The Great Wall of Chinatown
Cantonese filled John Fong Chin’s ears as a boy growing up in Los Angeles’ Chinatown more than four decades ago.
But these days when the second-generation Chinatown merchant walks down the street from his gift shop, he’s more likely to hear a Chinese dialect he can’t understand. And he can’t decipher the mix of signs--in Vietnamese, Cambodian or Thai--above the newer shops and restaurants.
Ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia have come to dominate Chinatown, operating nearly 90% of the businesses. In their ginseng shops, jewelry stores, restaurants and swap-meet-style boutiques, they cater to other recent immigrants who miss the customs of their homelands.
A block away, Chin, 49, and other descendants of Chinatown’s original residents hang on to dying tourist businesses begun by their fathers in the late 1930s. In kitschy, Chinese-style buildings from that era, they gamely sell egg rolls, back-scratchers and painted fans to the few tourists who haven’t gone elsewhere.
Chinatown is a community divided. A new wave of immigration over the last two decades has created a dual society of scrambling entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia and more assimilated, older merchants whose families emigrated from China more than six decades ago. They ply their wares on the same streets yet remain miles apart in language and tradition.
“A lot of people don’t understand,” Chin said. “A lot of people think Asians are Asians.”
That estrangement keeps Chinatown from confronting economic changes that threaten its existence. Its businesses continue to weaken amid the state’s economic problems, the collapsed real estate market and stiff competition from the glitzy emporiums of the San Gabriel Valley and other new centers of Chinese American life. While the promise of economic development is on the horizon, such as the million-dollar light-rail station planned for the community, Chinatown sits unorganized and immobilized, in danger of literally and figuratively missing the train.
“Why should we be this way?” asked Peter Woo, president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
College Street, which cuts across Spring and Hill streets, is the unofficial dividing line between the groups. North of College, Chin runs his shop in a style that he says is distinctly different from the Teo Chew, ethnic Chinese who came from Southeast Asia.
He displays his goods on glass shelves, while many of the newer owners pile their wares onto sidewalk tables and in open-air stalls. Shoppers from the Teo Chew businesses who drift northward haggle with Chin and ask him to lop off the sales tax.
“We’re not familiar with that style of business,” he said. “We can’t do it. It drives me nuts.”
Still, he admits his part of Chinatown could take a lesson from the aggressive business tactics of the newer owners. Although he proudly displays ornate cloisonne statuettes with $695 price tags, it’s the 3-for-$1 sandalwood soap bars that tourists snap up.
Chin’s Sincere Importing Co. sits in Central Plaza, a complex of aging structures strung with faded paper lanterns and marred by pigeon droppings, boarded-up windows and “for rent” signs. Built in the 1930s by the Chinese American community, the neighborhood replaced the original Chinatown, which was destroyed when Union Station was built.
“New Chinatown,” created in 1938 and 1939, presented a Hollywood-like version of Shanghai streets. It was the CityWalk of its time, thronged by tourists whose cars jammed the streets. Film stars and City Hall bureaucrats partied late into the night. After midnight, Chinese gamblers and revelers revived themselves in diners with bowls of jook, a rice porridge.
The shop owners, Cantonese-speaking southern Chinese farmers and merchants, had fled drought, famine and floods. Many came from Toishan, a rural area south of Guangzhou, the city formerly known as Canton. With the port of Hong Kong only a river trip away, the Toishan emigrated in waves to the United States. Their dialect, along with Cantonese, became the language of commerce in Chinatown as they prospered off the free-spending crowds.
Pastime or Livelihood?
Today, their college-educated children have long since moved on to professional jobs elsewhere. A few, such as Chin, stay. The crafts and miniature-furniture wholesaler keeps his barely profitable shop open for sentimental reasons. His father started the business in 1937 out of a street stall that he rented for 50 cents a day.
