I am walking through Dynasty Center, warmed by the morning sun. The season’s rainstorm brought a sky as blue as a newborn’s eyes, but water vapor is still rising from the multicolored canopies. Stalls with vendors selling densely packed sun-faded souvenirs is the Chinatown setting I’ve been walking through for as long as I can remember, from New York up to San Francisco and back to L.A. Turtles the size of chicken nuggets paddling in their little plastic boxes, accompanied by the barks of little mechanical dogs that march stiffly in the same futile direction, beneath the phone chargers, the rows of luggage, and the bamboo clusters peeking over one another in ceramic pots. I am walking past walls of pajamas with Disney characters, then walls of backpacks with Marvel characters. Then there are characters I only vaguely recognize, some I feel real fondness toward but no present desire for, all those Labubus of yesteryear.
I had been driving west through downtown and stopped in Chinatown to wait out the morning congestion in a new café that used to be an old bistro. One thing I don’t think gets mentioned enough about L.A. is all the positive aspects of traffic. Sometimes sitting in the car makes you want to die, but other times the standstill on the freeway is a provocation. It forces you to get out of your car so you can really look at a place and forces you to reckon with all that it means.
Walking from my parking spot, I buy cilantro and two star fruits from a bundled-up grandmother eating from her own supply of sticky corn. I wonder if I could pick up a bamboo cluster for a friend, as a birthday present. Perhaps some paper manifestations just in time for the year of the Fire Horse.
But it is then that I realize that perhaps I am being looked at with curiosity. There aren’t many customers inside Dynasty to begin with, but I am the only one that the vendors seem to be watching. I stop and stare back.
“Ni Hao,” one of them finally says, spoken in a warped inquisitive tone, like a test. As if he is really trying to ask: Who are you? Where did you come from? Are you lost? What are you doing here?
These are valid questions. What am I doing here?
Every city I have ever found myself alone in, I have gone directly to its Chinatown. A 12-hour layover in Istanbul, a summer abroad in Paris, a weekend trip to Athens from London, a visit to a friend in Seoul. It’s an impulse I’ve always followed but haven’t questioned too closely. I tell myself I am seeking ease, advice from a familiar face, a cozy bowl of soup that tastes like home.
When my family immigrated from China to America, I was surprised that our first shared apartment was on a street with hardly a single English sign. Alhambra was another one of L.A.’s unofficial Chinatowns where everyone still spoke their native tongue. I grew to love places like that, places where I could get affirmation for just speaking Mandarin without an accent, where I was still allowed back simply because I didn’t draw attention to myself. Over the years, Chinatowns have offered me ephemeral homecomings in city after city without demanding that I make my home there.
One day, and I guess that day has finally come, this ruse stopped working. I no longer fit in the picture. I’m a person who creates characters, imbues them with problems and makes up situations for them to struggle through toward emotional epiphanies. The very real people who live in this part of the city have no use for someone like this. The grandmothers might still smile warmly at me, but they are no longer my grandmothers, and I am no longer a child, so why should they offer me refuge.
My mother was dubious when I told her I wanted to write about Chinatown. She said, “You know how older immigrants talk about Chinatown? Three words: dirty, chaotic, broken.”
Historian Norman M. Klein wrote about one of L.A. Chinatown’s most enduring legends: underneath is a hidden web of tunnels, where sinful, lurid acts were carried out and crimes were committed. For decades this myth was passed on as people were suspicious of what they couldn’t understand. After the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Chinatown’s Chinese residents were barred from testifying in court, excluding them from courtrooms that were investigating them, and vulnerable to police officers whose official records stated they couldn’t tell them apart.
That original Chinatown was eventually demolished to clear space for Union Station. The replacement was moved just north of Downtown Los Angeles and opened in 1938. It’s an eerily quiet part of city, especially during the day. Its only post office is in danger of closing due to lack of funding, and fliers are posted up on lamp posts asking for financial support from the community. The owner of the small antiques shop will talk to you for hours about every small business that has come and gone on his block. Fridays and Saturdays a group of young Thai chefs and artisans try to draw crowds to eat and shop at their night market on Mei Ling Way. During game nights, hundreds of Dodgers fans will stream in and park before games; perhaps they will eat a big meal together at Yang Chow but then the crowds depart, the rest of the streets stay quiet.
Perhaps it is the neighborhood’s enduring, somewhat mysterious opacity that appeals to a new generation of designers and artists. They’ve opened studios and galleries alongside the stationery store, coffee shops, tea cocktail lounges, fusion restaurants and destination bars that come fully to life only after dark.
