 If Chinatowns eventually get taken over by second-generation Asian hipsters, does it still count as Chinatown? David, let's discuss this. Yeah, we got to talk about this viral New York Times article titled, Saving Chinatown While Also Making It Their Own. A younger generation of Asian Americans are fighting to keep the history and culture of the Manhattan neighborhood alive for the very idea of what an ethnic enclave can be. It is written by half Filipino writer LaGaia Machanader. It sparked a bunch of comments from Asians, non-Asians, questions about what even is gentrification. Is gentrification, is it okay if you come from that culture originally? And yeah, we're going to break it down. All right, so please hit that like button. Check out other episodes of the Hot Pop Boys. Let us know if you like this discussion. If you find it interesting, please share this video. Basically, I guess in short, the article is a long read. It's really well written. It's quite dramatic as well, but I would say that it covers the story and background of a lot of restaurant owners, business owners, and organizers whom we know personally a lot of them. And I think they're cool. I love their businesses. I support them. But I guess there's a question because some of their businesses, I guess, are priced higher than obviously the traditional businesses. They're kind of hipsterized. They're still cultural, still representing Asians, still representing homage to Chinatown and the Chinese culture and their hometown, which a lot of them did grow up in Chinatown. But a lot of people are wondering, David, are these second generation Asians kind of in their own way gentrifying Chinatown and how bad is that compared to what the alternative gentrifiers could be? Right. No. I mean, it's a really good question. I think all the media in the prior decade or two have always been about the older generation immigrants getting pushed out by quote, unquote, like rich, white, non-compassionate gentrifiers. Non-cultural, right? And there's now this third party where they're not as rich as the white gentrifiers, but they're still obviously higher income, more educated, coming in with a more hipster lens or like multicultural bend than the previous generations was for like 100 years. And it's like, what is okay? What is not okay? And that's like sort of the ins and outs of this article. Right. Yeah. And maybe, maybe even the term hipster is so loaded and sometimes has a negative connotation. So I don't want to say that they're only hipster, but I guess their own modern take and their own like Asian American identity, I guess. What does the term hipster even mean anymore? I don't know, man. Hipster's kind of got a bad rap. So I don't want to label everybody just as a hipster, but you know, I mean, we're, we all kind of know what we're talking about. Andrew, you know what else has been labeled hipster? Just kidding. It's smiley sauce, smiley sauce.com guys from Sichuan, Sicily. This goes great on any carbs, pastas, noodles, rice. You can use it in any sort of use case that you use in olive oil. It's part Chinese, part Italian. I have to be honest. It's not quite, you know, there's, yeah, there's a lot of chili oils out there, but I really like that one. I think it's a new take. It's a rebrand or a re-our interpretation. It is unlike anything available on the market right now. Let's get into some extras from the article. Andrew, she said, as other quarters of Manhattan have started to change in character, such as Washington Heights, where Dominican population is declined or Harlem, no longer majority black, both with the departure of the young people raised there and the arrival of outsiders in search of cheaper rents or the aura of cool that comes imagined with living on the fringe, Chinatown has remained recognizably Chinatown. That is true. Now, there was always hipsters living in Chinatown, but I do think the hipsters who live in Chinatown generally did like, they kind of enjoyed it. Like I talked to people who live there that are non-Asian and they were like, you know, I loved my time in Chinatown. I probably wouldn't live there forever, but I enjoyed it. And I was like, okay, that's, that's fair. That's good. That's positive. It's like living in a different universe for them, right? Yeah. For at least if they're like, they like to smoke out on the, on this, the, the fire stage. Yeah. I think a lot of hipsters realized that they couldn't just live in Chinatown and then Chinatown morphed to them. It's kind of like goes back to that old saying when people try to invade China, you don't really invade China. China just absorbs you. