goodbye Lingo

My neighbourhood magazine store, Lingo, closed today for good.

Chris and I walked past the store in its last hour of business. As the owner taped paper to the windows, he explained that they were closing due to the lack of business.

I didn't know what to say - I felt bad for not having frequented the store more often, and Chris seemed to think it would be cruel to purchase a magazine then and there.

Jenn is sad.

I Speak English

I broke out my new "I Speak English" t-shirt today for the first time. Three people commented on my shirt: a busker on Commercial Drive, the girls at M&M Meat Shop in Champlain Square, and the pesto guy at the Trout Lake Farmers' Market.

The pesto guy was particularly delighted with my shirt. When he found out that I got it in LA while teaching a history course on Chinese migration, he asked if I'd been on the CBC lately.

Turns out he'd heard Vicki and Joyce's interview on CBC Radio One!

Congrats for sounding more coherent & memorable than you thought you were. ;-)

flickr montager

I am officially a geek.

Check out the cool images you can create on Flickr Montager. Just enter a search tag and up pops a mosaic based on Flickr images with that tag. Click on any of the thumbnails in the mosaic to change the "lead photo".

Go and play!

home sweet home

Have arrived safely in Vancouver. Enjoyed a tasty Cambodian-Vietnamese meal with some CCHS friends at Phnom Penh in Chinatown. Vancouver foodies would approve.


Opened my apartment door tonight to a ringing phone:

"Hello? No, this isn't Swiss Chalet. Yes, you've dialed _______. Well, I'm sorry you've been waiting for 10 minutes, but this still isn't Swiss Chalet."

Who knew that my condo had started serving rotisserie chicken in my absence?


In other news, I stumbled across Mappr today while uploading more photos to Flickr. Mappr maps out photos from Flickr based on geographic location tags - so you can search for "Chinatown" and see a visual display of Chinatown-related photos pop up across North America. And then I found Geobloggers....god, my cartographically-addicted mind is boggled at the possibilities...


And finally, I discovered tonight that random strangers have been viewing, commenting on and "favoriting" my Flickr photos! I'm not sure what to make of this yet...

leaving los angeles

It's my last day in LA. Decided to head home a few days early rather than couch-surf for the remainder of my stay.

There's a whole laundry list of tasks I need to do before I get on my 7pm flight:

1) Have breakfast with Henry
2) Eat empanadas with Jessica and Vicki
3) Visit the UCLA Law School
4) Go shopping at Fox Hills mall
5) Eat an In-n-Out burger

Of course, all this depends on whether I can actually finish my laundry in time!

Off I go on my final 10-hour adventure in Los Angeles...

tales of eminent domain, or why Antonin Scalia is my new best friend

It's an odd day when I find myself agreeing with Justice Scalia and a whole host of libertarian property-rights activists.

But such was the case when I read about the recent Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain, which stated that local governments may force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public, even if the property is not blighted and the new project's success is not guaranteed.

4 Justices dissented - O'Connor, Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas - most unlikely bedmates for I.

Yet, I have to agree with Justice Thomas's statement that eminent domain in the name of urban renewal "has historically resulted in displacement of minorities, the elderly and the poor".

Because when you think about it, whose definition of blight are we using? Is Vancouver's Chinatown blighted, and therefore a good candidate for urban renewal vis-a-vis the wholesale removal of residents and demolition of family homes? Or what about Watts or Little Tokyo or Boyle Heights or any of these other so-called "depressed communities"?

Is it really increasing the public good when the state orders the demolition of a family-owned corner store to make way for Walmart, no matter how much tax revenue Walmart might generate? (and given our discussions of Proposition 13, it's doubtful even the tax revenue would make up for the loss of community).

God, the more I learn about the law, the more depressed I get.

on celebrities and chicken

After a night of clubbing in Hollywood, we ran into Brian McKnight at Roscoe's House of Chicken 'n' Waffles.

Going to bed now....will post more tomorrow about Koreatown, Venice Beach and Randy's Donuts.

on whiteness, women, and the wayward wishes of my mother

Before I was born, my mother tells me she asked God for two things:

1) that her daughter's face be small (and not round like hers)

2) and that her feet be slim (and not wide like hers)

As if these conversations with some presence upstairs weren't disturbing enough for this agnostic daughter of hers, she went on to say that upon my birth, she raged with anger at this God who would deny her the most important characteristic of all.

