| In many Chinatowns across the United States, | knowledge and a deeper connection—they’re the | ||
| youths exodus is the norm. The things that many | ones who really incorporate Chinatown into | ||
| visitors find unpleasant about Chinatown-its | their lives after they grow up.” | ||
| crowded feel, dirty streets-are the same factors | |||
| 5 | that spur residents to leave once they can afford | 35 | Norman Fong says that very few people have |
| to. Despite its splashy outward façade as a | stayed in the neighborhood to do empowerment | ||
| popular tourist destination, San Francisco’s | work. As a boy in the 1960s, Fong ran around | ||
| Chinatown is a place where, internally, most | with a Chinatown gang. “Everybody needed to | ||
| residents skirt the poverty line. This dichotomy | be part of a gang then—there was a lot of racism | ||
| 10 | makes it what the historian Judy Yung has called | 40 | going on that the cops could care less about.” He |
| a “gilded ghetto.” | says he has always valued young people. “I | ||
| valued myself as a youth, even when society | |||
| Here the cycle of immigrants is still a revolving | really didn’t value youth. I’ve always felt that | ||
| door-constant flow of families moving out and | youth power was not really respected or | ||
| newer immigrant families moving in to take | 45 | understood, especially in the Asian community, | |
| 15 | advantage of cheap rents and neighborhood | where reverence for seniors is very important” A | |
| services. Conditions have gotten dramatically | short, stocky fireball of a man with shaggy hair, | ||
| better in the last two decades. But some in the | he still seems to be a big kid himself, despite his | ||
| community worry that young people who grow | age (at the time we met, he was fifty-five). He | ||
| up here fail to return and contribute | 50 | has become, if not a father figure, then a sort of | |
| 20 | meaningfully to its continuing improvement. | big-brother figure to kids in the community. A | |
| That return, they say, is the key to the | minister in the San Francisco Presbytery for | ||
| neighborhood’s survival. | more than twenty-five years, Fong also serves as | ||
| a parish associate for the Presbyterian Church of | |||
| “A lot of kids who move out, they will come | 55 | Chinatown. | |
| back to Chinatown because of the cheap food – | |||
| 25 | that’s what they always tell me,” Rosa says with | “I said, ‘This is your turf,’” Fong told me. “‘This | |
| a laugh. “They hang out here, either because it’s | is your home, too, no matter where you live | ||
| close to their house, or because their friends live | now. Chinatown is the birthplace of Asian | ||
| here, or their school is around here, or because | America. Tell me what you don’t like about it, | ||
| they go to Chinese school. Maybe their parents | 60 | and what should be better.’” | |
| 30 | work here. So there are a lot of reasons why | ||
| they’re in Chinatown. But those that have more |