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we can get into that. That's like a hundred other videos. She also goes on to say, but who's Chinatown? For tourists looking for a easy accessible exotic within American cities, there is the Chinatown myth of surfaces of paper, latins and dragons, stone lions and ceramic lucky cats waving their paws, dumplings and noodles. These items do have genuine cultural value, but it does not rescue them from the reductiveness of the outsider's gaze. Who whose fault is this? No, no, I can say this, that all Chinatowns have always been heavy of commerce, heavy for tourism as well. The way Chinatowns are designed even down to the design of the Pagodas, which they don't have like green and red Pagodas in China. I don't know where in China they have that. I know they have Pagodas, but they're not green and red. You know what I'm saying? A lot of that was made for tourism and I think that's okay. But with tourism, there's always that balance in Chinatown. So I think she's questioning the balance. You have to have tourists in Chinatown. That's it. We need them. But you're right, the balance. And what is the goal of a Chinatown really? Is it just meant to be a landing place for survival for immigrants who otherwise cannot survive and have access to systems in other places? Or is it more like to represent Chinese culture and the totality and the holisticness of it? Or is it to defend like Toisan American culture circa 1920? Right. You know what I mean? Like it's really complicated. Yeah. Well, maybe the answer, short answer is it's different for everybody. She says what is a neighborhood after all, but the people inhabit it. Leong notes that some of Chinatown's distinctive characteristics is the presence of the elderly and insistent on family as an extended unit with many lives and time periods lived through under one roof. I don't fully agree with that. I think that that's a situational situation. You know what I mean? Like I think people who could avoid that or didn't have that, like didn't have, you know what I mean? Like so I don't know if it's like just part of the culture. That's like almost a function of the situations that people are in. Long story short, Andrew, you know, she goes through a lot of points. It's really well written like that. But I do own a point I can't really hope from potluck club. The quote is we're not trying to rebrand Chinatown. Okay. We just want to create a true representation of us as American born Chinese. Right. So it's not about like someone owning Chinatown. Nobody really owns Chinatown. I guess like if you owned all the buildings in Chinatown, you know, in Chinatown. But really, nobody owns the narrative of Chinatown, except they're just people are like potluck club, which is kind of a new, you know, kind of hipsterized, new take on Cantonese food restaurant. Essentially, they're just trying to represent themselves, right? Right, which is not wrong. Everybody should be able to represent themselves just like the immigrants who open up a business in Chinatown are representing themselves. If it's if it's Toisan food, if it's general Kanto food, if it's Hong Kong food, if it's Shanghai needs food, they're all just representing themselves. Yeah. And you guys have to understand if we I mean, this is like a whole another video, but originally it's built up by people from Toisan, right, which is a very specific region of Guangdong with its own culture, right? They speak Toisan Wan instead of like even standard Cantonese, right? And then people from Hong Kong come and then people from Fujian come and then people from Mandarin speaking provinces in China come and they sort of add their flavor to the thing. And then who has ownership? Who has gatekeeping ability? Yes or no? I don't know. It's very tough to say. I think the article is very smart. The article is clearly really well written by La Gaia Michonne Andrew, but I do think it's like sounded maybe a little bit militant against white gentrifiers. And maybe that's why the New York Times comments section got so defensive. Oh, I'd like to see some of these defensive comments. Yeah, I think that the one thing that she could have focused on as much as I do think that there is this aspect of like oppression from this white gentrifier like Black Rock, you know, Vanguard type of thing situation, right? But there's also an element of just like wanting to create something cool that represents how you feel about your culture in that bringing in a lot of like higher end consumers Asian and non-Asian. And that that's like a foreign capital inflow into that community. Right. Well, you're saying that although there are older traditional Chinese businesses that do attract tourists, there's also these new school modern second gen businesses that are usually at a higher price point, usually cooler, more hipster, right? We get it, but they're also attracting even a different audience. Right. That's not people wanting to buy paper lanterns or like come for a Chinese New Year and like launch some fireworks or something like that. I do think that it's why isn't it right, Andrew? If China towns become American born Chinese towns or like ABC towns or even more Pan-Asian than that, like Pan-Asian towns. Yeah. Why is that? Is that right or is that wrong? Or is that what's wrong? I mean, I think it comes down to what you see as the lesser of two evils. Not that I think we always talked about how second generation business owners have to come back to Chinatown. Now, I think there's some sense that you wish Chinatown would stay in its like kind of like price point, for example, like, oh, like, what if in 30 years there's not enough Chinatown cheap eats? There's no, there's no more dollar dumplings or whatever. In 30 years is possible because that's just the way economics move, right? And like how money flows. People have to make each one of those dumplings by hand. Right. Now, does the second, obviously if you're a second generation business owner, do you want to run the exact same business