With generations carrying on tradition, L.A.'s Chinatown celebrates 70th anniversary
By David Pierson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer June 28, 2008
Ron Louie has successfully designed high-end homes from Santa Monica to San Marino for four decades.
But at least once a week, the architect leaves his Pasadena home and heads to Chinatown in Los Angeles to run his family's aging trinket store, K.G. Louie.
Making a profit isn't the point. They're lucky to ring up $100 a day.
Carrying on the store is an act of respect to the siblings' father, Gar Fong Louie, and mother, Lee Shee Louie, who were among the original tenants of Central Plaza, the colorful center of Chinatown.
As "New Chinatown" marks its 70th anniversary today, those celebrating will include the so-called grandchildren -- the second- and third-generation Chinese American professionals like Ron Louie who no longer live in Chinatown but keep a finger there nonetheless.
"We all have our professions, but we want to keep the tradition alive," said Louie, 69. "If it wasn't for our parents' sacrifice, we wouldn't be where we are today."
The Louies opened their store in Central Plaza because the original Chinatown was razed for Union Station. Its founding families lived at a time when the Chinese were prevented from buying property, obtaining bank loans and securing desirable jobs.
It wasn't until the next generation that Chinese began to find mainstream professional success.
Many fled Chinatown and moved to the modern Chinese community to the east, in the San Gabriel Valley.
Yet a handful of families, like the Louies, who were part of the neighborhood's 1938 opening, still cling to the narrow pedestrian streets and pagoda-style buildings.
Many will be present tonight at a retro anniversary celebration meant to evoke the glamour days when Hollywood stars would descend on Chinatown.
Organizers will show historic photographs, a swing band will perform and one of Central Plaza's more recent tenants will unveil newly installed neon lights along the roof lines of his three buildings -- an ornament that long distinguished Central Plaza until the lights fell into disrepair in the 1980s.
"We want to pay tribute to these original merchants," said George Yu of the Chinatown Business Improvement District, which helped organize the event that's open to the public. "I think they'd be proud to see what their children have become."
New Chinatown was a popular tourist destination for decades after it opened, perhaps reaching its zenith in the 1970s during then-President Nixon's trips to mainland China. But by the 1980s, the district was in decline, as the epicenter of L.A.'s Chinese community moved east to Monterey Park and vicinity. Merchants struggled as business dropped and crime increased.
But in recent years, Chinatown has rebounded with trendy new boutiques, restaurants, bars and galleries. A new generation of merchants -- many from Vietnam -- have also brought vigor to the district.
Some of the older establishments have seen an uptick in business while others continue to struggle.
Phoenix Bakery is more successful than ever -- settling into Los Angeles icon status to a loyal group of customers, much like its neighbor a few blocks east, Philippe's.
In 1977 the Chans moved the bakery, originally tucked into a corner of Central Plaza, around the corner onto Broadway, where they sell their famed strawberry cream cakes and Sticky Sugar Butterflies from an aqua blue storefront with a logo of a robed boy carrying a cake box behind his back.
"The bakery is still an anchor for our family," said Kellogg Chan, a retired banker and lawyer whose father opened the store. "We all come in and help out."
Two cousins, one a biochemist, the other an engineer, work the bakery on weekends. The store is now managed by Chan's younger brother, Kelly, and his son, Craig.
"I feel like downtown is on the way back," said Craig Chan, 30. "We want to be part of the redevelopment of Chinatown. This is our legacy."
Kellogg Chan, 68, said he was put to work in the bakery by his parents as a young boy. He learned to slice berries, clean pans and bake and ice the cakes.
It was a lesson in discipline and hard work that helped him later in life, he said.
"They stressed education," he said of his parents. "The bakery taught me that success takes a lot of hard work. Why do I come back? Because this was the source. This paid for our educations and our homes."
Sitting at one of the bakery's round tables Thursday, Kelly Chan, 61, was more precise: "We've spent the last 20 years making more money than we know what to do with."
While "the grandchildren" help out in some businesses, other Chinatown shops are still overseen by older generations.
Eileen Soo Hoo stood behind her glass counter selling jade necklaces and beaded bracelets at Phoenix Imports on a recent afternoon, much as she's done every day since 1953, when she married into one of Central Plaza's first families.
