On a drive through her one-of-a-kind hometown, Judy Chu sees reflections of her Chinese heritage everywhere she looks–on the storefronts, the street signs, the faces on the sun-splashed sidewalks.
“A `Men’s Wearhouse’ with Chinese letters,” said Chu, a state assembly candidate who is trying to end California’s long drought of Chinese-American lawmakers.
She was nodding toward a haberdashery outlet as she wheeled her Toyota sedan down Atlantic Boulevard, where nearly all the shop names are spelled out in Chinese characters: “Where else would you see that?”
This San Gabriel Valley community of 65,000 people, five miles from downtown Los Angeles, is the only Asian-majority city in the continental United States. By most measurements, it is a model of success in the immigrant experience. It also epitomizes a trend that finds more and more Asians–the newly arrived as well as first-generation Americans–moving into the nation’s suburbs.
Fast-growing Asian communities have taken root in the San Francisco Bay town of Cupertino, the Richardson and Carrollton areas north of Dallas, Houston’s Bellaire section, the New York borough of Queens, and Southern California’s Orange County, among other locales.
Nowhere, however, is the pattern more striking than in Monterey Park, often billed as America’s first suburban Chinatown.
Ethnic Chinese, who make up the biggest bloc of the city’s population, have prospered here as in few other places, despite their stubbornly low profile in elective politics. They own the businesses, their children excel in the schools, and the culture they carried across the Pacific lives on in their adopted home.
“There’s been an amazing transformation of the community,” said Leland Saito, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s a symbol of the state of Asian America. People aren’t used to seeing a suburban Chinatown. That’s a new phenomenon for many Americans.”
Here, as elsewhere, the Asian suburbanites followed paths taken by earlier waves of immigrants, including the Irish, Eastern Europeans and Mexicans. They used the ethnic ghettos as beachheads, then flocked to middle-class settlements beyond the city, as economic opportunities paved the way.
What is remarkable about the Asian march to the suburbs, particularly among the Chinese, is how quickly the newcomers mastered the marketplace, observers say. Other immigrant groups typically labored for several generations to bankroll their departure from the inner city. The Chinese of Monterey Park accomplished the feat in one generation–and, in many cases, almost as soon as they landed on these shores.
“The Chinese jumped a step,” said Tim Fong, a sociology professor at Oakland’s Holy Name College. “They didn’t play the (slow) assimilation game.”
But Monterey Park has not been immune to intolerance, nor have other California suburbs that are undergoing sharp demographic changes.
In the 1980s, as the Chinese influx gathered steam, an ugly “English-only” campaign tore at Monterey Park. And to this day, the city’s embrace of the Chinese is not complete–especially in terms of political representation.
Chu is the lone Asian on the five-member City Council. Voters of Chinese descent account for barely a third of Monterey Park’s total. The city has never sent a Chinese-American legislator to Sacramento.
Indeed, if Chu wins her assembly contest, she will become the sole Chinese-American in the state’s 120-member legislature.
California has the country’s largest Chinese population, estimated at close to a million. But it can claim just a single prominent Chinese-American politician–state treasurer Matt Fong, who is an underdog candidate for U.S. Senate.
Two Chinese-Americans held seats in the legislature during the 1960s and ’70s; one of them, Fong’s mother, March Fong Eu, later served 20 years as secretary of state.
oMnterey Park is at least 65 percent Asian, a figure that includes sizable tallies of immigrants from Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. There are also expanding Asian populations–mostly Chinese–in the adjoining cities of Alhambra, Rosemead, San Gabriel, South Pasadena and San Marino.
The visual impact of Chinese immigration on Monterey Park is a head-turner to first-time visitors. Not long ago, the city resembled any other Southern California suburb whose housing tracts and commercial corridors took shape in the 1950s and ’60s.
Today, Monterey Park’s stores, restaurants, banks and churches, as well as its billboards and road signs, are emblazoned with Chinese characters. It’s as if a sprawling, Chinese-speaking colony had been shipped whole from the Far East.
“See that bakery?” Chu asked her passengers on the drive. “It went from Jewish to Chinese a year ago . . . And that used to be an Alpha Beta over there. Now it’s a Shun Fat supermarket.”
She turned right on Garvey Avenue. “The Japanese restaurant there–it’s run by Chinese,” she said. “That place over there sells contemporary European furniture, but it’s Chinese. And look, the Hollywood Cafe–that’s run by Chinese.”
Monterey Park is a stark contrast to Los Angeles’ old Chinatown. Jammed into a few streets north of the Civic Center, Chinatown remains a pagoda-roofed tourist attraction for the most part, lined with red-lantern trinket stalls and sweet-and-sour eateries. Well-paying jobs are scarce for its 15,000 residents. But it continues to function as a cultural touchstone for Chinese-Americans throughout Southern California.
Chinatown also gave many of Monterey Park’s entrepreneurs their start in this country.
One of those boot-strappers is Robert Lee, owner of the Ocean Star restaurant. Food critics celebrate Monterey Park as perhaps the nation’s top venue for Chinese cuisine, and Lee’s establishment usually gets standard-setting praise.
“My family was a poor family,” said Lee, 49, who emigrated to the United States from southern China in 1969. “Now, business is very good.”
He spoke during a busy Sunday dinner shift, sitting in the marbled reception hall of the cavernous restaurant. All but a handful of the customers conversed in Mandarin or Cantonese.
Lee began his career as a cook in Chinatown. He pooled his savings with other immigrants to open a seafood house in Alhambra, then a second in Chinatown, a third in Monterey Park and finally Ocean Star.
“It’s much better here than in Chinatown,” said Lee, who backs Chu’s candidacy. “And when I came to Monterey Park, there weren’t a lot of Asian people.”
Asians were drawn to the city in the 1960s and ’70s after Chinese-American developers promoted Monterey Park as a would-be “Chinese Beverly Hills.”
Many Anglo residents and some Latinos were alienated by the resulting proliferation of businesses like Lee’s. They complained that buying sprees by Chinese immigrants inflated property values, squeezed out non-Chinese owners and led to over-building.
The disaffection among Anglos sparked the mid-1980s campaign–marred by the occasional Ku Klux Klan flyer–that sought to declare English the city’s “official language” and require storefronts to display English signs.
The English-only movement failed. But it was followed by white flight. Entire neighborhoods, seemingly overnight, shifted from predominantly Caucasian to solidly Chinese.
The city is now less than 10 percent Caucasian (and about 25 percent Latino, a number that has also declined). Some Anglos who stayed put still have mixed feelings about the new Monterey Park.
“The one thing that bothers me is that (the signs) on restaurants and bakeries are written in Chinese, but there’s no translation,” said Bonnie Shyer, 49, who grew up here. Except for a few years spent in Dallas in the 1970s, she has lived most of her life in the family home on Monterey Park’s Grandridge Avenue.
“Our street is 99 percent Asian,” she said. “It feels different . . . I don’t like being at the market–and I don’t want this to sound prejudiced–but the Chinese have a habit of running and grabbing stuff off the shelves.”
Nevertheless, Shyer added, she and her family are Chu supporters.
Chu was born in South Central Los Angeles to a Chinese-American father and a mother from Guangzhou.
On her drive through the district, Chu dropped in on Frances Wu, 77, originally from central China.
Wu operates Golden Age Village, a retirement community whose apartment buildings are constructed in red-and-gold pagoda style. She strolled through the pond-bordered grounds with Chu, and the two talked about how Monterey Park had made an East-meets-West version of the American Dream possible.
“I love this city,” Wu said. “Everything is beautiful here. It’s home, sweet home.”
