The Genesis of a Chinatown: Congregation or Agglomeration?

BY SABRINA MCCUTCHAN 

Part I: Introducing a New Chinatown

The Morrisville Outlet Mall has been “abandoned” for a long time, but today the halls are nearly impassable. It is six o’clock in the evening on February 11, 2012, and the “Year of the Dragon Celebration,” a groundbreaking ceremony for RDU’s new Chinatown, has been underway for four hours (see Appendix). The Chinese dance performances have already ended and people are eating dinner, some buying from the food court (the lines are longest for Chinese cuisine, a few lonely customers approaching the Subway© and Greek vendor) and some walking down the mall concourse to an enormous buffet room. This main artery is lined with red and gold Chinese paper lanterns, their 汉字(characters) standing out sharply on their sides. It opens on a number of other activity rooms which almost exclusively cater to children: there’s a movie room screening Kung Fu Panda and 龙门飞甲 (Flying Swords of Dragon Gate), a games and craft room with one section cordoned off for hula-hooping, a karaoke room, and local magician Shaun Jay performing in the hall. Underscoring the hustle is the incessant tonal hum of spoken Mandarin.

Roughly 8,000 people showed up for the day’s festivities, the vast majority of them Asian or Asian-American families (“News”). In the six o’clock crowd, there were only two or three Caucasians (myself included) and a handful of African-Americans. About eight men in nicely-cut business suits exited the VIP room attached to the buffet when I walked past; Mark Herman, the CEO of Panda Properties Sino, LLC, later informed me that they were visiting Chinese investors. The mall’s retail spaces may have been largely empty the day of the groundbreaking, leaving only four retailers and a local model railroad club, but Herman and his partner Kevin Lee have big plans to fill them. If Saturday’s impressive turnout is any indication, RDU’s local Asian community is excited to see those plans come to fruition.

But what exactly are those plans? Herman’s vision is complex and, as we will see below, fraught with fissure-lines of tension. There are two competing paradigms driving project development. One is a deep personal appreciation for local American Chinese individuals and what is perceived as their Chinese culture and heritage. The other is a potent commercial sensibility stemming from decades of involvement in restaurant development. This intersection of business drive and cultural appreciation birthed a plan that revamps the existing retail space with Chinese architecture and imports “authentic” Chinese businesses within the next year, then adds a five-star hotel and cultural school, both also imported from China, by 2015 (Herman) (Chou). Funding stems from both local American and overseas Chinese and Hong Kong-based investors. The food court will be expanded to cover twice as much square footage as it does now, and three more restaurants will be added on the property, all of them boasting “authentic” Asian cuisine. Food is Herman’s life work and an attraction of Chinatowns the world over, so it is perhaps natural for this to evolve as the development’s focal point. But the development will also host cultural activities like martial arts and calligraphy classes, serve as space for Triangle language schools on Saturdays, cater to university and corporate need for a professional conference venue via the hotel, and house service-providers and retailers ranging from attorneys to dentists to multi-million dollar silk artists opening their first galleries outside of China. At the level of factual detail alone, jarring contrasts are already emerging between the different roles this space is expected to play.

Part Two: Structural Tensions 

“You can’t open up a business and call it Chinatown.” –Mark Herman, CEO of Panda Properties Sino, LLC

Herman unwittingly uses complexly nuanced language to describe his vision. He simultaneously views the space as “an experience you can only get at a Chinatown,” “a portrayal of modern China,” “authentically Asian,” “a village,” “a conference center,” “an attraction,” and “a small-scale Disney World©” (Herman). Chinatowns have arguably been all of these things, in some form or fashion. But can this particular project single-handedly integrate these myriad facets? Will the NC Chinatown, crowned with the title “中国城,” serve the dual functions of congregation and agglomeration, uniting a local community as it simultaneously harnesses financial foreign power and commoditized culture to drive a new conception of Chinatown? Many lines of tension fissure outwards from this locus, but for the sake of space, we focus here on the following two: “traditional” Chinatowns versus authentic China, and the local versus the foreign.

 Traditional Chinatown vs. Authentic China

“[Chinatowns] don’t do justice to modern China.” – Mark Herman

The developer’s understanding of what characterizes a Chinatown is problematic in many ways. In describing the genesis process, he says a Chinatown “was just started by one business opening… and then a neighborhood getting together in an unorganized manner.” Literature on the subject, however, cites politically-motivated formation of Chinese ghettoes in response to social racial tensions as the impetus for these communities. The Morrisville Outlet Mall is a fringe space, abandoned and shunned by other developers; preceding Chinatowns in cities like Vancouver were also relegated to undesirable locations (Anderson). Ethnically-themed business development occurred there because they were the only places available to set up shop. In other words, community predated commerce. This misconception has shaped the developer’s vision in a fundamental way: it leads to the belief that commerce generates congregation, especially congregation of the culturally-rich sort found in some of America’s oldest Chinatowns.

Other recognizable elements of a Chinatown for Herman include authentic food and the gate. Food is Herman’s primary criterion for an “experience you can only get at a Chinatown.”  He describes many of the Chinese restaurants in the Triangle as being too “Americanized,” and perceives a need to restore authenticity in cuisine to the community. This restoration takes the form of importing Chinese restaurants from mainland China, which will retain some kind of cultural integrity that local establishments (even those run by first-generation Chinese immigrants) have lost. Several questions arise here: what standards does he use to judge authenticity? Will the particular brand of “authentic” cuisine imported even appeal to local consumers? Then there is the matter of the gate: the developers obviously recognize it as a critical component of their project, as the only design document hanging in their office is the gate sketch. But the gate is an architectural marker unique to Chinatowns, not a reflection of “authentic” mainland China. From the first moment a customer steps onto the premises, the traditional conception of a Chinatown will assert itself, working at counter-purposes to the developer’s articulated goal of creating a “new” kind of Chinatown which more faithfully represents the mainland.