"I always say 'one more year,' but we never leave," said Soo Hoo, who is originally from England and speaks with a noticeable accent.
"It's a habit now," she said. "So many others left. They grew tired of Chinatown. They had no childhood because they had to work. They don't want to be tied to a business like this. My kids always ask me why I stay here."
But Soo Hoo can't imagine leaving.
She is so tied to the store that she asked a passing organizer how much of a distraction today's celebrations would be for her business. She said she'd rather look after the store than go outside to join the festivities.
Ron Louie said he invited more than 80 family members to the celebration. He doesn't expect the youngest to show. Some of them haven't ever seen the store.
He sometimes worries that history will be lost. In the last four years, three of Chinatown's mainstays have died: Roger Hong, the son of a pioneering Chinese American lawyer; Gim Fong of Fong's Oriental Works of Art; and John Chin of Sincere Imports.
But Louie doesn't think the family will ever lose the shop.
"Someone will take over," he said. "It's too unique to give up. I'll force my daughter. There's enough of us to find someone."
david.pierson@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-newchinatown28-2008jun28,0,4430138.story
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
At California's Asian fish markets, freshness is everything
At California's Asian fish markets, freshness is everything
By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
6:45 PM PDT, June 22, 2008
OAKLAND -- Rafael Anguiano takes his corners gingerly. He has to -- he's driving an aquarium on wheels, a lumbering delivery truck carrying 3,000 pounds of live fish in large, sloshing tanks.
One sunny afternoon, he sweats freely as he hustles hundreds of flopping fish into the Lucky Seafood Market inside a rolling rubber trash can. Breathless, he dumps five buckets into the store's tanks, the sturgeon, catfish and carp slashing and struggling like salmon surging upstream.
"C'mon, make me full," a Lucky market worker pleads. "One more bucket, one more."
Anguiano's cellphone rings. It's Johnson Cheng, owner of Yet Sun Market six blocks away. Customers are demanding their fish, he says. Wincing into the receiver, Anguiano asks wearily: "People are already waiting for me?"
Cheng, Anguiano says, is a ruthless negotiator: "He wants all my fish and won't take no for an answer. I'm going to have to cut somebody bad today."
Anguiano, 33, is a critical link in California's ethnic food chain. He works for The Fishery, a Central Valley aqua farm that's one of a handful statewide catering to a unique niche: California's Asian markets.
In Asian cuisine, live fish are a delicacy. Asian diners insist they can distinguish on the plate between a fish freshly plucked from a tank or stream and one previously gutted and languishing on ice.
Ken Beer, Anguiano's boss and founder of The Fishery, once believed the Asian live-fish venture would be short-lived. His older ethnic customers would die off, he figured, and new generations would adopt American habits and take to buying fillets in Styrofoam packages.
Instead, new immigrants kept demand high for the dozen California fish farmers who raise product for the state's Asian customers. Small neighborhood markets catering to Asian tastes have expanded outside traditional Chinatowns to suburbs such as the Sunset District in San Francisco and Monterey Park in Los Angeles.
About 25 years after Beer and several others began supplying Asian markets, business is swimming across California.
According to several aqua farmers, the Asian appetite for finned fish -- sturgeon, large-mouthed bass, tilapia, catfish, carp -- comprises 70% of the estimated $50-million California aquaculture industry, not counting algae and shellfish. That's a whopping 20 million pounds annually.
Beers delivers 1 million of those pounds -- and he's in the process of expanding his farms. The Fishery's small fleet of delivery trucks serves markets in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Sacramento.
Still, he worries he won't be able to keep up with demand.
Already, Anguiano plays a cat-and-mouse game with markets. On his twice-weekly Oakland rounds, he serves his veteran customers first, then hits those who play the field with other suppliers.
But word gets out the moment Anguiano's truck is spotted. "I can't drive past a market without my phone ringing," he says. "Everyone has their spies out."
In market after market, Anguiano weighs his loaded trash can on scales. Then he pushes his load -- fish writhing, water spraying off whipping tails -- down narrow aisles with slippery tile floors, shoppers jostling to eyeball his catch. Anguiano knows the appearance of his fish is critical. Anything off-color or under stress will be rejected.
