Quote:
Originally Posted by paytonc
There's an extensive discussion in "City of Quartz" about the political battle lines in Monterey Park. Now that it's almost exclusively Chinese, density has risen as extended families replaced the many empty-nest households, and that's led to vastly increased commercial densities as well. Monterey Park even went through a pretty contentious eminent domain process to replace some tired auto-oriented retail with a mixed-use lifestyle center:
Atlantic Times Square by Payton Chung, on Flickr |
That Atlantic Times Square development, though dense, isn't designed very well, in my opinion (and it's rather ugly). I assume they used feng shui on it, which explains the weird proportions and odd corridors. They also used a very cheap-looking veneer on it (not surprising, huh?). However, it does contain a Curry House (the Japanese restaurant chain), which opened last year, so this is the only reason why I've been there---it's now the closest Curry House to me in South Pasadena (though I still do go to the OG Little Tokyo one too).
Monterey Park has been Chinese for a while; Taiwanese people started moving there in the 1970s, and for a while it was colloquially known as "Little Taipei." It became more Cantonese later.
I work in an adjacent city called Rosemead, which also has a high Chinese as well as Vietnamese population and businesses. Rosemead was in the news a few years ago because the city wanted to shut down a Chinese poultry slaughterhouse for violations to air quality, water quality and health codes. And neighbors complained of bad odors coming from it. The owners said that it was an attack on their "Chinese culture." I actually don't know how the issue was resolved, because the place is still in business. I don't notice any odors, though, so maybe somehow that was mitigated.
I commute to Rosemead from my home in South Pasadena--once I leave the South Pasadena city limits headed south, I enter Alhambra, another city with a high Chinese population. Let me just say, that having worked in Rosemead for over a year now, and driving through Monterey Park and Alhambra more than I've ever had to before, I have to run the gauntlet of
bad Chinese drivers; pho places abound in Rosemead, but Vietnamese food gets tiring after a while. I don't like dim sum either, but there are lots of dim sum places in the triumvirate of Rosemead/Monterey Park/Alhambra, and many places are cash only or "minimum $10 for credit card or debit card transactions." In other words, I need to find a new job so I can get the hell out of Rosemead; the only thing I like about Rosemead is a Chinese Islamic restaurant that's there, but I don't even go there too often.
Supposedly, the City of Industry in the San Gabriel Valley has become a popular investment area for Chinese businessmen, hence the growth in the Chinese populations of nearby Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights. And of course Hacienda Heights has a large Taiwanese Buddhist temple (Hsi Lai Temple) that opened there in the late 1980s. At the time, it was the largest Buddhist Temple and monastery in North America. They also established Hsi Lai University at the temple in the early 1990s, which changed its name to University of the West, which is now a fully accredited degree-granting university. In the mid-90s they moved to a campus in Rosemead.
I guess the whole point of my post is that the Chinese population (as well as other Asian ethnicities) has been well established in the Los Angeles suburbs for decades. No surprise to me, though, we being on the Pacific Rim.
One entertaining aspect of working in a predominantly Chinese and Vietnamese area is that you see some interesting business signs.
This is in Monterey Park. What kind of law firm is this?
Photo by me
This is a restaurant in Rosemead. Would you eat here?
Photo by me
This is actually a Korean restaurant in the city of San Gabriel:
Photo by me
And if you're Filipino, the name of this bakery in Monterey Park would make you laugh:
Photo by me
(It says "Kiki Bakery." "Kiki" is Tagalog for vagina. Being a bakery, it gave "yeast" a new meaning for me when I first saw this.)
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