07.18.07
Posted in Chinatown at 8:05 pm by albert_lim
Honolulu has won a $150,000 Preserve America grant from first lady Laura Bush, to be used in revitalization projects for the Chinatown Special Historic District. Chinatown, now a cultural and artistic hub, is the first Hawaiian site to receive one of the grants.
Mayor Mufi Hanneman said, “The grant will be used to promote the history and culture of Chinatown to visitors and residents and provide a richer experience for visitors, with the goal of providing a more meaningful visit and stimulating more business activity.”
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07.12.07
Posted in Chinatown at 5:00 am by albert_lim
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the land squeeze that’s changing the face of Chinatowns across the U.S. As contributor Carol Huang writes, the renewed hipness of America’s downtowns has pushed urban real estate sky-high, making it hard for ethnic enclaves to survive as the first stop for new immigrants who usually have few skills and speak little English.
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07.02.07
Posted in Chinatown, Activism and Empowerment at 9:15 pm by albert_lim
The Globe and Mail reports that dozens gathered in Vancouver’s Chinatown on Canada Day, July 1, to demand further redress for the head tax.
The Canadian government applied the head tax to Chinese who entered the country from 1885 to 1923 (charging $50 at first and eventually $500), in an effort to keep out the impoverished among them. In 1923, the head tax gave way to the Exclusion Act, which barred all Chinese immigrants until 1947.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized for the head tax last year and authorized payments of $20,000 to the 400-some head-tax survivors or their widows. However, many groups say that’s not enough.
“(Prime Minister Harper) has only addressed 0.6 per cent of all head-tax families, and we believe all head-tax families should be treated equally,” said Sid Tan, who organized the rally. Tan was speaking for the elderly first-generation children of head-tax payers.
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Posted in Chinatown at 8:26 pm by albert_lim
Right: National Geographic Photo Camp photo by Qiaowei Queenie Yu
National Geographic recently handed out digital cameras to 15 teens in San Francisco’s Chinatown and, after giving them some pointers, set them loose to capture scenes of the neighborhood as they know it. You can view their work at SF Gate and National Geographic.
Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and National Geographic contributor Jay Dickman, who tutored the teens, said, “I was impressed by how they stepped into the Asian community and were able to get images that would have been difficult had they not been Asian, the way they got under the fabric and into somebody’s life.”
The event was part of National Geographic’s Photo Camps, a series of four-day summer workshops in seven U.S. cities and Oaxaca, Mexico. The Photo Camps are sponsored in part by Maryland-based VisionWorkshops, a photojournalism mentoring program.
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06.27.07
Posted in Chinatown, Activism and Empowerment at 5:35 am by albert_lim
Right: Beach Street gate into Boston’s Chinatown
Make way, elders of Chinatown: The Boston Globe shines a light on the new generation of community groups that are brokering political power in the neighborhood.
According to the article, these groups (which include the Chinese Progressive Association and the Asian Community Development Corporation) focus on educating voters to speak for themselves, instead of on delivering voter blocs in exchange for city services, as their predecessors did. As a result, voter turnout in Chinatown has doubled since 1998, which has given the neighborhood more voting clout and made it more accessible to political candidates.
Says Avi Green, executive director of voting rights group MassVOTE: “At one point it was all Frank [Chin, the patriarch of Boston’s Chinatown], but now it’s a contested thing. Now, you have all of these organizations that are powerful within the community. The bottom line is, the clout of the whole community is expanding.”
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05.29.07
Posted in Chinatown at 3:30 pm by albert_lim
Above: Man-li Kuo leads a weekly Mandarin class in Flushing.
The New York Times reports on non-Asian residents of Flushing, Queens, who are learning Mandarin to adapt to the population shift in their neighborhood.
“Kind of like, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,’” says one Italian American woman student quoted in the article. Another student profiled is an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland who hopes to hold a conversation in Mandarin by the time he’s 95.
Stories like this go to show, America’s WASP-oriented mentality is a sinking ship, and people had better learn how to swim.
Don’t believe us? Check out this story from Reuters, which goes over the latest census data: “U.S. minority population tops 100 million.”
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05.25.07
Posted in Chinatown at 1:59 pm by albert_lim
The Associated Press reports that Honolulu’s revamped Chinatown might be the key to Oahu’s future and the city’s bid to transform itself from a tourist hub into a world-class city.
In Germany, news agency dpa reports that investors have presented plans to build a Chinatown in Oranienburg, a town near Berlin, aiming to draw tourists and business.
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05.14.07
Posted in Chinatown at 1:07 am by albert_lim
Amy Wu, 16, and Lily Yee, 17, load up with paint to do away with graffiti (but hopefully not the mural) in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The San Francisco Chronicle covers the Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Project, which has young people cleaning up Chinatown’s streets, giving tours of the neighborhood, visiting the elderly and providing day care.
Seventeen-year-old Jessica Kyo says of the program, “You meet a bunch of cool people. And when you’re trying to beautify something, you can’t help but form a bond.”
The project started in 1991, and has just received a Community Hero award from the Crissy Field Center, an environmental education center in the Bay Area.
For more about Adopt-An-Alleyway, go here.
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05.10.07
Posted in Chinatown at 9:37 am by telly_wong
A warning or an invitation?
There’s some debate in Houston these days whether to officially call its pan-Asian commercial district “Chinatown”, “New Chinatown” or “Asia Town”. Since the area now boasts a diverse array of immigrants from Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Middle East and the Philippines –in addition to China– some community leaders and organizations feel “Asia Town” is a more apt moniker, while others just want to
stick with good ole “Chinatown” for the sake of simplicity (for who though?).
Right now, the name that’s sticking is “New Chinatown”, which is being used by the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. The name also distinguishes the neighborhood from Old Chinatown, the area’s original Chinese settlement in downtown Houston which dates back to the 1920s.
New Chinatown stretches six-miles long (through Bellaire from Frondren to Highway 6) and was started by Taiwanese developers in 1983. Today, the community boasts a booming and thriving economy, as evidenced by a number of new banks, malls, restaurants, hotels and apartment complexes.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about calling an area “Chinatown” or any other Asian-sounding name after some folks of the Eastern persuasion start moving in. In ways, it seems rather divisive and segregational, as well as a sly move by The Powers That Be to continually keep Asians perceived as “The Other”. Here in New York, there are many Italian American communities in the boroughs outside of Manhattan, though I’ve yet to hear any one of them referred to as “Little Italy”.
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04.15.07
Posted in Chinatown at 3:11 am by albert_lim
Yet another case of blind men grasping at an elephant? One event, two news sources, two very different stories.
What we know for sure is that workers in Milan’s Chinatown clashed with local police. Read the rest of this entry »
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