He passes splayed fish heads and turtles with their shells broken open to expose red meat -- soup ingredients. There are live bullfrogs and geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck), which are large saltwater clams with long, meaty necks. Workers scoop a fresh fish from a display tank, stun it with a mallet, then quickly skin and fillet it.
Anguiano negotiates both language and cultural barriers.
"Hey, amigo!" he calls out to one Asian worker. "Boss?"
People smile and point. "I don't know much Cantonese -- just the names of the fish, that's it," he says in one of Oakland's Chinatown markets. "But luckily this owner speaks fluent Spanish."
Ken Beer wanted to study bighorn sheep.
The year was 1975 and Beer had a summer to kill at home in California before starting graduate school. That's when three Arkansas entrepreneurs approached him with a harebrained scheme.
Soon Beer was hooked. He skipped graduate school and started raising fish. Mistakes were made. One customer wanted 100,000 finger-length catfish, half his year's earnings. An excited Beer scrubbed the holding pool with bleach to kill any bacteria. A tad too much bleach, it turned out.
"Within 15 minutes, the fish were dead," he said. "That took a lot of the starch out of me."
By 1982, Beer was selling live catfish one or two at a time right from the farm in Galt, just outside Sacramento. He noticed that Chinese and Vietnamese from the Bay Area would snap up a hundred fish at a time to sell in their city markets.
That's when he thought: Why not deliver wholesale?
Beer now serves more than 50 markets in the Bay Area -- a far cry from the days of the bullfrog incident a decade ago.
When he began his run that day, the frogs were sedate inside a burlap sack on the back of the truck. By the time he reached San Francisco, the ice had melted and the heated frogs were jumpy.
He was in for a surprise, he said, when he went to fetch some frogs for delivery. He opened a sack and 50 leaped out.
"People were chasing them around, helping me round them up."
Esther Lin is wide-eyed as she watches Anguiano empty 150 pounds of large-mouth bass into the display tanks of her corner market in Oakland's Chinatown. She scans the tanks for dinner.
As a child in Hong Kong, she used to run to meet the fishing boats. "For Chinese, a live fish means good luck," she says. "It's part of the joyful process of eating."
Outside, Anguiano stands atop his truck bed with a large net. He scoops the catch 10 at a time into his rubber can. Water splashes onto the windshield of a car waiting for the light to change. The motorist glares. Anguiano keeps working.
People stop and stare at the wet fish, skin glinting in the sun. Once, Anguiano said, a woman asked what would happen to the fish. When he told her they'd soon be killed, she asked to pray for them.
His cellphone rings. It's Johnson Cheng. Again.
"OK, OK," Anguiano says. He hangs up, shaking his head. "Ay, ay, ay. He's gonna kill me."
Soon, he's parked outside Cheng's market. Co-owner Sherlyn Cheng meets him at the curb. The market delivers to 20 restaurants, and customers are hankering for their fish.
"They're complaining like crazy," Cheng says.
Johnson Cheng leaps onto the truck to select the best fish. "Frozen fish is like chewing wood," he says. "My customers want everything live."
Cheng wants 700 pounds of bass and keeps cajoling until Anguiano relents and offers 100 pounds more.
"Usually, he's my enemy," Cheng says. "Today, he's my amigo. You saved my life, man."
When Anguiano warns him the next delivery will be smaller, Cheng quips: "Next time you will be my enemy again."
Then the old woman appears. Stooped over her cane, she shows up every time, like a sea gull trailing a fishing trawler, in search of free fish. She smiles, raising her tiny sack.
"She plays hardball," Anguiano says. "She buys me fruit as barter." He motions that he is out of fish. The woman vanishes. Then she's back -- with kiwis. "Plan B," Anguiano says.
He slides a wriggling catfish into her bag and she scurries away. Later, as he readies to leave, he sees the kiwis she has left on his truck bumper.
"A deal's a deal," he says. "She's some businesswoman."
john.glionna@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/columnone/la-me-fishnew23-2008jun23,0,6769960.story
By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
6:45 PM PDT, June 22, 2008
OAKLAND -- Rafael Anguiano takes his corners gingerly. He has to -- he's driving an aquarium on wheels, a lumbering delivery truck carrying 3,000 pounds of live fish in large, sloshing tanks.
