Bonnie Tsui & “The Changing Face of America’s Chinatowns”

By Tina | Friday, January 20, 2012 | 3 Comments

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8a chinatown Bonnie Tsui & “The Changing Face of America’s Chinatowns”

Bonnie Tsui’s book The Changing Face of America’s Chinatowns is an analysis of the dynamics of Chinatown’s shifting population of immigrants of various Asian heritage origins, including the ones who are economically enticed to go back to their heritage countries. This book was covered on NPR. In the audio of Chinatown recorded in the NPR covereage, I even heard some Taiwanese/Fujianese spoken, and the book’s topic of study made me reflect on the role of Chinatown in my own life experience and if they are indeed disappearing as Tsui says they are.

When my Taiwanese family first came to the U.S. in the early 1980s, we lived in a little apartment in Los Angeles’ historic Chinatown for a few months before moving out the the “Chinatown” suburbs of Monterey Park and Alhambra areas. After a few more years in one of LA’s oldest towns, Whittier, where my family alone made up practically the entire Asian American population in the area, we moved to yet another Asian suburbia, the Hacienda-Rowland-Diamond-Walnut-Chino corridor where you can find Asian food from practically every corner of Asia within a 15 minute drive and quite a number of public schools there are 30% to 60% or more students of Asian heritage. Although I didn’t grow up in the urban Chinatowns, I most definitely grew up in various evolving forms of Chinatown, communities where you practically cannot survive socially or professionally without knowing how to speak Chinese (and a variety of Asian languages and dialects along with some Spanish).

When Tsui reports that some of the Chinatowns are struggling to even survive, it’s hard for me to believe. Since the urban Chinatowns are indeed what she calls revolving doors, and most people don’t usually stay there permanently and primarily use it as a gateway to America, I can see how that’s true there. But the largely suburban Chinatowns seem to be here to stay, at least for a another half century. In my own experience, it feels like that community is really here to stay. Nevertheless, I wonder if that’s just my wishful thinking, and maybe future economic, social, and political situations may entice people to engage in a sort of reverse immigration. What do you think?

[Photo courtesy of here.]

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Facebook Comments (Beta)

hmoobguy

Yeah, I think that the Chinatowns have a little more time before they completely diminish. With just about every “foreign culture” conforming to the “American culture”, it’s getting harder to keep your culture alive. I can see it right in my own house, with language being the biggest factor. I think that with the loss of your language, then that culture as well is more easily lossed.
http://tinabot.blogspot.com/ TinaTsai

@hmoobguy Yeah, I think I would have “lost the language” if I hadn’t developed an acute taste for Chinese martial arts films in college…
Blamster

I’m only familiar enough on this issue with the Chinese communities in the Northeast so I can only speak to those. Along the I95 corridor all the old school “downtown” Chinatowns are little more than tourist destinations if that. Even the one in Manhattan has shrunk in terms of the Chinese community there.

I would say both the immigrant “entry point” phenomenon as well as the real estate bubble and associated redevelopment/gentrification of the 2000s played a part. However there has been growth in “unofficial Chinatowns”, both urban and suburban, both in places where there were concentrations of Chinese before and where there weren’t.

I think most of the people are here to stay, what’s not clear is how strong the cultural community is going to be in the future, which is related to but not exactly the same as the racial community. I personally intend to contribute as much as I can to a strong cultural community for posterity.

Maybe it comes down to simple numbers but I’d like to see Lunar New Year be as mainstream as St. Patrick’s Day or Columbus Day or all the Jewish festivals.

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