Urban US Chinatowns wane as Asians head to suburbs

[Rail Claimore]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

For the last 10-15 years, at least in SoCal, I've seen plenty of instances where the Asian proprietors of restaurants have also learned to speak Spanish (or at least use Spanish phrases) to some of their other employees like the bus boys and the people in the kitchen; I've even heard the Asian wait-staff speaking to bus boys and cooks in Spanish. It sometimes amuses me to hear Spanish being spoken in a fill-in-the-blank-Asian-ethnicity accent.

It's not just restaurants either. In a lot of factories, warehouses, and other Asian-run companies that employ Mexican labor, all the middle-management is at least conversational in Spanish, and some of them speak Spanish better than English. I worked for a company like this here in Alabama.

[bricky]

Originally Posted by edluva

these suburbs aren't the chinatowns your mother took you to. ny/nj may have lots of big chinese enclaves, but they aren't the same

I think some people on the West Coast tend to associate urban with ghetto, or poor. While that's true for Manhattan's Chinatown, which is still in many ways a classic poor immigrant ghetto, Flushing in Queens plays a role for NY's Chinese community that I think is similar to LA Koreatown's role with the local Korean community. From my understanding, and just like LA's Koreatown, Flushing is not primarily a residential community. Sure, there are a lot of Chinese living there, but the bulk of people on the street on a weekend are actually coming in from elsewhere, by subway or by car. Flushing functions as a downtown for much of the Queens, Manhattan, and Long Island Chinese community, which is by no means uniformly poor. My friends' Chinese doctor coworkers, business owners, even 20-something middle-class 1.5 and 2nd generation Chinese-Americans, often choose to get dinner, hang out, in Flushing, rather than in Manhattan.

One difference is that LA's Koreatown is much more of a draw for non-Koreans, than the Chinese part of Flushing is for non-Chinese. But I think that is mostly to do with LA Koreatown's central location, and Flushing being out in the seeming middle of nowhere. Along with the fact that Koreans have much more of a drinking culture than the Chinese do. In fact, Manhattan's Ktown, while a heck of a lot smaller than it's counterpart in LA, might be similar in the sense of being a pan-Asian nightlife destination. Ktown here is not as much of a metropolitan draw for non-Asians, frankly because there is just so much else going on in a compact, easy to navigate Manhattan, (including on the Asian side, authentic Japanese dining/nightlife).

Also, perhaps the Asian community in NJ is more similar to what you find in California, in it being largely suburban, and middle to upper-middle class. NJ in general does not have the entrepreneurial culture that you find in the Bay Area, but then neither does any other place else in the world. That said, the Indian-American community in particular is very prosperous (among other things, playing a large and often entrepreneurial role in NY area finance), and generally based at least as much in NJ as in NY. Koreans in NJ are also another important, prosperous group, centered around (and having pretty much taken over) Ft Lee and some adjascent towns. There's even a mid-sized clothing brand (Southpole?) started by Koreans out there. Perhaps some other businesses too.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by bricky

I think some people on the West Coast tend to associate urban with ghetto, or poor.

Huh? On the West Coast, urban usually means more $/sf, and moving upward.

[bricky]

Originally Posted by mhays

Huh? On the West Coast, urban usually means more $/sf, and moving upward.

I was thinking more of Southern California, where Downtown LA for instance still has a bad reputation with many people. And for what it's worth, a lot of NYC does look poor. It's not, but looks it. Dirty, grimy, rundown infrastructure, buildings, even in the wealthy parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

[Rail Claimore]

Originally Posted by bricky

I was thinking more of Southern California, where Downtown LA for instance still has a bad reputation with many people.

Downtown LA on the whole for people in SoCal has a net neutral relationship. It's just one node among many in the region. The only people who almost consistently have a bad view of Downtown LA are people who moved to Phoenix or Las Vegas.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by BevoLJ

They still do. Or at least they did 10 years ago. They recruited the Philippines and El Salvador very heavy 10 years ago. Probably 80% of the cooks and 20% of the engineers in the Navy are from those two countries. They Navy offers them great programs to gain citizenship by serving, plus all the same educational opportunities in the US. The other part being that many sailors and marines marry Filipinos and bring them back to the states.

Anyway, your comment about how you notice so many Asian speaking Spanish reminded me of the Filipinos I used to know when I lived there. Most of them knew Spanish. I don't know why, but I always assumed it is from how Spain kind of played a big role in in making the Filipino culture. I don't know if there is much Spanish influence on the language or not, but I always kind of thought maybe there might be.

Interesting, I wasn't aware about the US Navy recruiting in El Salvador.

Spanish has influenced the Philippine languages in terms of vocabulary words (silya for chair, sapatos for shoe/shoes, among many other words), but otherwise, the Philippine languages are all Malayo-Polynesian languages. If there's a grammatical concept from Spanish that has influenced Tagalog, it's the gender thing; Tagalog otherwise doesn't have gender forms (or even plural forms) for nouns, but in Tagalog, someone who gossips, is a tsismoso if you're male, or a tsismosa if you're a female. The word for gossip in Tagalog, "tsismis," of course is derived from the Spanish word for gossip, "chisme" (in Tagalog orthography, a "ts" is pronounced like a "ch" in Spanish).

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by Rail Claimore

Downtown LA on the whole for people in SoCal has a net neutral relationship. It's just one node among many in the region. The only people who almost consistently have a bad view of Downtown LA are people who moved to Phoenix or Las Vegas.

Very true, and I've always thought this. This is why I sometimes wanna laugh when people really try to push downtown LA as the end-all "center" of the city of LA, or even the whole LA region. Don't get me wrong, I'm for the further revitalization of downtown LA, but like you said, it would still only be one node of many. Plus, LA people are actually very fickle when it comes to what neighborhood is "in" at the moment.

And you're right; many people I've known who have a bad opinion of downtown LA were themselves very provincial and from areas like Orange County or even Riverside; and yes, these were the types of people who, in the early 1990s during a big recession we had in California, left for what they thought were better, nicer places, namely, Phoenix and Las Vegas. It's like "huh?? You think those places are nicer??" And ironically, many of the people who left SoCal in the early 1990s for places like those, ended up moving back to SoCal in the later 1990s when the economy got better.

[bgwah]

Isn't there also some separation based on language? With the older Chinatowns staying predominately Cantonese-speaking, while the newer ones are mostly Mandarin-speaking?