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Quincy is hardly an anomaly: although still important, especially as visually recognizable symbols of Chinese America, the centrality of urban Chinatowns has waned for decades. Now, some suburbs and satellite cities have started to develop their own Sinicized version of the American Dream. In Houston, Chinatown was long ago reconstituted out of subdivisions and strip malls west of the city, beyond the affluent suburb of Bellaire. In St. Louis, Chinese Americans have dispersed into the suburbs entirely, allowing the old Chinatown to wither away without replacement. The Vancouver suburb of Richmond is home to a large, wealthy population of Chinese Canadians and a cluster of Asian-oriented shopping malls, including the sleek Aberdeen Centre. Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens in New York City, is nearly as large as the Chinatown in Manhattan and a major weekend destination for Asian suburbanites. West Coast cities have seen the rise of Monterey Park and other so-called “ethnoburbs,” a term coined by the geographer Wei Li to describe suburbs and business districts transformed by ethnic populations with direct links to the capital flows of the globalized economy. In the words of Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic in their recent book Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community: “The recognizable pattern of Chinese settlements in this country is not exactly disappearing; rather, it is being reconstituted in a much more complex, dispersed way.”

Homeownership On a Single Token

In the case of Quincy’s Asian boom, destiny took the form of a single subway token. According to Tom Lun-nap Chung, a former Quincy resident who researched the city’s Asian American population (and who is now a professor of family medicine at the University of Cincinnati), Chinese immigrants looking for an affordable place to buy homes discovered Quincy in the 1980s through the Red Line subway. The fare from Chinatown to the North Quincy and Wollaston stations, on the north side of the city, cost one token; to reach Quincy Center and stations to the south, it cost two. “It’s a real factor,” says John Brothers, executive director of Quincy Asian Resources, a local nonprofit that provides English lessons, organizes cultural events, and connects immigrants with public services such as healthcare and housing. (As of January this year, the subway converted to a single-fare system for all stops on every line.) “You’re scraping together money for your down payment. Well, in the Chinese culture, they probably saved up most of the down payment already, but still.”

When Chinese Americans started arriving in numbers, Quincy was reeling from the recent demise of its shipbuilding industry, which for a century produced battleships and aircraft carriers for the U.S. Navy. Soon, Chinese businesses began to appear in once-vacant storefronts on Hancock Street in North Quincy, spurred by easy access to Chinatown and low rents. During the ’90s, Quincy’s Asian population increased by 144 percent (the white population declined by 10 percent during the same period) and today stands at just over 14,000 people. Two-thirds of these are Chinese, while Vietnamese and Indians make up the second- and third-largest Asian subgroups, respectively. That means around 17 percent of Quincy’s total population is Asian. Many believe the real figure is higher. “The Asian community has been a huge bonus for this community because it has enabled Quincy to be much less downtrodden than other towns in Massachusetts that lost their manufacturing base,” says Brothers.

The Asian population benefits in return. Chung described the city as a “one-step-up enclave”: in Quincy, Chinese Americans can boost themselves into the middle class through homeownership and entrepreneurship. Since Chinese immigrants frequently come to the U.S. through sponsorship by a relative, the more people put down roots in Quincy, the more immigrants make the city their first stop in the Boston region. According to Brothers, “If you’re Chinese, you can move to Quincy now and not learn English and still do 90 to 95 percent of what you need to do in life.”

As Chinese Americans disperse, they indirectly reinforce Chinatown’s position as a hub, giving it renewed importance. Many immigrants in Quincy, for instance, ride the subway every day into Chinatown, where a van then transports them to their job–say, a ten-hour shift in a suburban Chinese restaurant far from both Quincy and Chinatown. But many new arrivals no longer want to stay in Chinatown. As they spread out across the region, they acquire cars, large refrigerators, and the shopping preferences of American suburbanites. “To middle- and upper-class immigrants,” Kwong and Miscevic report, “going food shopping in Chinatown is not an attractive option. The alien feel and sound of the place due to the difference in dialect and class, the nightmarish parking situation, and the need to enter many stores to buy different items ... all make Chinatown a place to avoid.”