that your parents ran or that these immigrants run? Like 95% of them don't. Yeah. And also, I think that the truth is, and not everybody's going to feel this way, what is a Chinatown if the older generation doesn't understand that the second generation has to go do their own thing? Like literally, I feel like that would be like part of Chinese culture. The older people, they would get it. Don't just interview like the grumpyest out of them. Before we get into the comment section, I'll leave my final opinion at the end of this. But a question is like, do you think there's even current Chinatown businesses that got criticized when they opened for being gentrifying like a dim sum palace? That's a new spot. The House of Joy. Any new restaurant that was new at its time, that was priced higher, probably got criticized for maybe a similar thing. I mean, if you really know about this old, old school stuff, Andrew, even when the people from HK came over, there was some like slight rift between Toisan people and HK people because the HK people were sort of doing that to the original inhabitants that came in like 1950s. It seems like it's kind of a cycle. You got to make it your own. Andrew, if you're going to do all the work and you're trying to move from like survival mode of your parents to thrival mode, which is obviously a take on the word thriving, you got to make it your own. So absolutely, you got to make it your own. Anyway, guys, let's just get into the comment section. Andrew, these are the first comment sections from the New York Times and some white people were mad because like we said, Ms. Sean Legalia Andrew, she kind of took a militant tone with this article. She said, this guy said, Chinatowns exist all over the world. I wonder if Chinese people prefer living together in Chinatowns, huh? Why they leave China at all? Well, how come they're not assimilating into the general population? And somebody said, yeah, that's so funny and absurd of you that you would note that to think that Chinatowns don't exist due to prejudice and rejection from the mainstream society rather than their hatred of everybody else. Jewish enclaves exist for the very same reason. Yeah, you know, I think you can argue about the percentage breakdown, but essentially part of the reason why Chinatowns exist is due to discrimination and getting pushed into these certain parts of the city, into the municipalities, you know, into the downtowns at that time, which were not very nice, right? But yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess the other side is that I guess a lot of Chinese do end up enjoying it, but I will say a lot of Chinese do graduate from Chinatown. They don't move there and stay there forever. A lot of stepping stone, right? Yeah, a lot of people use that as a stepping stone and a starting point and then they go somewhere else. Yeah, it depends on your goals, right? Like some people want to use it as a stepping stone to the suburbs where the good public schools are so the kid can get a good STEM job or a computer engineering job, tech job, you know, and then like just get a good salary with good benefits. Other people, they are going to tell their kids to more like stay in Chinatown and run the system and be like a hustler, right? Yeah, yeah. This guy said, you know, it's really interesting because a previously disadvantaged group has now become the advantage group who is in power. Asian Americans on average have more wealth than the larger white majority in most ethnic or racial groups. They make up an elite class of professionals who hold power in society and are displacing previous residents. All right, so what he's pointing at is just the little pockets where there is some reverse gentrification from immigrant Asians or Chinese in particular who are moving into neighborhoods, building up houses, raising the, you know, the housing prices. Well, isn't the truth, Andrew, that different waves of Chinese immigrants from China are categorized differently? Like the four dies from like Beijing and Shanghai right now. That's a whole nother vibe than like if your grandparents came in like 1951. Yeah, yeah, I think it's really interesting. I mean, I think Chinatowns, they are not always like, I mean, because Chinese people, it's such a broad term now and there's all different types of Chinese people. It is hard to say like Chinatowns specifically represent all of China now in today. Literally guys, if you do the research, there has been anywhere from six to eight major Chinese diasporic waves to America and they all, you could argue, don't fully relate to each other. Somebody was just saying, man, Chinatown was a slum, I grew up there. You know, we were trying to just get out. So it's cool, you know, some people, they leave and they try to fit in somewhere else, but then they realize they can't really fully fit in there. So then now they're coming back to Chinatown. So this guy was sort of saying it like, it's more like about like the rejection from the mainstream society when you try to enter it. Right, right, right. Yeah, this guy says, well, doesn't this story affirm the stereotype that Chinese are poor immigrants because they refuse to integrate with the rest of the community? You know what was really interesting, Andrew? And we're going to get out of the New York Times, you