Architect Ron Louie, 57, of San Marino spends Monday nights and Sunday afternoons in the 58-year-old K.G. Louie Co. store. Steps away from Chin’s shop, it is crammed with nearly identical goods that sell just as poorly. Although his father died 40 years ago, Louie and his five brothers faithfully put in their shifts each week.
“I don’t see us selling the store,” he said. “It breaks even, and we just want to keep the family name here.”
But breaking even is not good enough for merchants south of College, for whom business is a livelihood, not a pastime.
Many arrived in Chinatown in the 1970s after the Vietnam War, along with smaller numbers of ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodians and other Southeast Asians. According to 1990 U.S. census reports, 11% of the community’s 25,000 residents identify themselves as Southeast Asian, while 43.5% identify themselves as Chinese. But the data don’t take into account the fact that many Southeast Asians consider themselves Chinese even though they were not born in China.
That’s because many of the newcomers are part of the Chinese diaspora. From 1910 on, their families fled famine and drought and, later, communism to settle in half a dozen Southeast Asian countries. Many then fled again when communism came to those nations. Through it all, they clung to their Chinese roots--but at a price.
In Southeast Asia, they faced discrimination and were stereotypically called “Asian Jews” as they started up businesses and kept their cultural traditions. When these immigrants arrived here, most Cantonese-speakers could not relate to them. Many spoke a different dialect, were poor and came to Chinatown because Chinese social service agencies were based there.
The majority of the recent immigrants were Chiu Chou, as they are called in Cantonese, or Teo Chew, as they call themselves. Whether they come from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand or Vietnam and speak those languages, most also speak the dialect of the Teo Chew region north of Guangzhou.
In Chinatown, they became one people again--and outsiders again.
“In 1975, we were looked down upon as refugees,” said Kevin Ng, 29, a Cambodia-born jewelry store operator whose father helped found the Teo Chew Assn. to aid the new immigrants.
“But after a few years, the business community started to develop and the older Toishan couldn’t compete,” Ng said. “A lot of the restaurants and shops are now owned by Southeast Asian immigrants.”
An estimated 60% of the more than 500 Chinatown businesses are owned by ethnic Chinese who emigrated from Vietnam, said chamber President Woo. Another 30% are owned by Chinese who filtered through other Southeast Asian countries, according to estimates from Chinatown merchants.
The Teo Chew span both groups and dominate Chinatown’s business district. Near the entrance on Hill Street stands the impressive Teo Chew Assn. building, with its tea and game rooms for the elders, classrooms for English instruction and altar to Kwan Kung, a Teo Chew folk hero.
“It was a bank, but we bought it and paid $1.28 million in five years with donations from merchants,” said a proud Kim Tsai, secretary of the Teo Chew Assn.
The Teo Chew also began a fund-raising drive for a $500,000 ornamental gateway project for Chinatown. They pledged $50,000 themselves and have organized $225,000 in pledges from more than 20 community groups, Tsai said.
Despite their numbers and economic clout, the Chinatown Teo Chew are not politically active, she said. They do not belong to the decades-old Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn., the umbrella group that includes the traditional, family-based Chinese associations. Few Teo Chew have joined the Chinese Chamber of Commerce because its meetings are held in English, which many Teo Chew speak with difficulty, she said.
Instead, the Teo Chew keep to their shops or their association because, Tsai said, “there’s a family feeling in this group.”
And, others say, old resentment continues against the Teo Chew. Elderly Cantonese-speakers still shun Teo Chew-run grocery stores and some complain that Chinatown is no longer Chinese.
Divided by Mistrust
Others make jokes at the expense of the newcomers, revealing prejudice. “No one will admit it, but it exists,” said one Chinese American, a descendant of the original residents. The mistrust and resentment keep each group apart even as they suffer from fierce competition with businesses in the San Gabriel Valley.
The wave of Asian immigration that began in the 1970s also brought thousands of Southeast Asian and mainland Chinese immigrants to Alhambra, Monterey Park, San Gabriel and other communities. With cheaper land costs and more lenient building codes, they constructed neon-and-glass malls, drawing shoppers from Chinatown.
