My father grew up just a few steps from where I am now on this shop-lined section of Chung King Road in Los Angeles, two flights of worn wooden stairs above his father’s general store. The family flat was a heavenly slice of the homeland, the living room lined with silk-tasselled lanterns, Chinese landscapes on the walls and a custom red rug holding the room together. The cool, dark hallways smelled of camphor wood and soy sauce . A sizeable turtle roamed the kitchen like a king (until one day he disappeared – only to reappear in a soup). The flat had a bank of tall windows that overlooked all of Chinatown, with LA’s art deco City Hall looming in the middle distance. Throughout his childhood, my father gazed out onto this dreamy mid-20th century tableau, a sparkling panorama of newly built pagodas and temples with tiled roofs curled up at the eaves, some lined in neon. Amid the constant bustle of tourists, Hollywood stars would often be seen pulling up in their Cadillac convertibles, while down on Hill Street lived any number of old Chinatown families who had known my father since he was born. Families like the Fongs, the Lees, the Moys and the Wongs, these were Cantonese who dared to immigrate to these shores when they were not at all embracing to arrivals from Asia. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act forbade most Chinese immigration to the United States, although the law did permit Chinese merchants like my grandfather, as well as diplomats and students and their families, into the country. For the Chinese already in the US, however, citizenship was disallowed, and the act would not be repealed until 1943. Standing here again, after so many years since my last visit, I can understand why my father loved Chinatown and felt so deeply connected to its courtyards, banquet halls and backstreets. And yet, even though Chinatown seemed like a fantasy come alive for my grandparents’ generation, at some point in his time, the shine came off and my father wanted out. He was not the only one. But before then, “your grandfather was like Chinatown’s mayor”, my mother would remind me – recalling a photograph of him showing then-US president Richard Nixon around his store in the 1970s – and my grandfather oversaw activities in Chinatown with such a big heart and open wallet that nobody ever wanted him to leave. Throughout my childhood living in another part of LA, I knew Chinatown as the place where I could eat the most delicious siu mai and har gow , and reunite with my band of cousins, running through the alleys until we reached the statue of Dr Sun Yat-sen in Central Plaza, the area’s main dining and shopping courtyard. Beyond that, Chinatown was a little dirty, a little dangerous, and almost always blazing hot. It was also the exotic backdrop for much Gee family drama: my father’s squabbles with my grandfather over his will; my nasty aunt’s public snubbings of my mother; and a sprawling funeral for my grandfather, for which an entire half-mile stretch of Hill Street was shut down, all of the Gee girls and female cousins dressed in matching black dresses, sewn in another aunt’s Chinatown factory. This photograph marks such an accomplishment – to create something from scratch like these men did, merchants working together ... to offer an identity for ... the community Richard Liu, who owns several Chinatown buildings I did not realise back then how remarkable our little enclave was. Turns out, I did not know many things about my childhood’s special place of most welcome escapism. But suddenly, a few months ago, word began to spread about a kind of retrospective of the area and its people, and like it or not, it was my direct history, too, that was about to be put on public display. And so this spring, the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, after having received a trove of mid-20th century Chinatown photos from the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC) and a number of local family albums, joined forces with the Los Angeles Public Library to celebrate and explore the legacy of LA Chinatown, the first community in North America planned and owned by people of Chinese descent. The ongoing “Stories and Voices from LA Chinatown” exhibition, both online and wrapped around a fence on those streets sacred to my family, includes photographs of the founders of Chinatown, such as Peter SooHoo Snr and You Chung Hong, the first Chinese-American graduate of the University of Southern California Law School. There are early renderings of Central Plaza by prominent LA architects Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson, and videos of Chinatown residents, past and present, waxing poetic about the area’s complex legacy. The exhibition includes oral histories of descendants of Chinatown’s founders and former and current residents . Pat SooHoo Lem, daughter of SooHoo Snr, remembers walking up to tourists and offering to sell them a gardenia corsage or sing God Bless America for them. “We’d sing and they would give us a nickel or a dime,” she says in her twangy American accent. Caitlin Bryant, great-granddaughter of SooHoo Snr, is a CHSSC board member, working to rejuvenate Central Plaza. In the exhibition video, Bryant tells the story of how her grandmother worried about her grandfather in a newly founded Chinatown, as he sweated out the summer as a busboy at the Golden Pagoda restaurant. “My grandma would go and throw popsicles up to him on the second-floor window.” There is also Richard Liu, a Burma-born Chinese interior designer. “We left Burma when I was 12, in 1968, for an