One sunny afternoon, he sweats freely as he hustles hundreds of flopping fish into the Lucky Seafood Market inside a rolling rubber trash can. Breathless, he dumps five buckets into the store's tanks, the sturgeon, catfish and carp slashing and struggling like salmon surging upstream.
"C'mon, make me full," a Lucky market worker pleads. "One more bucket, one more."
Anguiano's cellphone rings. It's Johnson Cheng, owner of Yet Sun Market six blocks away. Customers are demanding their fish, he says. Wincing into the receiver, Anguiano asks wearily: "People are already waiting for me?"
Cheng, Anguiano says, is a ruthless negotiator: "He wants all my fish and won't take no for an answer. I'm going to have to cut somebody bad today."
Anguiano, 33, is a critical link in California's ethnic food chain. He works for The Fishery, a Central Valley aqua farm that's one of a handful statewide catering to a unique niche: California's Asian markets.
In Asian cuisine, live fish are a delicacy. Asian diners insist they can distinguish on the plate between a fish freshly plucked from a tank or stream and one previously gutted and languishing on ice.
Ken Beer, Anguiano's boss and founder of The Fishery, once believed the Asian live-fish venture would be short-lived. His older ethnic customers would die off, he figured, and new generations would adopt American habits and take to buying fillets in Styrofoam packages.
Instead, new immigrants kept demand high for the dozen California fish farmers who raise product for the state's Asian customers. Small neighborhood markets catering to Asian tastes have expanded outside traditional Chinatowns to suburbs such as the Sunset District in San Francisco and Monterey Park in Los Angeles.
About 25 years after Beer and several others began supplying Asian markets, business is swimming across California.
According to several aqua farmers, the Asian appetite for finned fish -- sturgeon, large-mouthed bass, tilapia, catfish, carp -- comprises 70% of the estimated $50-million California aquaculture industry, not counting algae and shellfish. That's a whopping 20 million pounds annually.
Beers delivers 1 million of those pounds -- and he's in the process of expanding his farms. The Fishery's small fleet of delivery trucks serves markets in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Sacramento.
Still, he worries he won't be able to keep up with demand.
Already, Anguiano plays a cat-and-mouse game with markets. On his twice-weekly Oakland rounds, he serves his veteran customers first, then hits those who play the field with other suppliers.
But word gets out the moment Anguiano's truck is spotted. "I can't drive past a market without my phone ringing," he says. "Everyone has their spies out."
In market after market, Anguiano weighs his loaded trash can on scales. Then he pushes his load -- fish writhing, water spraying off whipping tails -- down narrow aisles with slippery tile floors, shoppers jostling to eyeball his catch. Anguiano knows the appearance of his fish is critical. Anything off-color or under stress will be rejected.
He passes splayed fish heads and turtles with their shells broken open to expose red meat -- soup ingredients. There are live bullfrogs and geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck), which are large saltwater clams with long, meaty necks. Workers scoop a fresh fish from a display tank, stun it with a mallet, then quickly skin and fillet it.
Anguiano negotiates both language and cultural barriers.
"Hey, amigo!" he calls out to one Asian worker. "Boss?"
People smile and point. "I don't know much Cantonese -- just the names of the fish, that's it," he says in one of Oakland's Chinatown markets. "But luckily this owner speaks fluent Spanish."
Ken Beer wanted to study bighorn sheep.
The year was 1975 and Beer had a summer to kill at home in California before starting graduate school. That's when three Arkansas entrepreneurs approached him with a harebrained scheme.
Soon Beer was hooked. He skipped graduate school and started raising fish. Mistakes were made. One customer wanted 100,000 finger-length catfish, half his year's earnings. An excited Beer scrubbed the holding pool with bleach to kill any bacteria. A tad too much bleach, it turned out.
"Within 15 minutes, the fish were dead," he said. "That took a lot of the starch out of me."
By 1982, Beer was selling live catfish one or two at a time right from the farm in Galt, just outside Sacramento. He noticed that Chinese and Vietnamese from the Bay Area would snap up a hundred fish at a time to sell in their city markets.
That's when he thought: Why not deliver wholesale?
Beer now serves more than 50 markets in the Bay Area -- a far cry from the days of the bullfrog incident a decade ago.
When he began his run that day, the frogs were sedate inside a burlap sack on the back of the truck. By the time he reached San Francisco, the ice had melted and the heated frogs were jumpy.