A New Chinatown Takes Shape

Quincy’s rise as the Boston area’s second Chinatown–now sometimes referred to as “Chinatown South”–in many ways repeats the tale of cities across the country. Chinese Americans have been abandoning urban Chinatowns for the better part of a century, leaving behind overcrowded living conditions and dirty streets in search of good public schools, affordable single-family homes, and a favorable climate for launching small businesses. The trend began to accelerate with liberal federal immigration laws in the 1950s and ’60s, spurring a tenfold increase in the Chinese American population between 1960 and 2000. Kwong and Miscevic describe how Chinese capital, accumulated through decades of rapid economic growth in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other parts of East Asia, poured into the U.S. in the ’70s and ’80s. Some of this massive influx of investment found its way into real estate in various Chinatowns, while even more fueled an explosion in the number of U.S. banks owned by overseas Chinese.

These developments laid the groundwork for the emergence of satellite Chinatowns like Flushing, as well as the ethnoburbs of Los Angeles. Chinese Americans who dreamed of owning a home now had access to a large pool of mortgage capital in institutions that spoke their language. Meanwhile, incoming investment fueled runaway real estate speculation in urban Chinatowns nationwide. The Chinese expression for “flipping” real estate–“frying real estate in a wok”–proved apt, as skyrocketing prices caused landlords to raise rents on residents and businesses alike. In the middle of all this, garment manufacturing, long the mainstay industry of urban Chinatowns, entered terminal decline in the face of competition from overseas, including China. The economic upheaval sent investors and residents rushing to the suburbs, especially in California.

The early years of Quincy’s boom suffered instances and accusations of racism toward Asians in this mostly white, blue-collar city. At one point, the state threatened to withhold grants if the city did not address discrimination toward Asians in municipal hiring and public housing. Racial antagonism subsided in the ’90s, partly because Quincy benefited economically from the influx of business, but the potential for conflict between Asians and whites persists. Like the ethnoburbs before it, Quincy has now become a first destination for new immigrants from China, especially the southern coastal province of Fuijian. Timothy Fong, an ethnic studies professor at California State University, Sacramento, sees this as potentially problematic, since outsiders may not grasp the considerable diversity of Chinese immigrants: “Imagine, if you will, someone from the outside–you don’t know much about Chinese people, and you think they’re all the same. You just see the spread. It has the imagery of takeover. It’s not true, but the image of it is there.” In late 2006, a newly formed Chinese nonprofit flew the red flag of the People’s Republic of China over their building on two occasions. Local veterans organized a protest, city councilors complained publicly, and after a flurry of local media coverage, the organization agreed to stop flying the flag.

Despite growing Asian retail activity in Quincy Center, the city’s modestly sized downtown, Quincy has never received the torrent of incoming Asian capital that transformed ethnoburbs like Monterey Park virtually overnight, so Quincy may avoid the nasty conflicts of some of its California predecessors. The Asian American population is gradually becoming ingrained. The annual August Moon Festival, with traditional Asian foods and dancing, draws major crowds. Kam Man Plaza, a derelict strip mall whose former businesses were crushed by a nearby Wal-Mart, now hosts the largest Asian supermarket in Massachusetts, Kam Man Food, which is not only thriving but attracts a sizeable minority of non-Asian shoppers. The city now employs five Asian police officers and a full-time, multilingual Asian Liaison, and the mayor recently hired a Chinese American deputy chief of staff. A Boston-area health center that specializes in treating Asian Americans recently opened a multimillion-dollar clinic in a brand new condo building in North Quincy.

The list goes on–but only time will tell if increasing prominence leads to increasing resentment. Letters published in the The Patriot-Ledger(the Quincy-based newspaper that covers the South Shore) during the flag controversy suggest that the potential for misunderstanding and conflict remains. One reader wrote, “We live in America… If you choose to [fly the Chinese flag], then go back to that country. I’m sure they would be glad to have you.” “I was appalled but not surprised,” wrote another. “Almost every store from Norfolk Downs to Wollaston Center is adorned in Chinese lettering.”

 

The Kam Man Story

Next door to Kam Man, over lunch in the Honey Café, Kai Lau, the real estate broker and entrepreneur who brought the Asian American shopping mall to Quincy, is explaining how Kam Man came to be. “There was a change in the living standard of the Asian Americans, especially Chinese families. Now they can afford to have a car,” he says. “If he doesn’t have a car, his kid will demand to get a car. Right? American Dream–a car, house, education.”

