I. Coming Back to San Francisco Chinatown
It wasn’t until my early twenties when I moved back home and started a job at a civil rights organization at the border between San Francisco Chinatown and North Beach that I began to explore my relationship with America’s oldest Chinese neighborhood.1 One day I took the creaking number 1 bus toward Embarcadero and passed Stockton street, where a group of young Chinese kids and older adults crowded on. Squeezed for space and surrounded by Cantonese conversations, I was surprised at how out of place I felt. I realized I knew very little about San Francisco’s largest Chinese enclave, let alone the Chinese language.
In time, I nurtured my curiosity about my roots by joining the Chinatown YMCA, enrolling in Cantonese class at SF City College, canvassing for the Chinese Progressive Association, and learning about my family history. I remember when I went to see a showing of activist Harry Chuck’s documentary Chinatown Rising. The film wove Chuck’s original footage from the 1960s with interviews to shed light on the pivotal Asian American organizing that shaped SF Chinatown, including early fights for affordable housing, open space, and fair education.2 I began to see SF Chinatown as more than just a historic landing place for Chinese immigrants, or a place where my dad went to school as a kid, or as the city’s commercial hub of Chinese wares and produce. This neighborhood also was and continues to be a site of fierce activism for immigrant communities in San Francisco.
II. Chinatown Changing
A few years later I visited LA Chinatown for the first time and began to understand how Chinatowns across the U.S. are rapidly shifting. I was participating in a program called Summer Activist Training (humorously SAT for short) geared toward young Asian Americans interested in learning about grassroots movement building. Across a single weekend, we joined a strike for hotel workers, practiced telling our “story of self,” and learned about the rich history of Asian American activism. I especially remember my visit to Chinatown, led by organizers with Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED), a volunteer organization that fights for a Chinatown where residents have access to affordable housing, good jobs, and a healthy environment, amongst other key priorities.3
Our first stop on the tour was a visit to a single room occupancy building where elderly immigrant tenants were organizing for upgrades and resisting their landlords’ illegal rent hike. We visited Ai Hoa Market, the last standing Asian grocery store in Chinatown. When I found out the market would soon move due to a developer buy-out, my heart sank. We concluded our tour at Far East Plaza, where the hipster Southern fried chicken joint, Howlin’ Ray’s was bustling next to shuttered businesses. The CCED organizers spoke about the restaurant as an example of gentrification’s growing impact on the neighborhood. I realized that in any other circumstance I would have been one of the millennials waiting in line for fried chicken, but instead found myself standing at the plaza entrance trying to hold back tears. This tour had peeled back Chinatown’s veneer and underneath I was witnessing a community and culture at risk of displacement.
Six months later, the pandemic would exacerbate the threats that Chinatowns were already facing. A recent SF Examiner piece by Greg Wong cited a 41% and 24% drop in population in DC and NYC’s Chinatowns in the twenty years preceding COVID-19. Wong goes on to assert that “pandemic-fueled economic realities and gentrification have hollowed out the country’s Chinatowns, turning once culturally rich communities and vital immigrant gateways into ghost towns.”4 I left LA Chinatown that day feeling inspired by CCED’s organizing but heavy from seeing a snapshot of this change occur in real time.
III. Barrio Chino
It’s become almost a pastime to visit the Chinatowns of each new city I travel to.
No matter the tentative feelings I have with my own Chinese identity, there is a comfort and curiosity in finding the part of town that is connected to the heritage of my people, especially in cities far from home.
I have inadvertently visited multiple barrio chinos across Central and South America, including in Medellín, Colombia, CDM, Mexico, and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
When I visited Mexico City, the ubiquitous red hanging lanterns and large Chinese characters at the edge of the Centro district signaled that we had entered the barrio chino. As I walked down the commercial corridor with my friend, however, I felt disassociated. I saw artificial purple baos that looked nothing like the Cantonese ones I grew up with at home. The food and trinkets I passed by in the street felt like a Disney-fied imitation of my American image of a more “authentic” Chinatown.
