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Development of China City
Commercializing Culture
Unlike New Chinatown, which featured residences for its Chinese-American tenants, Sterling planned China City with one thing in mind — tourism. Located just a few blocks west from the sprawling new Union Station, Sterling played upon commercialized Chinese tropes in an effort to appeal to white, Anglo-centric sensibilities. Sterling packaged and sold Chinese culture in the form of Hollywood-esque storefront designs, cliched merchant costumes, and Americanized takes on traditional Asian cuisine. Sterling commissioned Paramount set designer and Hollywood insider William Tuntke to lead the project’s creative arm. Tunktke and his consulting architects borrowed landscapes from recycled sets of Hollywood films such as The Good Earth and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife and laid out plans for exotiscized lotus ponds and bamboo stands. For Sterling and her team, moderation was key. While they wanted the enclave to feel distinct from its palm-tree ridden, blue sky-ed surroundings, they were careful to limit the overt presence of Chinese culture. Chinese-American merchants and businesses, for example, could set up shop in China City, but they were subjected to tight regulations set by Sterling and her anglo investors. Merchandise, menus, costumes, and exhibits all had to be approved by the China City bureaucracy. In essence, racial and cultural identity came second to choreographed stereotypes. As journalist Harry Carr put it, “Chinatown without crooked alleys would be an egg without salt.”
Connection to White Settler Colonialism
Sterling and China City, through Hollywood inspired architecture, glitzy bamboo stands and lotus ponds, and romanticized merchant costumes, actively constructed Chinese culture through a lens of otherness. While the depictions of Chinese culture were much more positive than that of Old Chinatown, Sterling and her team still constructed Chinese culture as distinct, separate, and ultimately inferior. Chinese culture was not something to engage in, to learn about and pay homage to, but instead a subject of white voyeurism, an “amusement center” to stop by on the way back to Union station. White settler colonialism is not just a distant historical event, but instead an active and pervasive force that shapes the way race functions in America — today and nearly a hundred years ago in China City. Essential to white settler colonialism is the othering of non-white populations and cultures, just as Sterling does in China City. Furthermore, while Sterling advertised China City as a cultural enclave for tourists, she also barred from Chinese residents from living there, playing into another integral theme of Settler Colonialism — displacement. China City plays into a long history of disconnecting marginalized people from their own culture and physical spaces.
Works Cited
Josi Ward. “‘Dreams of Oriental Romance’: Reinventing Chinatown in 1930s Los Angeles.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, vol. 20, no. 1, 2013, pp. 19–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/buildland.20.1.0019. Accessed 28 Apr. 2021.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “Settler Colonialism as Structure.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 52–72., doi:10.1177/2332649214560440.
Li, Wei. “Beyond Chinatown, beyond Enclave: Reconceptualizing Contemporary Chinese Settlements in the United States.” GeoJournal, vol. 64, no. 1, 2005, pp. 31–40., doi:10.1007/s10708-005-3921-6.
Zesch, Scott. The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Reed, Brijit. The Past, Present, and Future Of LA’s Chinatown Communities. Curiosity Magazine, 24 July 2019, www.curiositymag.com/2019/07/24/los-angeles-chinatown-history-future/.
Bizarre.Los.Angeles. “Los(t) Angeles: China City - Photos.” Bizarre Los Angeles, 30 Apr. 2018, bizarrela.com/2016/12/china-city/.