Funeral Home Plan Withdrawn After Protest by Chinese Community : Cultures: Rose Hills wanted to provide better service, but residents and businesses made it clear that places associated with death are undesirable.

In its eagerness to better serve its Chinese clients, the company that owns the sprawling Rose Hills cemetery near Whittier envisioned a funeral home in the heart of Alhambra, complete with Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking assistants.

Rather than gratitude, however, Rose Hills executives got an unexpected cultural lesson: More than a thousand residents and small-business owners, most of them Chinese, signed petitions and waved banners opposing the proposed mortuary--widely feared to bring sickness and bad fortune to any business or home located near it.

Although the dispute was resolved amicably recently when Rose Hills quietly announced it was withdrawing its application for a conditional-use permit for the site, some community leaders say it tells the story of a divided Alhambra taking clumsy steps toward cultural understanding.

Rose Hills executives approached City Hall officials and the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce about two months ago about the busy site at Valley Boulevard and 3rd Street, but no one involved in those talks anticipated the forceful community response.

“I don’t think the people they met with had the Asian insight into the mortuary situation,” said Paul Talbot, former executive director of the Chamber of Commerce.

What came to mind for Talbot and hundreds in the Chinese community when they heard about the proposal was feng shui, the centuries-old Chinese practice of ensuring that buildings, roads and other man-made objects are in harmony with nature.

The direction a building faces, street location, even birth dates and burial sites of ancestors, play key roles in allowing for the flow of good luck and wealth.

Funeral homes, cemeteries or any other places associated with death are, to put it mildly, undesirable.

“There’s a lot of residential right behind (that location). And Valley Boulevard is the heart of the Asian retail community, with mom-and-pop businesses and banks,” Talbot said. “My feeling was, you’re going to end up with three or four blocks vacant within a couple of years because of the bad feng shui that goes with (a mortuary).”

Rose Hills’ application for a conditional-use permit was pulled from last week’s Planning Commission agenda as news of the community dissent reached Sandy Durko, the company’s executive vice president. In a quiet, behind-the-scenes lunch meeting last week, Durko met with community leaders and agreed to seek another site with community input.

Some business people and residents became distraught at news of the planned mortuary, losing sleep, breaking out in hives and having trouble concentrating at work, said Llewellyn Chin, an attorney who attended the meeting along with Talbot, Alhambra developer Raymond Cheng and others.

“Nobody wants to go by or go into a mortuary unless they really have to,” Chin said. “There is some fear of ghosts impacting the residential neighborhood. Some people might even try to avoid the place to get where they’re going, and you can’t really do that on Valley Boulevard.”

While Chin said many younger, more Americanized Chinese residents don’t pay as much heed to feng shui, many seek out auspicious dates and signs for special events out of generations of habit.

“People don’t challenge it. It has worked for a long time,” he said.

Locating the mortuary at the busy commercial corner, filled with Chinese restaurants and banks and bordered by a predominantly Chinese residential area, could have spelled disaster for the city, Talbot said.

“Putting a mortuary in doesn’t decrease the property value, but it decreases the numbers of potential buyers,” Talbot said. “Realistically, if you took the Asian property owner out of Alhambra, property values would drop dramatically. That’s what drives Alhambra.”

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Of Alhambra’s 82,106 residents, 26.1% are of Chinese origin, according to the 1990 Census.

Community leaders are quick to point out that another Alhambra site might be appropriate, and Durko said he received half a dozen calls from real estate brokers last Tuesday alone offering suggestions.

About 9,000 people are buried each year at the rambling 2,500-acre Rose Hills cemetery near Whittier, and about 5,000 a year are handled by the funeral home, Durko said. When the company recently surveyed customers, they realized many of their Chinese customers were using the Rose Hills cemetery but going to mortuaries closer to Alhambra and Monterey Park.

“We thought what we were going to do would be a benefit to the community. We thought, ‘Boy, this would be a good thing!’ We’re a quiet neighbor. We are a corporate citizen. We thought we would kind of blend in,” Durko said.

“The emotional level of it is what surprised us,” Durko said.