My mother is the oldest of five siblings, most of whom grew up in New York’s Chinatown. They are voracious eaters and bargain hunters, and lifelong visitors to Chinese neighborhoods everywhere. When we talk about a good Chinatown, we point to certain signs: live fish for sale, dragon eyes in sidewalk produce displays, smokers, crowds.
A few years ago, I wrote a book about American Chinatowns and my family’s history in them. People often ask, “What’s your favorite Chinatown?” or “What do you look for?” I wondered if there was a shorthand I could offer, to sum up the best of the best. And so: fish, dragons, smoke, crowds.
Live fish mean that there are enough people buying to make the trouble of caring for the seafood worthwhile. The dragon eye — longan in Cantonese — is a strange fruit, a sweet, subtly fragrant exotic with coarse, sandpapery skin. Shaped like, well, an eyeball, it slips out of its brown covering to reveal translucent white flesh, with a hard mahogany seed inside. You have to know how to eat it, by cracking the whole thing open like a peanut. Chinese people are crazy for longan. Like the aforementioned fish, its presence indicates a recently arrived populace desiring a range of fresh food — some of it still swimming — not usually seen in the corner grocery.
The smokers? In the United States the smoking rate is at a new low. Not so in China; it’s the world’s biggest consumer of cigarettes. As strange as it may seem, smoking is a strong cultural indicator that a Chinatown continues to serve a vibrant population of immigrants. A Chinese restaurant with a bunch of cooks smoking out back, or customers puffing while waiting for a table? Worth a try! It’s one that’s less likely to be Americanized.
New immigrants mean a certain density and that prices aren’t too high. The more people, the better. “The best for less,” my mom sings when she’s spotted a particularly pleasing find: swinging roast ducks in a window, the skin lacquered and crispy (just $18.50 for a whole duck!), or sprightly, rubber-banded bunches of scallions (two for a dollar!). A carefully placed elbow here, a strategically waving hand there, and she emerges, triumphant, prize in hand. Yao peng, yao leng: cheap, and pretty.
These are signs to look for in a good Chinatown, especially as Lunar New Year celebrations on Jan. 31 bring a crush of visitors. Of course, Chinatowns in this country come in markedly different incarnations these days.
Years ago, they were dense neighborhoods in cities like San Francisco and New York, serving as refuges from racism, entry points to America, residential and cultural epicenters of Chinese-American life. This is the rule no longer. Many historic Chinatowns, like those in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., have faded. New patterns of Chinese migration send upwardly mobile populations straight to houses in the suburbs and job opportunities in cities far from the coasts. In those places, large Asian shopping malls and supermarkets are the gathering place. Some Chinatowns spring fully formed from the suburban asphalt, with pagoda roofs and paifang, or welcome gates, spearheaded by a local government or business association hoping to draw visitors.
“This ethnic community today is a spectrum, from the most concentrated to the most dispersed,” said Wei Li, a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University whose work focuses on the geography of ethnic communities. “What each one looks like depends on the geography of a particular city, and the maturity of the Asian population there.”
But in their own ways, they all fill cultural as well as commercial needs, she said.
The Chinatown brand, in fact, has come to mean something more than just Chinese. Later this year, “North Carolina Chinatown” is to open near the Raleigh-Durham airport. Even though developers are calling it a Chinatown, their design deliberately encompasses all Asian cultures.
Though many newfangled Chinatowns may be retail instead of residential, the signs hold true. You’ll find tanks of live blue crabs and geoduck, a species of large clam, at Shun Fat Supermarket in Monterey Park, Calif.; heaping displays of longan and long beans at MT Supermarket in the Chinatown Center mall in Austin, Tex.; clouds of smoke in the parking lot of Chinatown Plaza in Las Vegas, where folks perch with the local Chinese newspaper. And plenty of people, speaking all kinds of dialects and hailing from all over China. They come by car now, not on foot.
That’s all fine and good, you say, but what’s the best? To me, the differences between Chinatowns are to be celebrated; the good ones reflect life in all its rhythms. To that end, I recently revisited the question of my favorites with a “best in class” approach. I went in search of fish and dragons. Here’s what I found.
Traditional
New York City for its milieu, markets and history.
Manhattan’s longstanding Chinatown has a centrality and a feeling of constant renewal, a vibrant depth, that beats out other historic Chinatowns in cities like San Francisco and Chicago.
The New York chef Wylie Dufresne, of the restaurants WD-50 and Alder, regularly walks around Chinatown sniffing out weird, beautiful, bright ingredients in places like Hong Kong Supermarket on Hester Street.
“By going there, you can pick it out yourself,” he said. “You can hold it in your hand. And there is always the opportunity you’ll come across not just one or two, but 20 things you’ve never encountered before.”
For Mr. Dufresne, celebrated for his novel approaches to cooking — palm seeds infused with Angostura bitters, a pig in a blanket that features Chinese sausage and bread pushed through a pasta maker — the surprising “urban pantry” that is Manhattan’s Chinatown is a jolt to creativity.
