Week 2 - Chinatown

Chinatown of Los Angeles is a neighborhood known for its rich Chinese culture and history. Because it was home of the majority of the first generation Chinese migrants in Los Angeles during the 1900s, many people visit Chinatown to get a taste of the Chinese culture, architecture and way of life in America.

At first glance, I was disappointed by how Americanized and commercialized Chinatown was. The streets were labeled with ridiculously American names like "Bamboo Plaza" and "Mandarin Plaza" - certainly not what the local first generation Chinese immigrants had called them. As I walked around, I passed by families of caucasian tourists with their cameras and fanny packs, a group of elderly men and women walking into a building labeled "Chinese Historical Society of Southern California," and international eateries such as "Via Cafe" and "Wonder Bakery" that certainly were not Chinese. There were informational placards placed all around the city telling about the history of Chinese immigration in the area and although I did enjoy the amount of historical information provided, I felt that the entire area was artificially created to look Chinese without any true local Chinese people or culture surrounding the neighborhood.

Elderly Tourists

Chinese woman walking through more traditional part of Chinatown

It was only after I traveled past the areas labeled like Bamboo and Mandarin Plaza that I found the rich cultural diversity that I was looking for. Farther down the way there were shops and restaurants that reminded me much more of the ones I had seen while studying abroad in Shanghai - junk shops crowded with a plethora of random items for sale, fancy tea houses, fish markets with live fish for sale, and noodle and soup restaurants. For the first time since I arrived I saw Chinese men and women shopping alongside the tourists and conversing with one another in the streets. I even saw one group of men gambling with dice in the middle of the street exactly like they did at the back corner of our ENCU campus in Shanghai.

The major difference between this Chinatown and other Chinese cultural hotspots was the large latino influence present in the area. Most signs and advertisements provided spanish translations under them and I passed just as many Hispanic men and women as I did Asian. I think that because Los Angeles has a large Mexican as well as Asian population, they had both inhabited this neighborhood as a comfortable place that welcomed diversity.

Many of the signs in Chinatown provided Spanish Translations.

In Burgess's The Blackwell City Reader in Chapter 37, "The Growth of the City," he places Chinatown in the zone of deterioration as a part of the slums; "The slums are also crowded to over-flowing with immigrant colonies - The Ghetto, Little Sicily, Greek-Town, Chinatown - fascinatingly combining old world heritages and American adaptations."  Although the location of Chinatown in Los Angeles fits this description (about 5 minutes from downtown), I believe that it has economically outgrown the typical "slum." Whether the area owes it's increase in revenues to the tourism that the Americanized part of Chinatown brings in or through other ways, I would classify the Chinatown in Los Angeles as a neighborhood extremely safe and clean compared to other slums in a city's zone of deterioration.