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.