A decades-long business owner on Chung King Road told me, “Every couple of years, a new group of people, recently graduated art students usually, come around, rent space and try to revitalize the streets.” In her shop she sells postcards of faraway places with captions like: A BEST SELLER MOVIE BY JACKIE CHAN RUSH HOUR WAS NOT SHOT HERE. There’s a resigned weariness in her voice when she says, “Then they realize we just don’t get the kind of foot traffic it takes to sustain those kinds of businesses, and it goes away.”
I get it. She’s been living in the community for decades and has seen tides of faces come and go. She sounds already disappointed on their behalf, tired of artists whose far-fetched plans never quite materialize.
There’s something about the architectural scale of Los Angeles Chinatown that has always struck me as somewhere between convincingly authentic and strangely artificial. Is the sky too close to the clay tile roofs? Is the sunset too orange? Did someone repaint the mechanical horses for children one too many times and now their eyes look crazed?
It’s hard to walk during the day between Hill and Broadway without feeling like you’re walking in the backdrop of a movie, like a camera from above is about to come in focus and people will appear out of nowhere and set the place into action. Signage for new and defunct art galleries appear with letters roasted dry by the relentless California sun until the edges of words peel away, looking like they were written in calligraphy.
When pitching a TV show around Hollywood a few years ago, I saw the ways media executives’ eyes perked up with approval when I mentioned Chinatown as a setting. Somehow, always a piece of the city, yet to be claimed. Since I’d been finding myself in various Chinatowns both as a liminal space and a state of mind, I told them I’d claim it, even though it was just as mysterious to me. I thought in trying to capture it, I could join the group of people somehow helping to protect it.
I love exploring Chinatown, peeking into the windows of jewelers boasting diamonds and gold and Rolexes, and discovering secret cinemas across the street from death doulas. But it’s also a place that takes care of its elderly inhabitants, whose presence is most urgently felt. Elders get their hearing checked and play mahjongg and practice calligraphy in the shade of empty plazas. Elders in wheelchairs sit in the sun beside decommissioned shopping malls, whose main purpose seems to be to hold adult daycare centers for senior citizens. There do not seem to be sharks circling.
For a long time I wanted to move to Chinatown myself, to live there even without knowing very much about it. I dreamed of my children learning Chinese in the dual language immersion program of the local elementary. Before moving back to L.A., I had lived in a tenement building in New York’s Chinatown. I miss having claim over a piece of that city that other people found indecipherable. I miss a place that did not make me feel ashamed about my most outlandish yearnings and dreams.
There are many places in this city that real estate developers have found more appetizing. Communities with futuristic dispensaries and start-up athleisure. Thriving shopping malls and long lines around the block for viral beverages. Not here in Chinatown, but perhaps this place is holding out for something better, something more real.
My friend Joseph Lee has his painting studio on the second floor of a strip mall plaza, his half-squeezed tubes of paint line the walls from end to end. On the surface, here is another Chinatown mall whose decommissioned retail and office spaces have stood empty for years. But in recent years, they’ve been turned into studios for architects and designers and other creatives whose floor-to-ceiling windows face one another under Chinatown’s bright sky.
Joe told me he followed his heroes to Chinatown. The first one being Bruce Lee, who once had a martial arts studio in an unmarked building (which Joe found using a now-defunct History Channel app). Then there’s one of his favorite living painters, Henry “Chinatown” Taylor himself, whose gallery and former home are still just around the corner.
At night, Mandarin Plaza buzzes with conversation from the tea shop in the center. On weekends, sometimes a jazz band performs behind the stairwell and revelers dance in the eaves. The sidewalk in front of Café Triste is often so crowded with impeccably dressed patrons, it’s difficult to hear your own thoughts while walking by. Its owner can’t keep the customers sitting down long enough to eat his creative menu, so he thinks he must start serving fries.
My mother brought me to this country as a child and toiled with a ferocious determination that afforded our family the means to move farther and farther from the place we started. Thinking back, it was precisely because she was too busy working to focus on me that I was given the freedom to pursue my own fantasies of becoming a writer.
Chinatown is a part of Los Angeles built by immigrants who were chased, moved aside, distrusted — a place with a violent history it has continuously tried to shake. And yet it remains in a state of reinvention, making it an ideal place for dreamers to impose their improbable dreams, to make bets on themselves as artists, as creatives, as immigrants. Even when those dreams don’t quite hold, it continues to allow people to harbor hope for the next evolution. In that sense, Chinatown carries its own poetic legacy, the myth that deserves to endure.
Xuan Juliana Wang is author of the short story collection “Home Remedies” and assistant professor of English at UCLA.