know, arguments section, but some people were like liberal whites arguing against this article, because LaGaia Misham might have made it seem like, like they were these young Chinatown second generation people were against integration. Right, right. I don't think that that's the case. I don't think it's that the second generation business owners are against white people. I don't think, I don't think it feels like, I think they're just against, they're against probably people moving in who are not compassionate to the culture and don't want to engage with the culture, right? And you do see that. I think that's fair. I think that's fair. That's what how a community should feel, but it's not about like pulling out pitchforks and like pushing people out play. Anybody can live in Chinatown, bro. It's mad chill. It is honestly mad chill. Yeah, like nobody, if you are opening up a non-Asian business in Chinatown, nobody is going to spray paint you or throw a brick through your window. Yeah, it's not like that. It's not like that. In fact, the Chinese owned businesses are more likely to get a brick through their window. To be honest, you made me bet which one does. Right, right. Yeah, anyway, this guy says, man, most immigrants do not want their kids to pick up the family business. It's exhausting. It's stressful. The pay is low and there are better jobs out there. Running a restaurant or a shop means to survive rather than to thrive. My grandfather would kill me if I decided to open up a restaurant. This is generally about, in my opinion, 75% true. OK. But 25% of people who have the right hookups or maybe they get a good deal on rent or they have just this amazing team where being at working at a restaurant together doesn't even feel like work and the restaurant can appeal to a high-end enough consumer where there's a good margin for everybody to split up, it totally can work. Exactly. But yeah, you're right. Like there's a 75% chance if you open up a restaurant, it will not work. Because it is a very difficult restaurant to scale up because your costs scale as you do more business. Somebody was saying that this is just a function of capitalism. Nobody is entitled to hold on to anything forever. And the same reason is, I mean, would you agree with this, that La Shia Masan is sort of like not acknowledging just that everything changes all the time due to capitalism? I mean, Little Italy has shrunk. Chinatown has probably taken over parts of Little Italy that were once Italian. A lot of Italians moved out. A lot of the workers in Little Italy right now who speak Italian are like Albanian or of different backgrounds like Spanish or something, right? So it's like, I mean, they, Italians could have been saying this for a while. And I think they kind of did low-key say it, but I guess maybe their group is not considered a minority group. Yo, everybody, they Chinese are taking over Mulberry. Let's all go to Long Island. But I also do want to know that the Chinese, the rich Chinese from China that are buying up a bunch of buildings in New York are almost a completely different group than the Chinese in Chinatown. Right. Like almost like they're, they're both Chinese, but that's about it. Yeah. And I think let's be clear here too. If you, if you really understand, even inside of like an Asian hood or an Asian enclave, there's still people who like are rich growing up in that zone too. You know what I mean? Like, like, it might be like of the community, but yeah, there's always a variance. Somebody said, man, Chinatown is way past saving. The people have left and are not coming back. The hipster version of this sea town really isn't the same. Take it from a guy who lived here in the 90s. And somebody said, hey, the hipster version versions are still better than no version at all. Right. No, I, that, I agree. I agree. Yeah. Somebody said, why is there such borderline gatekeeping from some people from within the community? They are trying to tell us what Chinatown should and should not be. Listen, I grew up part of my life here too. Why can't Chinatown be hipster? Why do we have to be an enclave of only poor immigrants? Why can't there be room for both? Yeah. I mean, I think it's complicated. I think usually, to be honest, money and education and privilege wins out. So whoever of between the second generation and the first generation has the more like organization willpower and money probably is not gonna. It's not like a battle, but they're gonna like take over more. You know what my major takeaway is, man? I always tell people this and it seems like common sense, but obviously, like, for example, you know, the guy in Mishan, she might not be like the most capitalistic person. She might be just trying to write a good article. You know, a lot of people have different experiences in life and they've seen different reps so that they colors their lens or the way that they view the world. You know, I'll say this. It's like, you don't have to be from the original community, but you just have to respect them. You know what I mean? You don't have to like do everything for them. You have your own life and your own identity that you are actually responsible for like showcasing and representing and hopefully that shines well for the whole group, but you don't have to be from something like if you didn't grow up that