“People used to walk in Chinatown until 6 or 6:30 p.m.,” said Ng, of the family-owned Mei Hing Lung Jewelry Co. on Broadway. “Now, there’s hardly any foot traffic after 5 o’clock. . . . Chinatown is dying.”
A USC business graduate, Ng said he has contemplated leaving Chinatown for a job with a Northern California winery. Meanwhile, his father, Tap Ngo, 68, pursues real estate investments in China, the real backbone now of the family business.
Tsai, who was born in Hong Kong but claims Teo Chew as her heritage, said she started her photo business in 1982 because of plentiful foot traffic. But business has slumped since the 1992 riots, prompting her to turn to portraits, oversized enlargements and government photography contracts.
“I thank God we’re surviving,” she said.
Smaller, less-profitable businesses have demanded rent reductions throughout Chinatown, sparking foreclosures when building owners couldn’t pay their mortgages, said David Louie, a fourth-generation Chinese American (no relation to Ron Louie) and a commercial real estate agent.
More than 20 retail and office buildings in the neighborhood went into foreclosure last year. The more than 196,000 square feet of retail and office space they represented was equal to one-fourth of Chinatown’s business district, said Louie, who specializes in Chinatown properties. Buildings with nearly that much square footage face foreclosure this year, Louie said, as their owners struggle to make mortgage payments.
And that doesn’t include long-standing vacancies in buildings that once housed landmark restaurants such as Yee Mee Loo and General Lee’s or the 25,000 square feet of never-leased retail space next to the 3-year-old Metro Plaza Hotel.
With land prices falling from the 1980s’ highs of $270 per square foot to $125 per square foot, Chinatown is attracting new owners.
They include investment groups of older, more established Chinese American doctors and entrepreneurs who will probably take a more active role in Chinatown’s future, Louie said. Real estate speculators, mainly up-and-coming ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia who know the Chinese market, are also showing interest, as well as non-Chinese developers, he said.
“That’s good,” he said. “They will bring added vitality and economic restructuring. I see a resurgence after this.”
Louie, 48, typifies a group of assimilated, well-off Chinese Americans, descendants of the original Cantonese-speakers, trying to revive the ailing Chinatown. For them, the tiny neighborhood is the emotional center of Los Angeles’ Chinese community and tugs at them, even though they no longer work or live there.
“What Chinatown used to be is Chinatown for me,” Louie said.
Three years ago, he and a group of business owners, professionals and community activists formed the Chinatown Economic Development Council. Loosely allied with the nonprofit Asian American Economic Development Enterprises and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the council seeks to boost business development and end the past emphasis on construction of affordable housing.
Real Estate in Flux
In response, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency is shifting gears. In the works are a $500,000 matching small business loan program to improve building facades and interiors, an anti-graffiti mural program and a $50,000 study of the community’s needs. The council is working with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on its plans for a light-rail station at Alameda and College streets. With a 19-foot-high platform sloping gently toward Broadway, the stop would create room for 480,000 square feet of retail development.
But the payoff may still be five to 10 years away.
For now, Chinatown real estate remains in flux and no stable body of landowners exists to take charge. Louie and his group are sincere and committed, but are outsiders nonetheless, not Chinatown property owners themselves and with few connections to the Southeast Asian merchants who make their livelihood there.
Woo, the chamber head, envisions turning Chinatown’s herb and jewelry shops into a specialty retail area. But only 100 of Chinatown’s 500 businesses belong to the chamber and few are herb and jewelry sellers.
Meanwhile, the Teo Chew and the older businesses continue to struggle. The Teo Chew Assn. locks its doors by late afternoon. By then, few pedestrians can be found on the sidewalks either north or south of College, and merchants sit idle. The cars that pass are filled with workers rushing north toward the Pasadena Freeway and home.
“It’s not going to get better in a hurry,” said shop owner Chin.
