"It's Chinatown"

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"Welcome to Chinatown"
Chicago, Illinois
blink.beloit.edu

Hello Everyone:

It is a new week and a new week of things to talk about.  The Blogger Candidate Forum asked yours truly to remind you that convention coverage will continue this week as the festivities move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Right now, we are going to take a side trip to Chicago's Chinatown and find out how and why it continues to flourish while other fade away.

Chinatowns are fantastic places to spend time.  Blogger has fond memories of spending time in San Francisco's Chinatown and feeling like yours truly in lost in China.  This feeling is one of the reasons that Chicago's Chinatown continues to thrive.  Marwa Eltagouri's Los Angeles Timesar article "Why Chicago's Chinatown is flourishing while others across the U.S. fade," discusses how, in the face of gentrification, the Chinatown is becoming a model for the survival of Chinatowns throughout the United States.

Old Chicago Chinatown
choosechicago.com

Marwa Eltagouri begins with the story of Sau Fung Lam.  When she arrived from China 24 years ago, Ms. Lam went to the grocery store to buy an apple.  Despite her lack of English language skills, she manage to communicate her request via hand gestures.  The grocer seemed to understand and was handed a large onion.  The point here, since Ms. Lam moved from East China to Chicago in the early 1990s, Chinatown has thrived, metamorphosing itself from a partial Chinese community where the residents mainly spoke English into one where businesses and agencies function bilingually.  Primarily because residents speak a Chinese dialect; experts believe that nearly 65 percent are foreign-born.  Chicago is no longer a city where neighborhoods are no longer defined by their ethnicity however, Chinatown is the exception, remaining in the Cermak Road and Wentworth Avenue location since 1912.

Chinatown main street
Chicago, Illinois
chicago-chinatown.info

Ms. Eltagouri writes, "Leaders say Chinatown has avoided gentrification because Chinese Americans value a sense of belonging and choose to stay in the neighborhood.  Few residents move out, and if they do, they their homes to other Chinese."  The numbers near this statement out.  "Between 2000 and 2010, Chinatown's population increased 24% and its Asian population increased 30% Asians make up nearly 90% of the neighborhood's population, according to 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data."  The unnamed experts in Ms. Eltagouri's article also observe that the majority of foreign-born Asian's residing in the community, almost 10 percent arriving in the last ten years, are a sharp contrast to Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco, where immigrants no longer drive the community.

Chinatown Carnival
Chicago, Illinois
chicagotraveler.com

A 2015 report from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning found that nearly "78% of Chinatown residents speak Chinese at home, and of that population, more than three-quarters speaking English 'less than very well.'"  Employment-wise, the report revealed that half of the Chinatown residents work in one of three sectors: food (i.e. grocery and restaurant), healthcare and social services, and manufacturing.  The Chicago Chinatown neighborhood allows Sau Fung Lam to live comfortably in the city without ever learning English.  While this may horrify some segments of the American landscape but she reckons that if Chinatown was consumed by Chicago, ...Life would difficult.  At 81, Ms. Lam spends her days enjoying Cantonese delicacies at MingHin Cuisine, purchasing turnip cakes from the Hong Kong Market, and singing with her sister in a Chinese choir once a week.

Tasty dumplings in Chicago's Chinatown
chicago-chinatown.info

In an acknowledgment of nationally declining Chinatowns, urban planners and Chicago-area organizations have committed to investing this community, which explains why it is doing well.  Case in point, in 2013 the CMAP announce an initiative to preserve Chinatown's cultural identity by enhancing public education and senior care, growing transportation infrastructure, and create more public parks.  Ms. Eltagouri reports, "And in August, the city opened a two-story, $19.1-million branch of the Chicago Public Library that has attracted about 1,500 people a day.  It caters to Chinese-speaking patrons, as many residents turn to the library for English classes.

Chinatowns came to life in the United States following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act  in 1882.  This law forbade Chinese laborers from coming to America, with the exception of merchants and scholars.  Chinese already residing in the U.S. were subject to violent spasms of racism and discrimination, and faced obstacles to assimilating into the nation's socio-economic fabric.  Without a way to return home, the Chinese immigrants learned to rely on urban clusters-i.e. Chinatowns- to survive.

Chicago Chinatown merchant
redline project.com

The Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 and replace by an annual quota of 105 entry visa but ethnic Chinese people were still prohibited from owning property or businesses.  In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act, lifting the racial immigration restrictions.

Between 2000 and 2010, San Francisco's Chinatown, the oldest in the nation, "...the Asian population dropped 19.3%...though the number of Asians living in the core fell by only 3 percentage points," according to census data analysis.  Cindy Wu, the deputy director and planning commissioner at Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco, told Marwa Eltagouri,

You can see a pattern starting to form, and eviction and housing cases tell the  rest of the story.

A worker at Bark Lee Tong filling an herbal prescription
Chicago, Illinois
dnainfo.com

According to a 2015 study published by New York University and Capital One, the difference between Chicago's Chinatown and that of San Francisco or Manhattan is the availability of housing.  Chicago "...doesn't have as high of a demand nor as tight of a supply of rentable apartments..."  However, the experts and civic leaders agree that one of the factors that account for Chicago Chinatown's success is it commitment to tradition, an attraction for both Asian and non-Asian visitors.

One last case study, Nancy Wong moved to Chicago in 1988 from Hong Kong out of concern that the autonomous territory would become part of mainland China.  Ms. Wong opened a floor shop on Archer Avenue, regularly visiting Chinatown to attend to clients.  She thinks the numerous services and agencies available to immigrants and Chinese speakers are another attractive quality.  There are a myriad of housings options available for seniors, employment training courses, and English classes frequently taught at churches.  The primary use of the Chinese language for businesses helps keep Chinatown from becoming just another tourist attraction.  Ms. Wong said,

Some young people even work or live in Chinatown just to learn Chinese