Meanwhile, in the Chinatowns of Medellín and Santo Domingo, I was astonished to find few Chinese people in the shops or the street. Searching for Chinese faces in Medellín, I finally flagged down an Asian woman stationed outside one of the restaurants and asked her in Spanish where all the Chinese people were. I’ve since forgotten her response, but I remember feeling confused. Who was this Chinatown for then if not for Chinese residents? I was seeing up front and close that my assumptions about Chinatown – as a place centered around Chinese life – did not hold up everywhere I went. Even though growing up I felt disconnected from Chinatown, when navigating the most legibly Chinese neighborhood in a foreign city, I found myself comparing it to my familiar, however imperfect, image of Chinatown back home.
The San Francisco Chinatown Area Plan from 1987 offers one framework to understand the multiple roles of Chinatowns in cities: as simultaneously a residential neighborhood, a capital city, and a tourist destination all in one.5 Visiting Mexico City, Medellín, and Santo Domingo’s respective barrio chinos unsettled me because they felt like tourist relics of Chinatowns, ostensibly catered to visitors like me. As distant as San Francisco Chinatown felt growing up, seeing what Wendy Tan refers to as “Chinatowns without Chinese” in her report Chinatowns in Latin America felt even more bizarre.6 The decorative Chinese facades, collection of Chinese restaurants, and gimmicky wares felt unrecognizable to me, like a shell of a former, breathing Chinatown.
IV. Little Chinatown
The Chinatown of my childhood is not the prominent Chinatown near downtown San Francisco but rather the more unassuming commercial stretch on Clement street between 12th Avenue and Arguello on the western side of the city. According to Michell S. Laguerre’s paper Richmond District as the New Chinatown of San Francisco, the neighborhood I grew up in transformed when Chinese and Russian immigrants moved in the 1960s to what was once a mostly Irish community in a segregated city. Laguerre highlights that “new Chinatowns” like the Richmond district differed from their counterparts because they lacked a cohesive architectural design and comprised more ethnically diverse and affluent residents.7
This Chinatown, too, is changing. Over the past ten years, more hipster shops selling nonessential overpriced wares have cropped up along Clement Street. Last year, two stalwart businesses, Kirin Restaurant, my family’s go to place for Chinese take-out, and Taiwan Restaurant, closed due to their owners retiring.8 Although I no longer live in San Francisco, each time I return, I find myself looking for the businesses I grew up visiting.
For me, Clement street in the heart of the Richmond district, was the place where I trailed my mom for years as she did her shopping. I impatiently tagged along as she searched for the cheapest water chestnuts for wontons during the holidays, green onions and vegetables at New May Wah supermarket, and low fat milk from Smart and Final. I followed her as she picked up ngau lei sou, a sweet fried doughnut she knows I’m partial to, wrapped in an oily paper bag from the window stall at Taiwan Restaurant or dim sum treats like ha gow and cheung fun from the dependable Good Luck Dim Sum. No visit to Clement street was ever a one stop affair.
We didn’t know the shopkeepers here well and we weren’t a part of local Chinese civic organizations or churches, but my mom knew this street and where to find which ingredient at the best price like the back of her hand. It was the only place where I heard her speak in Cantonese in public. Only recently has it occurred to me that these grocery trips with my mom, and the knowledge of which stores to go to and for what, are a kind of recipe that I took for granted when I was young but find myself wanting to preserve as I get older. This has always been my mom’s Chinatown tour.
1. Chinatown Rising LLC. “Chinatown Rising.” Accessed December 15, 2024.
2. “Ibid.”
3. Chinatown Community for Equitable Development. “About,” n.d.
4. Wong, Greg. “Grace Young’s San Francisco Past Fuels Goal to Save Chinatowns’ Future.” San Francisco Examiner, September 24, 2024.
5. San Francisco Planning Department. “Chinatown Area Plan.” San Francisco General Plan, n.d.; “Study: Chinatown’s Future Centers on Neighborhood’s ‘Heart.’” San Francisco Examiner, September 12, 2024.
6. Tan, Wendy. “Chinatowns in Latin America.” City University of New York (CUNY) Hunter College, 2017.
7. Laguerre, Michel S. “The Globalization of a Panethnopolis: Richmond District as the New Chinatown in San Francisco.” GeoJournal 64, no. 1 (2005): 41–49.
8. Madrigal-Yankowski, Nico. “25-Year-Old SF Chinese Restaurant Closes Permanently.” SFGATE, August 30, 2024; Y, Vivian. “Taiwan Restaurant.” Yelp. Accessed April 4, 2025.