Chinese or not, people make daily pilgrimages to this neighborhood to shop, to eat, to wander. It has been home to successive waves of Chinese immigration dating back to the 1870s, when the hunt for new employment started to pull Gold Rushers and railroad workers east. Today, the New York metro area has the biggest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, and includes booming enclaves in Queens, Brooklyn, even Harlem.
Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, roughly bounded by Delancey and Chambers Streets on the north and south and stretching from Broadway to the East River, is still a central hub connecting those spokes (though the 2010 census found about 48,000 residents in the neighborhood, experts caution that figures are under-reported). Everybody has an opinion of what’s worth the trip. For my aunt, it’s the dried shrimp and mushrooms. For the woman walking in front of me on Hester, it’s tofu, with a couple of spiky dragon fruit for good measure. The teenagers on the corner? Bubble tea from Silkroad Place, on Mott.
Though there are numerous central subway stops along traffic-glutted Canal Street, the best entry to Chinatown is an oblique one, like the Grand Street station on the B and D lines. Get out there, and you are where Chinatown lives and breathes: Hester Street Playground. Small, human-scale dramas unfold: Teenage boys battle on the basketball courts, girls at the handball walls. Old men hold forth on benches, arguing companionably over cards. Young children govern the slides and swings.
Depending on what street you’re on, Chinatown is Cantonese and Taishanese: Mott Street, the historic center of the neighborhood, is home to these two longstanding populations from Guangdong province. Or it is Fujianese, along East Broadway, the more recently established main drag that emerged with the influx of immigrants from Fujian province in the early 1990s. Mandarin, the official dialect of China, is now the default everywhere at shops in between. The richness of experience, like New York itself, is what makes this old-school Chinatown so great.
Suburban
Monterey Park, Calif., “the Chinese Beverly Hills,” for its variety of food and epic concentration of Chinese.
At the freeway exit for Atlantic Boulevard, I’m tailing a van for Noodle World, a local chain whose logo is a spiky-haired cartoon boy excitedly slurping a bowl of noodles. As I wander on Atlantic and then head on to Garvey Avenue, the main drag, Monterey Park’s other nicknames — the first suburban Chinatown, Little Taipei — ring true with the soundtrack of the place, which is Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese ... everything but English.
Ten miles east of downtown Los Angeles, Monterey Park is the first American city with a majority population of Asians; nearly 50 percent are of Chinese descent (in 2010, the city’s total population was 60,269). A trip here is a special experience, different from traveling abroad, because in many ways it is just like any American suburb, except that everyone is Asian and businesses have Chinese signage and are housed in mini-mall complexes with names like Jade Plaza.
In north Monterey Park at Atlantic Times Square, a luxury mall and condominium complex, a man sells Chinese newspapers at the parking garage, and the movie theater shows films such as “Linsanity,” a documentary on Jeremy Lin and his memorable N.B.A. start with the New York Knicks two years ago. Residents live in fancy condos above the 24 Hour Fitness, come down to work out and head next door to the dim sum palace to meet friends afterward. At the entrance to the Wing Hip Fung herbal market, a prominently placed sign practically shouts: “NO SMOKING Within 20 Feet of The Entrance.”
I watched a tour guide emerge from the escalator and lead a group of wide-eyed non-Chinese visitors on a lunchtime stroll around the shops. It’s a tourist destination, much the way a traditional Chinatown is.
David Chan, a third-generation Chinese-American and accountant in Los Angeles who writes a food blog and is famous for eating at and documenting 6,000-plus Chinese restaurants around the world, has said that what qualifies as “authentic” Chinese cuisine is whether a Chinese person living in Monterey Park would deign to dine there. Right here in town, you can eat your way across China. But he also told me that Monterey Park has grown into a bigger metaphor, representing the whole of what the San Gabriel Valley has become.
“Somebody once described San Gabriel Valley as a Chinatown the size of Manhattan,” he said. “One street can have 200 Chinese restaurants. The demographics make it very different from New York; the Chinese community in L.A. is more middle class and upper middle class, and it’s contiguous, less fragmented. And you have the second generation, the ‘626 generation’ ” — named for the area code — “that’s very food-centric.”
Across the street from Atlantic Times Square is Huge Tree Pastry, a popular and inexpensive Taiwanese breakfast place where I ordered hot soybean milk and you tiao, a long, fried Chinese cruller. The décor is no-frills (utilitarian tables, fluorescent lights, ceiling fans), but the service is warm and gracious. The all-Chinese crowd was mixed in age: a trim businesswoman in heels; a man with an iPad; an extended family of grandmother, infant and sleepy-eyed parents. I left through a cloud of smoke exhaled by a 20-something couple outside, working their smartphones.
Monterey Park is packed with places like Kam Hong Garden, a specialist in knife-cut Shanxi noodles and hot, gamy broths, and Elite Restaurant, a tidy, upscale dim sum establishment that eschews the traditional rolling trolleys for a more civilized made-to-order experience. The glazed roast pork buns are soft and chewy, the wok-tossed Chinese broccoli crunchy and fresh. Wherever I went I spent little, and departed with leftovers.