He was in for a surprise, he said, when he went to fetch some frogs for delivery. He opened a sack and 50 leaped out.
"People were chasing them around, helping me round them up."
Esther Lin is wide-eyed as she watches Anguiano empty 150 pounds of large-mouth bass into the display tanks of her corner market in Oakland's Chinatown. She scans the tanks for dinner.
As a child in Hong Kong, she used to run to meet the fishing boats. "For Chinese, a live fish means good luck," she says. "It's part of the joyful process of eating."
Outside, Anguiano stands atop his truck bed with a large net. He scoops the catch 10 at a time into his rubber can. Water splashes onto the windshield of a car waiting for the light to change. The motorist glares. Anguiano keeps working.
People stop and stare at the wet fish, skin glinting in the sun. Once, Anguiano said, a woman asked what would happen to the fish. When he told her they'd soon be killed, she asked to pray for them.
His cellphone rings. It's Johnson Cheng. Again.
"OK, OK," Anguiano says. He hangs up, shaking his head. "Ay, ay, ay. He's gonna kill me."
Soon, he's parked outside Cheng's market. Co-owner Sherlyn Cheng meets him at the curb. The market delivers to 20 restaurants, and customers are hankering for their fish.
"They're complaining like crazy," Cheng says.
Johnson Cheng leaps onto the truck to select the best fish. "Frozen fish is like chewing wood," he says. "My customers want everything live."
Cheng wants 700 pounds of bass and keeps cajoling until Anguiano relents and offers 100 pounds more.
"Usually, he's my enemy," Cheng says. "Today, he's my amigo. You saved my life, man."
When Anguiano warns him the next delivery will be smaller, Cheng quips: "Next time you will be my enemy again."
Then the old woman appears. Stooped over her cane, she shows up every time, like a sea gull trailing a fishing trawler, in search of free fish. She smiles, raising her tiny sack.
"She plays hardball," Anguiano says. "She buys me fruit as barter." He motions that he is out of fish. The woman vanishes. Then she's back -- with kiwis. "Plan B," Anguiano says.
He slides a wriggling catfish into her bag and she scurries away. Later, as he readies to leave, he sees the kiwis she has left on his truck bumper.
"A deal's a deal," he says. "She's some businesswoman."
john.glionna@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/columnone/la-me-fishnew23-2008jun23,0,6769960.story
Thursday, June 19, 2008
New Chinatown grows in far east San Gabriel Valley
New Chinatown grows in far east San Gabriel Valley
Wealthy ethnic Chinese immigrants are fashioning their own enclave in the cities of Rowland Heights, Diamond Bar, Walnut and Hacienda Heights.
By David Pierson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 19, 2008
The celery and squid sizzle in Suipao Tsai's blackened wok as she prepares lunch for up to six dozen employees of the family's multimillion-dollar lingerie business in the city of Industry.
It's a scene repeated every weekday morning at her palatial family compound in the hills of Rowland Heights.
A Mercedes-Benz SUV parked next to an 18-foot koi pond is lined in the back with old Chinese newspapers and loaded with a steaming pot of beef brisket and turnip stew.
After the Mercedes arrives, the employees -- most of them Asian -- pile heaps of food on plates, then sit quietly eating and watching a Mandarin-language talk show on a flat-screen TV.
"It's a cultural thing," said Mike Tsai, 38, Suipao Tsai's second son and chief operating officer of the family's company, Leg Avenue. "My father used to be responsible for providing lunch for 200 employees" in Taiwan. "We brought that tradition here to America."
In fact, much of the eastern San Gabriel Valley has more in common with Taipei, Beijing or Shanghai than it does with neighboring Los Angeles. Here, Asian-immigrant entrepreneurs have transformed once-sleepy suburbia into a Chinatown like no other.
They are far from struggling newcomers trying to achieve the American Dream in other Chinese enclaves such as Monterey Park and San Gabriel farther to the west.
Here, the power of Chinese culture and its economy is on display, said Joel Kotkin, an expert in urban affairs and ethnic economies.
"It's so overwhelming," he said. "It's a suburb anchored to the tribal economy of the Chinese and China. They have an ideal life with a spacious backyard and institutions and amenities close by. You have a 15-minute commute to work rooted in city of Industry. You don't have to step out."