education and a better life,” Liu recalls. “We had big fears – that we would not be able to get Chinese food and spices , that we would just have to eat American food. Then we got to Chinatown and we realised everything was going to be OK. We could find everything we needed here.” As a young man, the designer frequented the Chung King Road antique stores, ferreting out such treasures as hand-painted snuff bottles. Today, Liu owns several Chinatown buildings, including YC Hong’s original law office. He has set up his design firm in one of them, overlooking a graceful Chinese courtyard garden . What I had not known during my childhood visits was that there had been an original Chinatown a few miles south of the new Chinatown site. Established in the 1800s, the old Chinatown was home to some 200 immigrants, many of whom crossed the ocean to work on the railroad. One black-and-white exhibition photograph captures the early Chinese settlers performing a lion dance in the middle of a dusty road. “That photo really touched me,” says Li Wei Yang, curator of Pacific Rim collections at The Huntington and a collaborator on the exhibition. “Even though life was so hard for them, these Chinese immigrants made such an effort to stay connected to their culture.” This original Chinatown had also been the scene of bleak events: an 1871 massacre in which some 500 rioting Anglos and Latinos stormed the area and mutilated and killed 18 Chinese men, including a respected doctor. A photograph of the massacre also appears in the exhibition. “It was very disturbing to see,” says Todd Lerew, director of special projects for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, who worked with Yang on the exhibition. “While we’ve come a long way from the horrific treatment and violence and overtly racist policies that earlier generations faced, it is clear that problems of racism and violent Sinophobia still persist today .” In the 1930s, the area was razed to make way for Union Station, still the city’s main railway hub. Soon after the displacement, SooHoo Snr and Hong spearheaded plans to build the new Chinatown, which runs primarily along Hill Street and Broadway. Indeed, designer Liu’s favourite photograph is of the grand opening of the new Chinatown, an image capturing Chinese-American dignitaries, the LA mayor and a brass band, all beaming at this monumental achievement. “To me,” says Liu, “this photograph marks such an accomplishment – to create something from scratch like these men did, merchants working together, building a shopping centre to attract tourists and to offer an identity for Chinatown and the community.” One of the early residents, Doré Hall Wong, whose father built new Chinatown’s landmark Golden Pagoda restaurant, remembers the racism that she and her family faced throughout their early lives in LA. “When I was a child I had to wear a bracelet, a necklace, with my name, my address, and I also had a pin that said, ‘I am Chinese’,” she recalls in an exhibition video titled Exclusion . “I realised what was happening when I got older – that there was discrimination. There will always be a form of discrimination .” Indeed, Chinese people in the US faced decades of harassment and violence throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, based primarily on resentment of China’s labour force. The men who arrived, often from southern China, were skilled and willing to work for lower wages. The Chinese Exclusion Act was, and remains, America’s only law established to prevent the immigration and naturalisation of an ethnic group. This policy of exclusion, as well as widespread racist sentiment, resulted in the clustered living situations that created Chinatowns throughout North America. That the founders of LA’s community were able to envision and manifest such a fantastical representation of China was a huge point of pride, especially given its proximity to Hollywood. Liu points out that while the architects Webster and Wilson, who designed the area, were Caucasian, they worked closely with Hong’s wife, Mabel, who provided examples of architectural and landscaping styles from books. As a result, the buildings had strong symmetries, octagonal windows and evocative wooden screens. One architectural critic remarked that “it was the neon trim that followed the upturned eaves of the classical Chinese designs that gave these silhouettes a freshness and sparkle”. Perhaps it was Chinese style with the “overlay of Westernness” – the vision of Webster and Wilson – that made LA Chinatown as dramatic as it was. “You could feel their passion, they fell in love with China and this project,” says Liu, whose favourite building is the former Golden Pagoda restaurant, later the bar Hop Louie (now closed). “The architecture was pretty much modelled after the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. Chinatown evoked a fantasy, a place to escape.” In fact, when Chinatown first opened, in 1938, “it was an exciting environment”, says Lerew. “It was clean and new with wide, brightly lit streets – in contrast to old Chinatown. The Chinese community in LA at that time knew that they could capitalise on the broader curiosity and interest in ‘Oriental’ culture, food and design.” Indeed, even though Central Plaza opened during the Great Depression, “it was extremely popular in the years immediately following the 1938 grand opening and during the second world war”, says Lerew. “There was no Disneyland yet at that time. Chinatown was the place to go.” My grandfather, whose American name was Sam Ward, was one of Chinatown’s pioneers. He ran his