Local vs. Foreign

“The first thing we did…after deciding the community wanted [Chinatown]…was fly to China.” – Mark Herman

For this Chinatown to be divergent from its predecessors, it must maintain some kind of strong linkage to China that is absent in other incarnations of Chinese immigrant communities. Herman’s vision for accomplishing this is to import everything comprising the establishment, from architects to raw materials to laborers to business owners to teachers at the cultural school. Over sixty percent of the retail space has already been signed over to Chinese retailers (Herman).  The cultural school is a branch of one established in Beijing. Even the five-star hotel, arguably the least visibly “ethnic” part of the entire complex, will be designed by a Chinese firm.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to some tensions in the local community. Herman admits he has been approached by many owners of Chinese restaurants in the Triangle who want to open spaces in the food court, but says he has turned them all down. This is particularly puzzling in light of the fact that he simultaneously articulates a strong professional pride in creating jobs that can sustain the community: “at the end of the day… the value I set on [what I do] is how many jobs I create.” But who will fill the jobs he’s creating? Not local business owners or workers: their business practices are not “authentically Chinese” enough to merit space. At the same time, proximity to three prominent universities and the preponderance of language schools in the area suggests a local Chinese American community mostly comprised of individuals above blue-collar working class. Does Herman intend also to import laborers from China who will work as stock-boys and sushi chefs? Or will we witness a phenomenon paralleling Durham’s Sushi Love restaurant, where many of the cooks are actually of Hispanic, not Japanese, origin?

As problematic as it may prove in implementation, the project goals described above have a couple of discernible motivations. First, Chinese investors have overwhelmingly abundant investment capital. “You know what people say to me?” Herman asks, speaking of Chinese investors. “They say ‘I don’t care if we make money in 10 years.’ I mean, who can say that?” Given lingering sluggish economic performance, Chinese investment appears more secure and sustainable to the developers than that offered by local businesses. Second, there is an established political relationship between Hunan province, from whence originates most overseas investment, and the state of North Carolina. There have been a few stalled attempts to sign a sister state agreement, which are currently being renegotiated (Herman). But several individual North Carolina cities, such as Pinehurst, already have sister cities (Zhijiang) in Hunan province (“News”). Creating business relationships with investors in these areas thus has obvious political appeal, and could be attractive enough to justify overlooking pressing local concerns, such as unemployment levels.

Part Three: Congregation and Agglomeration 

“We’ll sell the things made in the cultural school in the center.” – Mark Herman

“The deal I made with [the cultural school] is you can’t have any restaurants in your building, so everyone eats in the foodcourt, and that Saturdays we could have our local community schools occupy their space.” – Mark Herman

The underlying fuel for these tensions is the question of whether the new Chinatown will function as a space for congregation or for agglomeration. Will it be a place where the community comes together for a unifying cultural experience, or will it be so foreign and so commercialized that the community’s participation is relegated solely to a consumer role? The developers themselves do not seem to appreciate this as a source of tension. Their plan for managing the space is two-fold: hire somebody to “run things in the mall” on a daily basis, and establish a board of “12 community business leaders from the Asian community to steer the direction of this organization” (Herman). But the particulars of what this board will actually do remain unclear. It seems unlikely they would have any say over what types of businesses can enter the retail space, since that is currently so strictly relegated to prefer “authentic Chinese” retailers. The cultural school is likewise not the local community’s domain, even if they may occupy it one day a week. Nowhere in the course of the interview did Herman or Lee mention putting in a recreation center, or any other communal space lacking simultaneous retail functions. Moreover, they envision their Chinatown as an attraction and tourist destination that will draw people from all across America. This implies tourists wandering around the mall and school, gawking at the sheer “Chinese-ness” of the space, snapping photos and crowding around calligraphy demonstrations. Such activity can easily create resentment among locals trying to go about their daily business. One Yelp reviewer writes on the page for Li Ming’s Global Mart in Durham: “My last comment would be to those who like to go to asian markets just to “look around”. Some of us have real shopping to do and when you bring your group of tourists to the market to gawk and point at “odd” foods you may have never seen or eaten it is very bothersome to have to navigate around you. Go to the market to buy something, not to pick up frog legs, make a yucky face, then put it back down” (Minnow). Exactly how this sort of cultural and functional clash will affect the new Chinatown remains to be seen. What can be said is that the current plan fails to recognize or account for the possibility of negative community backlash. It is true that Chinatowns have historically been both communal and cultural spaces. But they have also been controversial spaces, places where matters of cultural identity and community can spark heated debate and even social violence. The developers would do well to remember that.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Kay J. “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 77.4 (1987): 580-598. Web.

Chou, Renee. “Washed-up Morrisville outlet mall to get Chinese makeover.” WRAL.com. 6 Feb 2012. Web. 22 Feb 2012. http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/10694415/.

Herman, Mark. Personal interview. 16 Feb 2012.

Minnow N. “Li Ming’s Global Mart.” Yelp.com. 3 Sept 2011. Web. 22 Feb 2012. http://www.yelp.com/biz/li-mings-global-mart-durham-2

“News.” Carolina-chinacouncil.org. Carolina China Council, 11 Feb 2012. Web. 22 Feb 2012. http://carolina-chinacouncil.org/news#china-town-celebration-party