When my tech co-workers and I first had heard about Lion Plaza, one of the first Asian malls in the Santa Clara Valley john (Silicon Valley), we were so excited. We would drive 15 minutes each direction to eat lunch there. Before that, the only way we could experience a such concentration of Asian restaurants and shop would be to go to Oakland or San Francisco Chinatown. Both are more than 40 miles away. Yet even Lion Plaza would seem far away when Milpitas Square opened in 1996. One of the largest Asian shopping areas in the Bay Area, former Hong Kong nurse John Luk developed it. Luk is interviewed in this article from the San Jose Mercury News. He talks about his life and strategies for making Asian malls successful.
John Luk Story and Mall Strategy
Luk started off as an emergency room nurse. He even worked his way up to becoming head nurse. Then, after noticing the lack of Asian groceries stores and banquet halls in the Santa Clara Valley, he gathered resources and partners to launch Milpitas Square. While we liked going to Lion Plaza, Milpitas Square is a massive Asian oriented developed on a scale we had never seen before. It situated itself strategically in Silicon Valley’s Golden Triangle.
Luk focuses on two things for developing an Asian themed mall – an anchor tenant and banquet hall facilities. Ranch 99 was the key anchor for Milpitas Square. Incidentally, he was involved with Lion Plaza also. He also worked with an older center in Newark (not far from where I grew up) and brought in a Ranch 99 and a banquet restaurant. I have been to both.
Willow Lung-Amam Paper on Asian American Malls
The history of Asian malls in Silicon Valley is an interesting one. The growth and evolution of these malls reflect the changing demographics and economic realities of Silicon Valley. If you are interested in more detail, I recommend this paper from Willow Lung-Amam on Asian mall evolution in the Valley. Note that if you can’t access it, JSTOR provides an overview here. Lung-Amam also talked about some of the challenges to open Asian malls, such as opposition by local residents, in her book Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia.
The John Luk interview and Lung-Amam’s paper resonates with me because I lived this history. These Asian malls are places near to me that my family and I still go to. The paper also discusses the challenges of urban Chinatowns as suburban dwellers like myself have little reason to go there.
One area that the interview and paper didn’t cover is how the catering to Asian customers doesn’t just happen at dedicated Asian malls. I have talked about how mainstream malls like Valley Fair and Stonestown Galleria have remained viable by catering to Asian American customers. Perhaps a future paper from Lung-Amam will cover this developments.
(photo credit: Nandaro licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)
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