eponymous general store and an import/export business where you could get everything from bak choi to fancy vases and chopsticks to Chinese whiskey – a business that kept the family connected to their Guangdong homeland. In the 1960s and ’70s, my grandfather was chairman of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, whose mission was to “advocate for democracy for the Chinese people and serve as a bridge between Chinese-American immigrants and the mainstream groups, diminish racial discrimination and promote peace among the people”, according to its website. My parents met for the first time on a blind date arranged by their parents at Fong’s Cafe. My mother, the daughter of a Sacramento chicken farmer, remembers my father Peter’s first question to her, as she lunched on a hamburger: “Do you like onions?” My grandfather needed to get his favourite son married off quickly so that Peter could avoid the Korean war draft. Enter the simple farming family with an available 17-year-old daughter. My mother could have been intimidated by the Gee family’s big busy store, but instead she felt an easy kinship, and life in Chinatown looked like fun. “I could have said no to the marriage,” my mother recalls, “but I looked around the store and everything looked OK. So, I said yes.” My mother soon moved into the flat above the Sam Ward shop, where she learned to steam fish and make beef chow fun. She worked as a salesgirl during the day, tallying up the cost of ceramic bowls and oolong tea , and packing up goods for tourists. My mother loved the pretty buildings with their neon lights, and she loved hopping from banquet to banquet, celebratory meals thrown by the other Chinatown families. “We always had lots of friends around,” she says. But my father, who was studying engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, could not concentrate with so many people around him. He wanted a place of his own, somewhere to raise his family in peace. And so it went. I would ride in the family estate car every weekend, my face pressed against the already-smudged window on the 15-minute drive to Sam Ward. I could not wait to see the bright buildings, moon-shaped portals, and wishing wells with their Guanyin statues, penjing trees and koi fish , slicing through the water like gold ingots with fins. We sometimes followed my grandfather as he made the rounds of Central Plaza, where tourists shopped for silk fans and backscratchers. Other times, we came dressed for one of his glamorous banquets where waiters in white jackets appeared in a line, holding big platters of sliced abalone, Peking duck and shrimp in lobster sauce. The sumptuous menu was always the same, but my five siblings (I was the second youngest) and I would still “ooh” and “aah” as each dish appeared. Then my grandfather would stand up, rising to his six-foot (183cm) height, corsage on his suit lapel, and give a speech that would have the whole room clapping wildly. As I grew older, Chinatown remained a touchstone, a place I would sometimes go when I wanted to find home. As a junior in university, I returned to dance, swirl and smile for the Miss Chinatown pageant. I did not win but I still got to ride next to the then LA mayor Tom Bradley, waving to the crowds from a convertible in the annual Lunar New Year parade. Now I had a place in Chinatown history, too. As it was for so many original families, Chinatown was a way station, a place for immigrants to gain their American footing and then carry on to live and work someplace else. Once housing restrictions for the Chinese eased in the ’60s, Chinese-Americans began to move to such enclaves as Monterey Park, Alhambra and San Gabriel, and create robust residential and commercial communities there, with Chinese characters gracing many signs among the main thoroughfares. To leave Chinatown behind for these new suburbs, with their housing estates, McMansions and strip malls, became a Chinese-American measure of success. But such upwards and outwards mobility came with a cost. Today, Chinatown has admittedly lost much of its original lustre. The beautiful buildings, once the colour of jewels, are faded and worn. Many of the best restaurants closed down during the pandemic , if not before. Google “Most dangerous parts of LA” and Chinatown tops at least one list, not because of its own citizens committing crimes but the gangs that surround the area. “Chinatown has become so dirty, and it has got progressively worse – all the empty storefronts and the merchants leaving,” says Liu. “It’s hard to see.” But Liu, for one, has a plan. He is renovating five of his storefronts and, this summer, these spaces will be showcasing paintings by some 30 famous artists who once exhibited in Chinatown. Opening day will be one big party. “It’s going to be a relaunch of Chinatown, post-Covid,” he says. “We’ll turn the neon lights on, the galleries and restaurants will be open. It’s going to be fun.” As I stand on Chung King Road, a light breeze sends rows of faded red lanterns swaying, and I hear my grandfather’s voice: “Just look at everything that we Chinese built here.” Then I hear my dad’s voice: “Be grateful we got out.” But with this exhibition bringing the vicissitudes of our history into one place, one timeline, Chinatown descendants such as Bryant, the great-granddaughter of Peter SooHoo Snr, feel hopeful about the enclave that has given so much to their families. “My generation is looking back,” she comments in her exhibition video. “They are looking back to look forward. They only want to make it great. This is just the beginning.”