This page was created by Eli Simon. The last update was by Kate Mcinerny.
Time Machine & Concluding Thoughts
If I had a time machine, I would . . .
Eli
I would travel to China City in 1938. I would walk up to Tsin Nan Ling, who had set up a small stand outside one of the Curio shops selling stone artifacts from his native province of Zhejiang. I would ask him, as the swaths of white tourists strolled by his stand, laughing and eating—is Los Angeles home?The most (or least) surprising thing I learned was that Christine Sterling, the city planner responsible for China City, also played a major role in the transformation of Olvera Street. I was also interested in the parallels between the walls surrounding China City and the walls surrounding USC — two entities who claim to be invested in their surrounding communities but also make active efforts to wall themselves off.
Kate
If I had a time machine to explore healing and medicine, I’d travel to 1932 and, as I walked through Old Chinatown, ask people how they heal through the violence of this settler colonial system, its processes of racialization, criminalization, and dispossession. I would make sure to visit a local herbal medicine shop, such as the one on 411 Apablasa St, which was housed in the empty building of this picture.Through this project I learned how China City was not simply a fake Hollywood replica of Old Chinatown. Rather, China City's development was an integral step in the settler colonial processes of dispossession, such that white people could continue to appropriate and consume the Chinese culture they were destroying in Old Chinatown. People in power made money off of violent dispossession both by building Union Station, which revalorized previously devalued Old Chinatown land, and by building China City, which created a new land market for appropriatory consumption.