Teens find a connection in returning to Chinatown
By Juliana Barbassa, The Associated Press
San Bernardino County Sun
Article Launched:10/29/2006 01:00:00 AM PDT
SAN FRANCISCO - Passengers pour from a crowded bus onto a Chinatown sidewalk. The thin frame of a teenage boy is jostled like a rag doll by women with babies, school kids with backpacks, elderly shoppers picking through bins of flopping fish, and tourists looking for bargains among the plastic Buddhas.
A crowd of teens gathered in the dark basement of the Chinese Historical Society on a Friday night bursts into laughter as the familiar scene from their daily lives plays out on video. They made the short movie to reflect their impressions of a neighborhood that is much more to them than dim sum and souvenir shops.
Chinese-American teens in San Francisco have a complicated relationship with the biggest of the nation's many Chinatowns.
On the one hand, it's a place of comfort and familiarity. But the noise, crowds and smells wafting from open-air produce stands selling dried mushrooms or fresh herbs can seem old-fashioned to a generation hooked on iPods and YouTube, and chaotic compared to the suburbs where some now live.
Yet whether they live in the densely packed blocks or visit regularly to find a physical connection to their culture, history and friends with similar backgrounds, Chinatown still is home to the teens who cherish what it represents even as they make fun of it on film.
"Universally, kids will seek a place of comfort," says Ben Wong, director of the Chinatown Beacon Center, a community organization that offers education and leadership programs for youth. "They naturally connect based on ethnicity, language, socio-economic status. If they leave, they come back. It's a place of connection."
For more than 150 years, the neighborhood has sheltered immigrants. It's one of San Francisco's biggest tourist draws, but still offers a first toehold, a network of support and the reassurance of familiar languages and customs to new arrivals.
This is what sets it apart from other ethnic neighborhoods that within decades can go from a dynamic community to little more than a collection of restaurants and quaint signs. The Chinese have been a part of San Francisco from the city's inception, and the neighborhood is a physical reminder of those roots. It has become a tourist attraction, but visitors have to compete for sidewalk space with recent immigrants looking for spices or foods they can't find anywhere else.
The young people who live and congregate here confront the same challenges faced by inner-city youth of all backgrounds: difficulty accessing good health care, a quality education, tight quarters. In hotels where one room can house a whole family, there's a lack of recreational opportunities and spaces kids can consider their own, said Jan Lin, a professor at Occidental College and author of "Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change."
There are drawbacks, but there is also a sense of community that draws teenagers like Vinson Chen, 17, who helps his parents run a general store in Chinatown although he lives across town in the comparatively tidy and spacious Sunset district.
The Chinese were an integral part of San Francisco's wild Gold-Rush days, but for decades segregationist practices forced them to pack their lives into a dozen or so square blocks. They provided for themselves what the outside world would not: schools, markets, medical care and entertainment, building a home in a country that was intent on making them feel unwelcome.
The 1906 earthquake destroyed the old Chinatown, along with most of downtown San Francisco. Some local leaders saw it as an opportunity to sweep the enclave away altogether.
"The cities in the immediate vicinity of the San Francisco Bay never in the past had such opportunity as now to forever do away with the huddling together of Chinese in districts," the Oakland Enquirer wrote days after the destruction.
Instead, the neighborhood was rebuilt, this time in an elaborate Oriental style whose curved eaves and colorful lanterns were designed to attract tourists even as it continued to house traditional family associations, herb shops and restaurants.
Even as immigrants established themselves and moved to outlying neighborhoods, San Francisco and especially Chinatown grew to become "a center of Chinese and Chinese-American culture," says historian Judy Yung, who grew up in the neighborhood during the 1950s and recently published "San Francisco's Chinatown - Images of America."
Today, the largest number of ethnic Chinese in the city live in the Sunset district. But when a leading Board of Supervisors candidate seeking to represent the Sunset held his first fundraiser, it was not in that part of San Francisco but in Chinatown.
"Whether you're living in the Sunset or other parts of the city, you'll return to Chinatown because that remains the cultural and political center of the Chinese-American community," says David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee and a professor of political science at San Francisco State University.
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