And many don't.
Since the family moved its offices to the city of Industry two decades ago, Mike Tsai says he's visited China and Taiwan more frequently than he's been to downtown L.A.
Tsai and other Asian entrepreneurs have created office parks where most of the signs are in Chinese. At the trendy shopping arcades one is more likely to hear Mandarin than English.
At Life Plaza off Fullerton Road, Tony Liu works at a high-end sneaker store. The 24-year-old from northern China has been in the U.S. for two years and said it often feels as if he never left home.
"I never get to practice my English," said Liu, who's been west of downtown L.A. only twice. "Sometimes it feels like I'm still in China."
The combined populations of Rowland Heights, Hacienda Heights, Walnut and Diamond Bar have not only doubled in the last two decades but also are now two-thirds Asian.
Close to 40% of the businesses in Industry are ethnic Chinese-owned.
Up the hill from Life Plaza, at Blandford Elementary School, close to 60% of the students are Asian.
Many are the children of wealthy immigrants, dropped off in luxury cars by their mothers. Many fathers are absent, having to work in China.
The school recently had to revamp its lunch policy. The main office was overwhelmed at noon with mothers trying to deliver hot lunches either from home or Chinese restaurants. Now they must leave the meals on a cart outside the school gates at 11 a.m.
Parent volunteer Rosy Chong said she overheard a newly arrived Korean parent's daughter ask her mother, "When are we going to America?"
"She thought Rowland Heights was a stopover" in Asia, Chong said.
For the teachers and administrators at Blandford, the demographic changes have been both a blessing and a challenge.
The cultural premium parents place on education has helped make Blandford the top-performing elementary school in the district. A waiting list was established to handle the high demand for enrollment.
Blandford Principal Jo Ann Lawrence said some parents told her they were reluctant to send their children to another school in the district because there were too many Latino students there.
"I'm not one to feel you have to be a melting pot; I value what each group brings," she said. "But the isolation concerns me."
Teacher Cindy Kim sees it firsthand in her classroom. In an environment so dominated by Chinese and Koreans, it's difficult to teach lessons about other cultures.
"We had Cesar Chavez assemblies, and it was difficult for them to comprehend," Kim said. "I'd ask for background information, and I wouldn't get a lot of input. They'd ask, 'Who is that?' Our big holiday is Chinese New Year."
The school usually holds its book sale after the New Year's celebration, knowing the students have "lucky money" to spend.
That was the case on a recent afternoon when Janelle Book, a Taiwanese native, was helping run the cash register surrounded by dozens of schoolchildren.
When Book immigrated to the U.S. 11 years ago, she and her husband chose to live in Rowland Heights over the western San Gabriel Valley because they considered Monterey Park and its neighboring cities the domain of working-class mainland Chinese immigrants.
Adjusting to the new country was easy at first because of where she lived. She could use Mandarin almost anywhere and could find most of the food she ate in Taiwan.
She got a job working at the cosmetics counter at a nearby Macy's. Half her customers also spoke to her in Mandarin.
The difficulty arose when she wanted to learn English. She had no one to practice with.
So Book signed up for an English-as-a-second-language class and began regularly watching "Friends" and "Everybody Loves Raymond."
She grew confident enough in her English to volunteer at Blandford when her 7-year-old-daughter enrolled in first grade. It made her feel part of a larger community for the first time.
Now she hopes that her daughter will grow up able to traverse both American and Chinese cultures. It's why she's being taught to speak both English and Mandarin.
"I'll take her to see our family in Seattle," Book said. "Show her another side of America."
The Tsai family immigrated to Southern California in 1984, fearing the political instability in Taiwan. They started modestly by selling cheap toys at a flea market in Redondo Beach. They then moved to downtown L.A., where they sold hosiery.
Early success allowed them to buy a 3,000-square-foot home in Rowland Heights in 1989.
Like many middle-class Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants, the Tsais opted for the area over more established enclaves like Monterey Park and Alhambra, partly because the homes were newer and larger.
The Tsais' fortunes increased dramatically in 2000 when Leg Avenue began making and designing sexy Halloween costumes for women.
They used old connections to secure factories outside Taipei and in Guangzhou and Shanghai to manufacture the designs affordably.
