jobs or relatives, they stay because of the pleasant weather and safe suburban living.

“This is the best,” Jue said. “We’ve been to 48 states. I like this place better than any other.”

Back in the 1920s, when Jue was a recent immigrant in Porterville, he heard of Ventura from a cousin, a traveling salesman who chanced upon what was then a prospering oil town.

The cousin talked endlessly to Jue about Ventura’s gorgeous weather--”neither too hot nor too cold”--until Jue finally had to go see for himself. He was beguiled after one visit.

Today, the cluttered office of Jue’s Market in Ventura is lined with family snapshots. There are pictures of his five children, who were born and raised here, and Jue and his wife are shown in their hillside house overlooking the ocean.

Four of their children have moved back to the county after leaving Ventura for college and are now teachers, businessmen and members of community boards.

Life in Ventura has been good to Jue, the semi-retired merchant said.

“I came here to look for a better life, and I still like it,” he said.

But China is never far from Jue’s mind. Propped against a wall is a framed photograph of a gray, three-story building shrouded in mist--the Jue family home in the southern province of Guangdong. Pooling their savings, he and his cousins returned to China in the ‘30s to build both the house and a concrete school for the village, Jue said.

Jue is typical of the county’s early Chinese settlers, who were mostly merchants and farmers, said Senate.

“They were the first farm laborers,” Senate said. “In Ventura County, they did not come for railroads or gold. They came to pick the crops, harvest them and plant them.”

Leaving behind farming villages in southern China, the old-timers--as they are called in the Chinese community--can be found at all economic levels. Some, like the Louie family of Oxnard, are working-class.

Yee Louie is a 53-year-old farmer who works a five-acre farm in Camarillo with his brother and sister. They grow bok choy, cucumbers and zucchini, selling the produce to local markets and Chinese grocers in Los Angeles.

Louie’s family has been farming the rich soil of Ventura County for two generations. Louie left China in 1949 to join his father at an Oxnard farm. China was then in political chaos following the Communist takeover of mainland China, and Oxnard offered peace, he said.

Today, he is one of the last small-scale Chinese farmers left in the county, Louie said. The vocation leaves him little time for his wife and five children, a fact that may discourage other Chinese from pursuing it.

“It is too much hard work and long hours,” Louie said.

The number of Chinese farmers in the county has also been dwindling as a new generation of Chinese immigrants arrives.

Community leaders say the past decade’s influx of Chinese are mostly young professionals who came to the United States as students. They have been lured to Ventura County from the Midwest and the East Coast by the chance to have their own medical practice or to work at high-tech firms and military bases.

In just a few years, they have diversified the county’s Chinese community. While the early immigrants were primarily farmers and merchants from southern China, the newcomers are from industrial cities in China, such as Beijing or Shanghai, or from other southeast Asia locations, like Taiwan, Malaysia, Burma and Singapore.

Dorothy and Joseph Lee moved to Thousand Oaks from Minnesota in 1981 after he took an engineering position at a Woodland Hills industrial firm. Rather than live in Los Angeles, the couple bought a house in Thousand Oaks, mainly because Ventura County home prices were cheaper.

But it did not take long for the Lees and their four children to fall in love with the area’s sunny weather and the relaxed lifestyle, said Dorothy Lee, adding that she has never even heard of a burglary in her neighborhood.

She said her family’s experience mirrors those of hundreds of Chinese who have moved to the Thousand Oaks area in the past 10 years.

“The main reason we come to Thousand Oaks is the job,” she said. “Some even work in Los Angeles, but they like to stay in Thousand Oaks.”

In the past few years, an even newer wave of immigrants from China has come to cities like Thousand Oaks to join relatives already settled in the area.

Two years ago, Nancy Lu immigrated to Thousand Oaks from Beijing to provide a better life for her children. Lu left despite the misgivings of her father, who said she would have to struggle to survive in the United States.

Lu, 50, who came to live with her brother, admits that life has been hard. Once an attending physician at a Beijing hospital, she is now a nursing assistant and hopes someday to become a medical technician. It is, she said, a step down.

“I was a doctor in mainland China--past tense,” she said, emphasizing the last two words.

Her husband and children were unable to leave China with her, and Lu came to the United States in 1989 with $30 and some old clothes. For nearly a year, she went to adult school in the morning and worked every afternoon.

Last year, just before her husband and two teen-age children joined her here, Lu was working two full-time jobs. She also learned how to drive, speak English and present herself in job interviews. The interviews were especially traumatic, because jobs in China were assigned at random, she said.

Her husband, also a former doctor, got a job assembling audio parts, and the family of four now rents a two-bedroom apartment near Thousand Oaks High School. Lu acknowledges that it is not an ideal situation.

“Life is not better for me,” she said, “but it will be for my kids.”

Lu now has one full-time job at Westlake Medical Center, but being on a night shift allows her only the weekends to spend with her family. Lu has turned down better job offers in Los Angeles, deciding to stick with Ventura County.

“I like it here,” she said. “It is peaceful.”

The Chinese in Ventura echo her sentiments and say they cannot understand why other Chinese would want to deal with Los Angeles’ high home prices, crime, traffic and smog.

Los Angeles is a nice place to visit once in a while, said Dorothy Lee, who goes there about once a month to buy Chinese groceries and visit friends. But she would not want to live there, she added.

Many of the Chinese in Ventura County say their friends and relatives who live in more urban settings, like Monterey Park and L.A.’s Chinatown, stay there because they do not have to drive to get around and they can survive without having to speak English.

Somis resident Stella Ling said her mother, a tenant in a Chinatown senior housing complex, is a perfect example: “She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t speak English. She still wants to maintain her independence.”

Community leaders say there has been little interest in forming a new Chinatown in Ventura County. The Chinese are too scattered, Ling said, and not enough people have clustered in an area to support one.

“To form a Chinatown, it requires a large concentration of people. We haven’t had that number,” she said. “We’ve had supermarkets close up, restaurants that serve authentic food. We usually think of Chinatown in terms of business.”

The absence of a Ventura County Chinatown has not stopped the Chinese from trying to get to know one another. They have organized two clubs: the Ventura County Chinese-American Club, based in Camarillo, and the Conejo Valley Chinese Cultural Assn. at Thousand Oaks.

The clubs have a combined membership of more than 600 families and run two Chinese-language schools for children. Their annual schedules include such American activities as Halloween parties along with celebrations of holidays like Chinese New Year.

Some Conejo Valley association members have regular basketball games and hiking trips. Because members speak different Chinese dialects, many of them incomprehensible to one another, the Chinese say they communicate in English.

They are rather attached to their slice of suburban paradise, the Chinese say. Los Angeles is worth an occasional trek, but for the comforts of suburban living, they stay in Ventura County.

“The children are going to live in Los Angeles, but we will stay in Oxnard,” Louie said.