Five Alternative Chinatowns

by Ernie Diaz

Spooked by China’s real estate scene but excited by America’s declining home values, many Chinese investors are taking special house-buying trips.

Most people moving overseas prefer a locale where their countrymen have an established presence. Rather than predictable old San Francisco and New York, we’d like to recommend some other cities, whose Chinatown histories are not quite as well-publicized.

Portland

Yes, Portland. With a population of only close to 600,000, Oregon’s largest city might appear a provincial backwater to a Chinese investor, on paper. But Portland has many benefits to draw the well-heeled immigrant. It’s easily one of the greenest, cleanest cities in America, and has most of the big-city attractions without the comparable specter of crime and expense. In fact, the median home price in Portland for November 2008 is $265,000, down seven percent from last year.

Portland was once considered one of the most dangerous ports in the world, and its Chinatown was right on the waterfront. Remnants of the Shanghai Tunnels still exist underground. In the late 1800s, they were connected to Chinatown’s brothels, saloons, and gambling houses. Unwary patrons were sometimes drugged then abducted through the tunnels, and afterwards sold to sea merchants as slave labor.

Visitors today can still tour the tunnels, but they’ll find things above ground much improved. Chinatown now runs into the Northwest Pearl District, forming a large and largely re-gentrified neighborhood. Lofts, condos, and chic eateries combine with a vibrant night life and youth scene far safer and saner than to be found in larger metropoles. The area’s proliferation of microbreweries goes far in consoling new arrivals depressed by the consistently dreary weather.

Honolulu

Honolulu is the only large city in the United States with a majority Asian population (55.85%). This might not mean much to the mainlander who finds Japanese seen and spoken on every corner, but success in the Promised Land involves getting PC in a hurry, anyway. Since it never gets hotter than 35degrees Celsius or colder than 12, the new arrival will find her clothes expenses greatly reduced, which can be reassigned to paying for those 12 dollar cartons of orange juice. Indeed, the cost of living in everything-imported Honolulu is legendarily prohibitive, and even down 48 %, the median home price is still $ 358,000. Then again, the waves crashing on Waikiki Beach should drown out most of the complaining.

The first Chinese arrived in Honolulu in the late 18^th century, but the large scale exploitative labor didn’t start until 1852, with the advent of the sugar industry. Entrepreneurialism rapidly developed Chinatown, despite two major fires leveling it, the second one in 1900 deliberately set to contain the spread of bubonic plague.

Honolulu’s Chinatown Burns, 1900

For most of the latter half of the 20^th century, however, Chinatown was a blight on Honolulu’s sun-kissed landscape, a center for the vice and homelessness part of any big city. Today, though, it has been revitalized. Not just a slick tourist venue, it is still a gateway for Asian immigrants, although you’re just as likely to buy a duck from a Filipino or Laotian at Chinatown’s massive open market. Bohemian nightlife, galleries, boutiques, and a profusion of restaurants at all price levels add to the attraction.

Melbourne

No one promised we’d stay on U.S. soil. Besides, San Francisco is the Melbourne of America, with its art, altering weather, and alternative lifestyles. And the Chinatown. The Chinese came to Melbourne for its gold rush, too. Unsurprisingly, long before the gold rush slowed the Chinese had established scores of provision stores, as well as the institutions and organizations crucial to a people kept insular by rampant racism.

The end of the gold didn’t mean a decline in business for the Chinese, who expanded into importing, furniture-making, and wholesaling fruits and vegetables, as well as the ever popular restaurant business. Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 greatly reduced the Chinese population, to the extent that Melbourne’s Chinatown was in danger of disappearing by the 40s and50s. In the 1960s, however, City Councilor David Wang persuaded the Melbourne City Council to undertake an aggressive redevelopment of the Little Bourke Street area, the heart of Chinatown.

Today it’s a bustling array of Asian eateries and cafes, set off by 20^th century buildings with Chinoiserie facades. Melbourne itself has thrice topped the Economist’s list of world’s most livable cities, lastly in 2005. Melbourne home prices haven’t been buffeted too harshly by the winds of global economic disaster, and median home prices are buoyant at $445,000. That’s still much better than Sydney’s $660,000, and remember that those are Aussie dollars, the ones that have declined so precipitously in comparison to the RMB.

Vancouver

OK, most mainlanders with the capital to buy abroad have probably heard about Van, a haven of diversity and international lifestyles in the Great White North. This is a city of distinct neighborhoods, with the Chinese perhaps the most visible ethnic group.

But the history of the Chinese in Vancouver goes far past the 1980s influx. Completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 left hundreds of Chinese out of work and begrudged for their presence. Discrimination kept them to laundries and delivery jobs, and living around Vancouver’s 1^st Street, soon known as Shanghai Alley. 1885 was the same year the Canadian government put a head tax of $50 dollars on each Chinese immigrant, increased to $500 in 1903.

In 1907, resentment over a recession and the perceived role of Chinese undercutting employment sparked a riot that swept through Chinatown. In 1923, the Exclusion Act further hampered the development of Vancouver’s Chinese community, limiting Middle Kingdom emigrants from then until 1947 to a mere forty four. The grim history is only included to dissuade any who see Vancouver’s latter day “Asian Invasion” as the arrival of a community that hadn’t paid its dues.

Today, the original Chinatown, a ten square block area on downtown Vancouver’s eastern edge, has been revitalized, although Asian-oriented malls can be found throughout the city and on out into the suburbs. A good thing, too, since investors looking to pick up property in Vancouver proper face a median price of $666,525, and that’s down nineteen percent from last year.

Los Angeles

Chinacounty’s Hsi Lai Temple, the biggest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere

Another obvious choice; this is the main destination for the house-hunting expedition referenced above, and with good reason: LA’s average home price is down thirty two percent year-on-year, to $340, 000. Many cities just south of LA have dipped below $300,000 for the first time since 2001, and not just in places where police helicopters rattle the windows at night and “fireworks” startle sleepers at all times of year.

Los Angeles actually has a Chinacounty, a broad swath including most of the San Gabriel Valley. It started in Monterey Park, just east of East Los Angeles proper, in the early 80s. By the early 90s, Chinacounty was anything but a ramshackle collection of herb shops and fish markets. Today, more than half of the majestic McMansions peering from within gated communities in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains are occupied by Chinese families.

Rowland Heights’ Hong Kong Plaza, in Chinacounty

Caucasians and Hispanics in the area are as accustomed to seeing Mandarin/English signage as Beijingers and the Shanghainese are. The prospect is ideal for the Chinese investor who, like many a China Expat, seeks not so much cross-cultural growth as a home away from home. Such a one need never learn English, although he should be warned that his kids will only speak Mandarin at special weekend schools, at gunpoint.

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2. Film Review: Forbidden City USA

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