The racy nurse and pirate outfits became so popular the company went from $1 million in sales in 2000 to recording $87 million last year.
Their original Rowland Heights property has grown to become a 1.5-acre plot featuring three houses shared by more than 20 family members and a fleet of luxury cars.
The family imported ancient wood chairs and stone from Taiwan to form a table under the gazebo in the courtyard. Their annual Chinese New Year's parties have become affairs for 400. This year's party featured Peking duck, rowdy Taiwanese dice games and the doling of $30,000 in red "lucky money" envelopes to visitors.
"Even though we've gone corporate, the Taiwanese family structure is always there," Mike Tsai said.
It's a lifestyle that requires few jaunts outside their "new Chinatown" enclave, save for shopping runs to South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa or a chance to race Mike Tsai's Lamborghini, Porsche or Ferrari at Crystal Cove.
"We never have to leave," Mike Tsai said. "Everything we need is here."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chinatowneast19-2008jun19,0,5800685.story
Wealthy ethnic Chinese immigrants are fashioning their own enclave in the cities of Rowland Heights, Diamond Bar, Walnut and Hacienda Heights.
By David Pierson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 19, 2008
The celery and squid sizzle in Suipao Tsai's blackened wok as she prepares lunch for up to six dozen employees of the family's multimillion-dollar lingerie business in the city of Industry.
It's a scene repeated every weekday morning at her palatial family compound in the hills of Rowland Heights.
A Mercedes-Benz SUV parked next to an 18-foot koi pond is lined in the back with old Chinese newspapers and loaded with a steaming pot of beef brisket and turnip stew.
After the Mercedes arrives, the employees -- most of them Asian -- pile heaps of food on plates, then sit quietly eating and watching a Mandarin-language talk show on a flat-screen TV.
"It's a cultural thing," said Mike Tsai, 38, Suipao Tsai's second son and chief operating officer of the family's company, Leg Avenue. "My father used to be responsible for providing lunch for 200 employees" in Taiwan. "We brought that tradition here to America."
In fact, much of the eastern San Gabriel Valley has more in common with Taipei, Beijing or Shanghai than it does with neighboring Los Angeles. Here, Asian-immigrant entrepreneurs have transformed once-sleepy suburbia into a Chinatown like no other.
They are far from struggling newcomers trying to achieve the American Dream in other Chinese enclaves such as Monterey Park and San Gabriel farther to the west.
Here, the power of Chinese culture and its economy is on display, said Joel Kotkin, an expert in urban affairs and ethnic economies.
"It's so overwhelming," he said. "It's a suburb anchored to the tribal economy of the Chinese and China. They have an ideal life with a spacious backyard and institutions and amenities close by. You have a 15-minute commute to work rooted in city of Industry. You don't have to step out."
And many don't.
Since the family moved its offices to the city of Industry two decades ago, Mike Tsai says he's visited China and Taiwan more frequently than he's been to downtown L.A.
Tsai and other Asian entrepreneurs have created office parks where most of the signs are in Chinese. At the trendy shopping arcades one is more likely to hear Mandarin than English.
At Life Plaza off Fullerton Road, Tony Liu works at a high-end sneaker store. The 24-year-old from northern China has been in the U.S. for two years and said it often feels as if he never left home.
"I never get to practice my English," said Liu, who's been west of downtown L.A. only twice. "Sometimes it feels like I'm still in China."
The combined populations of Rowland Heights, Hacienda Heights, Walnut and Diamond Bar have not only doubled in the last two decades but also are now two-thirds Asian.
Close to 40% of the businesses in Industry are ethnic Chinese-owned.
Up the hill from Life Plaza, at Blandford Elementary School, close to 60% of the students are Asian.
Many are the children of wealthy immigrants, dropped off in luxury cars by their mothers. Many fathers are absent, having to work in China.
The school recently had to revamp its lunch policy. The main office was overwhelmed at noon with mothers trying to deliver hot lunches either from home or Chinese restaurants. Now they must leave the meals on a cart outside the school gates at 11 a.m.
Parent volunteer Rosy Chong said she overheard a newly arrived Korean parent's daughter ask her mother, "When are we going to America?"
"She thought Rowland Heights was a stopover" in Asia, Chong said.
