The Plaid Bag Connection

Tag Archives: ethnoburb


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Lunar new year nomenclature and the multicultural metropolis

Chinese New Year decorations in Dublin, Ireland. Photo: William Murphy (Flickr/Creative Commons)

Chinese New Year decorations in Dublin, Ireland. Photo: William Murphy (Flickr/Creative Commons)

On Sunday I stopped by the Monterey Park Lunar New Year Festival with my family. For two days, the organizers blocked off several blocks of bustling Garvey Avenue to make room for street food vendors, trinket sellers, and corporate sponsors giving away free goodies. While most of the vendors were speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, there were a few booths from non-Sinophone cultures: an Indomie booth, a booth selling dry pho noodles, and a booth promoting tolerance of Islam (with one of the few banners that was in English only).

The Chinese are not the only ethnic group that celebrates new year according to the Chinese lunar calendar. Calling this a “lunar new year” festival rather than a “Chinese new year” festival is a deliberately inclusive choice. This event draws in visitors from across Southern California, not just heavily Chinese Monterey Park, and even if the event is sponsored by a Chinese newspaper and most of the vendors are Chinese, they were expecting people from many different ethnic groups.

In Sydney, food blogger and former politician Thang Ngo posted an open letter to the city’s Lord Mayor asking why that city continues to have a “Chinese new year” festival: Continue Reading →


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Temple conflicts in suburbia

Photo: Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times.

Earlier this year I wrote about what Anna from I Heart Cabramatta calls “house temples,” suburban residences turned into places of worship for Vietnamese Buddhists. Today’s Los Angeles Times has a story on the issues that these house temples are raising in their communities. Neighbors say they are primarily concerned with the amount of traffic that these temples bring, but there is also more than a small amount of xenophobia in the air.

Even though the face of central Orange County began changing decades ago with the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants, the tiny neighborhood temples sometimes seem foreign to residents when they spring up.

“There’s no question where you’re confronted with something you don’t understand or are unfamiliar with, you’re uncomfortable,” Kennedy said.

Often stereotypes about a culture or its images — such as the Buddhist swastika or Sikh turbans — can “color our thinking” about a neighbor, Kennedy said.

Orange County, about an hour south of the city of Los Angeles, is home to one of the largest concentrations of Vietnamese Americans in the country. Orange County’s Little Saigon is centered in the cities of Westminster and Garden Grove.


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Chinese Yellow Pages and the digital divide

Photo by Kristie Hang of (626) Foodettes. “Many Chinese still use these because not all of them are Internet savvy.”

Kristie Hang of (626) Foodettes spotted this stack of Chinese Consumer Yellow Pages (華人工商電話簿) books in California’s San Gabriel Valley.

While paper business directories like these have essentially died out in “mainstream” USA, they continue to thrive in some immigrant communities. Media stereotypes might suggest that Asian Americans are super-wired computer nerds, but many Asian immigrants and refugees face high barriers to Internet and computer use. Low-income people might not have access to the Internet or to a computer. Most computers sold in the US are set to use English as the primary language. Input methods in many Asian languages are so difficult to learn that many less-educated, low-income people may not have the time or patience to use them.

Take my parents, for example. They have a computer, an iPad, and a broadband Internet connection, but they still prefer to use these big paper directories rather than searching for businesses on Google or Yelp. They both have little formal education (a result of displacement and limited opportunity structures in wartime Vietnam) and limited English proficiency. Though input methods in Chinese are now readily available on computers sold in the US, keyboard-based methods have a steep learning curve, handwriting input is slow and unreliable, and dictation often does not understand their accents.

While using a computer makes it easier for many of us to find the things we need, for my parents and others like them, using a computer actually makes it much harder. That’s part of the reason why the Chinese Yellow Pages are not likely to go away anytime soon.

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