way, even if that was your parents, you don't have to be it. You really don't. Okay. And second generation immigrants, because with this Confucian philiopiety and the misappropriation of that or the over maximization or over utilization philiopiety, a lot of sometimes some people on the second generation, Andrew, they almost feel like their life is not their own. They put themselves last. Right. You got you over to yourself to put yourself first. It doesn't mean that you put your like family or your community or, you know, poor people from your community that look like you last, but you got to put yourself first. So for example, you're saying like if somebody grew up in Chinatown, their parents was a business owner of like maybe an old school bakery and they grow up just thinking, yo, I got to run the bakery the same way. I can't change any of the systems. The signage, the colors, the items. No, I'm making it the same way that my parents did. Yeah. Yeah. Like I got to keep these buns a dollar because these old, the older elderly people require that this guy may buy was 75 cents, right? Right. And you're saying not everybody needs to think like that. Dude, you could hipsterize it, make it pay-and-down matcha, ube, you know what I mean? The classic game plan that everybody's doing right now, it's delicious, by the way, it works. I'm not dissing it. I'm just saying, and then you take that profitability and that money you make is now you're doing brand collabs with your cool Asian pastries that are like matcha with something else. And then you just like donate to charity. You know what I mean? Or give away some of your buns to people. You know what I mean? Like you don't got to maintain the business 100% how it was for like a hundred years. That's crazy. Do community, use that, use that profit to preserve community and culture. Yeah. You know, I think for me, Chinatown, and this is my opinion, I'm not someone who grew up natively in New York, Chinatown, although, you know, we spent some time there, but we didn't grow, I didn't grow up there. But in simplest terms to me, it's like, there's always like community, families, a lot of commerce. It is a place for food and hanging out, preserving the culture. And usually you would expect any Chinatown to have some good value. So I think as long as those core principles are kept there, things are going to change around it. Like there's a hipster coffee shop, Artbean, that is delicious. But it also, the lattes, you can pay like six, seven bucks for them. For Pondon. Yeah. And it's a good latte, but it's in the middle of Dory Street. And could you say that that is gentrifying in a way, because it's a expensive coffee shop? But are they also preserving the culture and working with local artists and all this stuff? Yeah. So gentrifying, I think in the simplest terms, a lot of people really look at that word and be like, gentrifying. It's all evil. It's all evil. I'm like, it's kind of a function of capitalism. It's a function of the system. And the same system that allowed your family to end up owning three buildings in Chinatown and then being successful and then moving up and owning more property and flushing and doing all this, that same system that allowed your family to do that is the same system that is having that coffee shop pop up. Yeah. So I think it's just, it's kind of a fact of life. But again, all I always pushed for is like, gentrification probably will happen, but it'll happen slower if the people who are gentrifying are other Asians who care. Yeah. And that's really important. They can maintain some of the vibe. That is important. So yes, the second generation Asians, will the prices go up eventually? All the prices of everything are going up eventually. Yeah. I think it's ultimately about the desire and the execution. Of course, you've got to make sure your back end financials are good, but the front end's got to be cool. Yeah. And it's got to fuse the East and the West to some extent or at least trendiness. I think the whole Midnight Arcade, Midnight Market, they do an amazing job of that in Toronto, right? Yeah. Like they're fusing old Chinatown elements with what, you know, the rush hour and modern like, you know, Moncock things from Moncock. I mean, I thought this picture is so cool of like, soft swerve and where it's put because it's kind of like this hipster ice cream soft serve spot and it's next to some, like a ginseng herb shop and like, it's, I think that's beautiful. I think that's cool. I think it's cool. I don't think every shop necessarily needs to be soft serve, but I think that soft swerve is in between all these old school shops and it's all blending together in one community. Isn't that the definition of community? Because you need the second generation to come back. I think it's about thriving, you know, moving on, moving up sort of like the development ladder from surviving. Yeah. So why don't you support both businesses? I do. I love you. Make sure you let us know what you guys think in the comments section below, guys. You know, Viral New York Times article about Chinatown. It is a brainy read, but it's a good one, you know, even though I don't fully, you know, necessarily 100% agree with the tone. Let us know what you think in the comment section below. Until next time, we're the Hop Hop Boys. We out. Peace.