Lau came to the United States from Hong Kong three decades ago to study electrical engineering and entered real estate in 1986. The 90,000-square-foot space in Quincy became vacant in 2001 after its previous occupant, the discount chain Bradlee’s, went bankrupt. Lau’s first prospective tenant, Super 88, a Chinatown-based Asian supermarket chain, rejected the space in President Plaza because it was too distant (one mile) from the nearest T station. But Lau says that years of observing people carrying heavy bags of groceries back from Chinatown convinced him the time was ripe for a change in Chinese-American shopping habits. His main anchor store, Kam Man Food, would bring a traditional Chinatown business (it started on New York City’s Canal Street in 1971, and is now an eleven-store chain) to a suburban setting that was cleaner, more comfortable, and had good parking. “Nobody wants to live in Chinatown, because it’s filthy, it’s dusty, traffic is terrible, the apartment is very small,” he says. “They work hard so they can save the down payment for the house in the suburb and leave Boston Chinatown.”

From the parking lot, nothing about the shopping center that hosts Kam Man seems all that remarkable. The enormous crane of the now-defunct shipyard towers over a nearby hill. Native species of the strip mall ecosystem–Radio Shack, Domino’s Pizza–are present and accounted for, and the main sign visible from the road is entirely in English. But the shopping mall’s interior is far more diverse and visually dazzling. A tiny phone card store is lit by no fewer than eight chandeliers. A shop selling knick-knacks displays a photo of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin with President George W. Bush, looking uneasy in a traditional Chinese silk shirt. One kiosk loudly promotes something called the “Mingun Jade Massage Bed.” Inside the Lollicup TeaZone, teenage couples linger over bubble tea. A young girl skates by on roller shoes.

Inside Kam Man Food, men in white aprons prepare dumplings by hand next to a display of two-liter bottles of Coke. Standard cartons of brown and white eggs compete for refrigerator space with turnip cakes, several varieties of duck eggs, and a vast selection of tofu. In the seafood section, enormous carp and other fish swim in shallow tanks just beneath the ice. Familiar Western brands like Domino Sugar and Smucker’s jam share shelf space with “Crystal Love Fruit Jelly” and “Lotus-Seed Paste Buns.” An American flag hangs over the checkout lanes.

Spaces of the New

For decades, Cantonese speakers have dominated life in Boston’s Chinatown. Most Chinatown newspapers still use the traditional system of writing Chinese characters, still common in Hong Kong and Taiwan–the two places where most Boston-area Chinese immigrants were born, until recently. Today, immigrants come from everywhere: not just teeming coastal cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, but also the rural hinterland and booming interior cities, as well as other countries, like Vietnam and Malaysia. These immigrants bring both confounding variety–there may be some 11 Sinitic languages (versions of Chinese) and around 1,500 dialects spoken in China–and a new, portentous standardization: new immigrants virtually all speak Mandarin, the lingua franca of today’s emerging superpower. Slowly, the newcomers are transforming the character of the Chinese American population by importing elements of today’s China–a very different country from the one earlier immigrants left.

Class differences are becoming more complex as well. In his studies from the 1990s, Professor Chung found a “U-shaped curve” in levels of education and income among the Asian American population of the Boston region. More recent research by the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston has shown household income and education among Chinese Americans in Massachusetts more closely tracking the general population at every level, though Chinese Americans still have higher percentages of both the poor and less-educated and the well-off and highly-educated. This may bode well for places like Kam Man. John Brothers pointed out that as the influx of Asian Americans into Quincy has, predictably, driven up housing prices, Asians (along with everyone else) have started looking to other parts of the South Shore for affordable places to live. With increasing geographic dispersal of Asians at every class level, Kam Man-type Asian malls in new locations may become both economically feasible and socially useful.

In an article on Vietnamese communities in Orange County, California, and Boston, urban sociologist Karin Aguilar-San Juan argues that community building involves a crucial spatial dimension. The space of Boston’s Chinatown, though invaluable and irreplaceable in many respects, is remote from daily life for some Chinese Americans and fundamentally unappealing to others. It provides virtually no opportunity for would-be middle-class immigrants to own homes, and the luxury towers and condo conversions now spreading through the neighborhood only make life there less affordable. Meanwhile, the aging suburbs of every American city are full of retail structures built during the postwar heyday of suburban growth, underused and unloved today. Asian retail experiments like Kam Man, and future variations on the theme, offer a kind of pre-fab pocket urbanism for the post-Chinatown suburban reality in which, increasingly, most Chinese Americans choose to live. At the same time, they can invest moribund spaces like strip malls with new life and economic vitality. Most promisingly, the corridors and aisles of Kam Man may prove hospitable to a whole range of identities evolving in the variegated world of 21st-century Chinese America–including some brand new ones.

 

This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!