For indeed, I emerged with a slender face and miniature feet. But horror of horrors, her daughter came into the world a hak mui - "a dark girl" - rather than the bak sik ("white") that my mother craved.

So I can relate to this recent story in the LA Times about Asian American women in Monterey Park, Irvine, Alhambra and other LA suburbs where the ideal of white skin is an easily bought commodity.

Like an Orientalist version of Fantasy Gardens

From Downtown Los Angeles: A Walking Guide (City Vista Press, 1996):

"The most recognizable emblem of L.A.'s Chinatown is the gateway to the New Chinatown Central Plaza on the 900 block of N. Broadway. Its formal name is The Pailou of Maternal Virtue. The buildings in the plaza are highly ornamented in traditional pagoda styles to attract tourists.

The majority of Chinatown's other buildings are the ordinary, functional storefront structures like those found along any other commercial street in the city. But those in the Central Plaza are declaratively Oriental, with animal icons and pagoda-style tile roofs."

Oriental to who? A Hollywood set designer? George Lucas, while he's trying to envision the evil-Orientalist Trade Federation? Clearly, these folks have never been to Hong Kong, Saigon, Shanghai or any other major Asian city.

In other reflections, it was rather surreal to see a sun-drenched Chinatown with wide pedestrian-unfriendly avenues. I'm so used to Chinatowns - and downtown cores, really - being compact and "cluttered". Not cluttered in a messy sense, but cluttered in that "lived-in" look one might find in a comfortable home. LA's downtown just looks too new - as if the scorching sunshine was bleaching all and any history out of the area.

Heh. Speaking of bleaching history out of the area...wait until we get to LA's Tent City on Monday.

Tomorrow, we head to Monterey Park and San Gabriel, two of LA's eastern suburbs that are most reminiscent of Richmond. Jenn is uber-excited for the trip to 99 Ranch, the American equivalent of T&T (and perhaps not-so-coincidentally, owned by the same Taiwanese corporation).

P.S. For the non-Vancouver folk, Fantasy Gardens is this ...amusement park, I suppose, for lack of a better term. It's way out in East Richmond, formerly surrounded by farmland, but now in the middle of some seriously developed land. Fantasy Gardens was the brainchild of former BC Premier Bill Vander Zalm, who fell from office in a real estate scandal involving Fantasy Gardens, Faye Leung ("The Hat Lady") and Tan Yu (the Taiwanese billionaire who purchased Fantasy Gardens for $16 billion). Think Chinatownland, but with a Dutch twist.

the ground is shaking!

It's taking me some time to get used to the ground continually shaking - not because of any random earthquake, but because of all the cars. It happened to me twice today: once on campus at lunch in the Bruin Cafe and again in the Borders after dinner. I had to doublecheck with the folks around me to ensure that 1) we weren't having an earthquake and 2) I wasn't going crazy.

Also, more evidence that LA could be bulldozed and rebuilt without any really noticing:

1) The cemetary just off Wellsworth and Westwood where Marilyn Monroe was buried has been completely torn up and razed.

2) A new public library in Westwood appeared sometime in the last month, while my prof was away in Vancouver.

3) It appears that most of the Persian restaurants in Westwood have been replaced by French restaurants (or other shops), despite Persian Jews having developed most of the Westside. Maybe the restaurant-owning generation has retired and moved on, while their kids have gone on to other things?

Of course, that last point might be incorrect, since we realized afterwards that we'd blown right by a Persian restaurant on the opposite side of the street. Guess that's what you get for trying to find dinner on an empty stomach.

racism in LA, or Jenn's version of Crash

Scene 1:

While walking to a Persian restaurant in Westwood (the neighbourhood where UCLA is located, on the Westside of LA), we witnessed a car sideswipe a large white SUV. The SUV driver got out of her car, only to see the other driver (of indiscriminate Asian ethnicity) drive off. As he sped off, she yelled after him:

"Fucking Chinaman!"

Scene 2:

My prof's partner was walking their two babies during the fireworks. Their kids, Chloe and Mylo, are mixed, a blend of Chinese-Vietnamese-Dutch-Pennsylvania. Brandy and Henry are the biological parents (important for the story). A woman approaches her and asks Brandy:

"Where did you get those?"


It's times like these when you wish you had a very...large...brick.

No one walks in LA

After hiking 5 blocks today in the scorching sunshine to catch the bus with nary a (white) person in sight, I can wholeheartedly vouch for this photo.