At Shau May, hidden away in a sprawling strip-malled block of medical offices, clothing shops, Yunnan restaurants and travel agencies, I ordered a Taiwanese shaved ice to go. All eyes were glued to the Chinese soap opera airing on a flat-screen television on the wall. The shaved ice, with sweet red beans, almond jelly, lychee and condensed milk, was the perfect dessert beverage to take on the road.
Fabricated
Las Vegas, for pioneering an invented Chinatown mall experience that has come to be its own authentic creation. Honorable mention for most promising micro-Chinatown: Austin.
Las Vegas is known for all things man-made. In 1995, inspired by his experience in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in the 1970s, a Taiwanese developer named James Chen opened a shopping complex, Chinatown Plaza, just west of the neon lights of the Vegas Strip. Since then, a bona fide Chinatown has unexpectedly bloomed in the desert, with the area’s fast-growing community turning Spring Mountain Road into a busy three-mile stretch of Asian businesses. A sign this Chinatown is legit? A stop here is now de rigueur for tourists from China, who come to eat, take photos and check the attraction off their lists.
It was perhaps inevitable that other cities would attempt to capitalize on the Chinatown marquee, whether or not the places actually had historic ties to Chinese immigrants. In 2002, in the land of Disney, a Chinese developer bestowed Orlando, Fla., with a shopping center with a Chinese bookstore and supermarket, plus Vietnamese, Korean and Indian businesses. Last year, it got a brand-new set of welcome arches, made in China.
Cities like Houston, Atlanta, Salt Lake City — as well as the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina — have tried to market their Chinese-themed malls to tourists, as if having a Chinatown lends cachet (Atlanta’s has a six-restaurant food court and a koi pond). Some developers have built for an Asian audience that is diverse, scattered or small, but the mall has become a gathering ground.
Worth noting for a fledgling Chinatown in this manufactured, pan-Asian category is Austin, a laid-back city, home to the University of Texas, that in recent years has seen its tech industry and South by Southwest festival take off. The Chinatown there may still be emerging, but the cabdrivers know it. Fifteen minutes north of downtown, the centerpiece is Chinatown Center, a mall that opened in 2006 and is anchored by the gargantuan MT Supermarket. The area is a work-in-progress, fueled by the booming Asian population: 6.5 percent of the total population, far above the national 4.2 percent, with numbers expected to double by 2020.
Like Las Vegas’s Chinatown Plaza, Chinatown Center in Austin hosts a Lunar New Year celebration. At the entrance to MT Supermarket, Dorothy Huang greeted me with a hug. For 30 years, she has been the pre-eminent authority on Chinese cooking in Texas; for the last decade, she has taught classes and led dim sum and market tours in Austin. That she is the de facto ambassador for Chinatown and Chinese cooking there speaks to the small-town feel of the community.
“It’s not the traditional Chinatown; it’s different because it’s commercial but not residential, not yet,” Ms. Huang said as we took a lap through the aisles and passed an impressive display of all manner of fish ball (essentially a meatball made with fish, it’s an addition to Chinese soups). The diversity of the district reflects where many Chinatowns have gone: Chinatown Center was developed by Cambodians, is anchored by a Vietnamese tenant and hosts Chinese and Korean-owned restaurants.
Ms. Huang said that the Chinese population — indeed, the Asian population overall — is at a tipping point, and it’s what makes the area intriguing to visit now.
“You are watching change happen right in front of you,” she said.
That afternoon, we explored North Lamar Boulevard, Burnet Road and the stretch of U.S. 183 between them. We ate lobster, straight from the tank and delicately wok-fried, and fresh roast duck at First Chinese BBQ, and examined the leaf-wrapped rice jung at Texas Bakery. Evidence of Austin’s fast-changing demographics could be seen just past the Austin Chinese Church, which Ms. Huang attends (“on the weekends, all the Chinese go to the supermarket after church”), at the new Asian American Resource Center, an expansive, elegant community center run by the city’s parks department. The center opened in September, hosting tea social hours, culinary classes, festivals and exhibitions; its mission, as surprising as it may be to visitors, is to introduce them to all things Asian in Austin.
There’s something real to be found in these made-up Chinatowns. In Las Vegas, with its extravagant five-star dining, people go to Chinatown for the simple reason that no other part of the city offers such great food at such a good price. The restaurants in Chinatown have quality chefs, the malls are walkable, the streets are clean and there’s plenty of parking.
This kind of Chinatown is the future, Mr. Chen, its founder, told me: a modern Chinatown befitting this modern city. The distinctive feeling of standing slightly apart from the urban milieu is still there, but it’s mostly due to the language of the place; these new Chinatowns make a concentrated effort to invite the surrounding community. Five thousand people attend the Lunar New Year celebrations each year, and Chinatown Plaza’s parking lot is packed with performers and food vendors. It’s a refreshingly earnest hit of culture in a place that’s always pretending to be something else.
“Chinatown,” then, has become a cultural shorthand for many things in America. Not everyone agrees on what they are, but the draws of the place — good food, promise for the recently arrived, density of experience — are the few constants, and proven comfort, no matter what the origin story.
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