For the teachers and administrators at Blandford, the demographic changes have been both a blessing and a challenge.
The cultural premium parents place on education has helped make Blandford the top-performing elementary school in the district. A waiting list was established to handle the high demand for enrollment.
Blandford Principal Jo Ann Lawrence said some parents told her they were reluctant to send their children to another school in the district because there were too many Latino students there.
"I'm not one to feel you have to be a melting pot; I value what each group brings," she said. "But the isolation concerns me."
Teacher Cindy Kim sees it firsthand in her classroom. In an environment so dominated by Chinese and Koreans, it's difficult to teach lessons about other cultures.
"We had Cesar Chavez assemblies, and it was difficult for them to comprehend," Kim said. "I'd ask for background information, and I wouldn't get a lot of input. They'd ask, 'Who is that?' Our big holiday is Chinese New Year."
The school usually holds its book sale after the New Year's celebration, knowing the students have "lucky money" to spend.
That was the case on a recent afternoon when Janelle Book, a Taiwanese native, was helping run the cash register surrounded by dozens of schoolchildren.
When Book immigrated to the U.S. 11 years ago, she and her husband chose to live in Rowland Heights over the western San Gabriel Valley because they considered Monterey Park and its neighboring cities the domain of working-class mainland Chinese immigrants.
Adjusting to the new country was easy at first because of where she lived. She could use Mandarin almost anywhere and could find most of the food she ate in Taiwan.
She got a job working at the cosmetics counter at a nearby Macy's. Half her customers also spoke to her in Mandarin.
The difficulty arose when she wanted to learn English. She had no one to practice with.
So Book signed up for an English-as-a-second-language class and began regularly watching "Friends" and "Everybody Loves Raymond."
She grew confident enough in her English to volunteer at Blandford when her 7-year-old-daughter enrolled in first grade. It made her feel part of a larger community for the first time.
Now she hopes that her daughter will grow up able to traverse both American and Chinese cultures. It's why she's being taught to speak both English and Mandarin.
"I'll take her to see our family in Seattle," Book said. "Show her another side of America."
The Tsai family immigrated to Southern California in 1984, fearing the political instability in Taiwan. They started modestly by selling cheap toys at a flea market in Redondo Beach. They then moved to downtown L.A., where they sold hosiery.
Early success allowed them to buy a 3,000-square-foot home in Rowland Heights in 1989.
Like many middle-class Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants, the Tsais opted for the area over more established enclaves like Monterey Park and Alhambra, partly because the homes were newer and larger.
The Tsais' fortunes increased dramatically in 2000 when Leg Avenue began making and designing sexy Halloween costumes for women.
They used old connections to secure factories outside Taipei and in Guangzhou and Shanghai to manufacture the designs affordably.
The racy nurse and pirate outfits became so popular the company went from $1 million in sales in 2000 to recording $87 million last year.
Their original Rowland Heights property has grown to become a 1.5-acre plot featuring three houses shared by more than 20 family members and a fleet of luxury cars.
The family imported ancient wood chairs and stone from Taiwan to form a table under the gazebo in the courtyard. Their annual Chinese New Year's parties have become affairs for 400. This year's party featured Peking duck, rowdy Taiwanese dice games and the doling of $30,000 in red "lucky money" envelopes to visitors.
"Even though we've gone corporate, the Taiwanese family structure is always there," Mike Tsai said.
It's a lifestyle that requires few jaunts outside their "new Chinatown" enclave, save for shopping runs to South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa or a chance to race Mike Tsai's Lamborghini, Porsche or Ferrari at Crystal Cove.
"We never have to leave," Mike Tsai said. "Everything we need is here."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chinatowneast19-2008jun19,0,5800685.story
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students
Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: New York Times, June 10, 2008
The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.
The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.
But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.
“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”
“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”
The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.
Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.
The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.
“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.
“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”
The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.
The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.
Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.
The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”
That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.
The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.”
Some have suggested that Asian-Americans are held to higher admissions standards at the most selective colleges. In 2006, Jian Li, the New Jersey-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, saying he had been rejected by Princeton because he is Asian. Princeton’s admission policies are under review, the department says.
The report also notes the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in administrative jobs at colleges. Only 33 of the nation’s college presidents, fewer than 1 percent, are Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/education/10asians.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)