This path was created by Sijia Zhong. The last update was by Curtis Fletcher.
Views of Chinatown and Related Neighborhoods
Historical Overview
From a religious lens, Los Angeles’ Chinatown was viewed in foreign terms. When the Ah Quock and Sing Yee incident occurred, in which Sing Yee, a Chinese prostitute, fled Chinatown to marry Ah Quock in a Christian church, Zesch describes how “this was the first time a Chinese couple in San Diego had married in a Christian church...San Diego’s non-Asian population followed the love story with great interest; there was unprecedented demand for the Sunday newspaper that told it” (Zesch 75-78). Chinese immigrants were evidently viewed as outsiders to the white community, and the combination of that perpetual foreigner status with some familiar aspects of conformity, e.g., marrying in a Christian church, breaking the cycle of prostitution for Sing Yee, and the surprising amount of support and interest they received from the white community reflects a confirmation of an earlier quote from a Chinese immigrant about acceptance; that it’s possible, but in select circumstances. The implications of this event as well is a possible early indication of a model minority myth attachment to the Chinese immigrant community in Los Angeles--that their willingness to conform to white Anglo standards could also tokenize them and reduce them down to a foreign spectacle. In contrast to this Christian ceremony, another account describes a funeral procession for a Chinese immigrant in Los Angeles, “headed by an ordinary American hearse, with an American diver; but besides the driver sits a Chinaman who industriously scatters along the road bits of thin, uncolored paper...this paper represents money and its object is [to] purchase the good-will of any spirits who may be prowling” (Coe 3). Although this is only one specific funeral ceremony, it also reflects the persistent significance of Chinese beliefs and religion for a person’s death--although they may conform to white expectations while living, like Sing Yee and Ah Quock, they ultimately still die as a Chinese person, and this juxtaposition exhibits a self-awareness in terms of identity and culture that can still be perceived in Asian American and Chinese American culture today.From the aspect of the prostitution industry, the old Chinatown, similar to the aspect of religion of faith, is also regarded as outsiders. Hence, most people held an indifferent attitude toward the red district of old Chinatown as long as their life was not affected by the prostitution. It should be noted that most of the information that the general public got at that time about old Chinatown prostitution was based on the sensational stories in newspapers. It is not surprising that after the media began to put Chinese prostitutes under the spotlight from the beginning of the twentieth century, other neighbourhoods started to view old Chinatown prostituion as a dirty intrusion into the civilization of Los Angeles. For example, many women reformers from other nearby neighborhoods even refused to enter the old Chinatown, because they did not want others to mistake them as prostitutes (Wild 740-742), which is understandable but also very ironic. However, the views of Chinatown are not monotonous, which not only included disdain or indifference, but also some unspeakable assimilations underlying the surface. In the book the Chinatown War, the journalist Gibson went to the brothels for observations, and he found that there were many dissolute white men and depraved boys in these Chinese brothels. As he noted, there was “no impassable abyss preventing the mingling and assimilation of the two races.” This is a very interesting commentary, which “accidentally” coincides with several scholarly articles -- those that made analyses to conclude that the sex trade and brothels unexpectedly increased inter-ethnoracial contacts, and pushed these relationships to a peak, which later decreased after the construction of the Union Station. Therefore, the views of Chinatown from other neighborhoods are indeed very complicated, even to people themselves, because a lot of things really happened unexpectedly and unconsciously, such as this inter-ethnocial assimilation caused by the prostitution industry.