Why is chinatown important

Census Bureau figures for the populations of Chinatown communities appear to be far below actual figures. Chinese speakers call Chinatowns Tangrenjie streets of Tang people and regard them as cities within cities. Entering most Chinatowns can be like entering a different country, as one encounters exotic sights, sounds, and smells.

The exotic nature of these communities has always made them places of interest for tourists, novelists, and romanticists. Some of their inhabitants find everything they need to live full lives and seldom leave or interact with outsiders. Three types of associations, all based on traditional Chinese social organization, have played an important role in the lives of Chinatown inhabitants. Clans, or tsu, are organizations based on kinship or family name.

Immigrants with family ties are organized to provide aid to each other in time of need. An individual might be provided the benefits of a clan based solely on his or her family name, even if there is no actual blood tie. The role of the clans has largely been taken over by government agencies. Secret societies, or tongs, are also organized to give assistance to members in need and to push for the interests of their members in Chinatown and in the larger society.

Some tongs were very respectable, but they were often thought of as criminal organizations. Many were involved in illegal activities such as prostitution and drug trafficking, both of which were very lucrative in the predominantly male Chinatowns before World War II.

There were constant disputes between these tongs over territory, drugs, and Chinese women, and these led to a series of tong wars during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that terrorized the citizens of Chinatowns from San Francisco to Cleveland. The benevolent associations, or hui kuan, were organized around the places of origin of their members. They not only provided loans and other assistance but also arbitrated disputes among their members and exercised considerable power over them.

Over time, the hui kuan were consolidated into a national group called the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, more commonly known as the Chinese Six Companies. This new organization took on the role the hui kuan had played. In addition an entire theater building was imported from China and erected in Chinatown to house the Chinese theatrical troupe.

Chinatown's twelve blocks of crowded wooden and brick houses, businesses, temples, family associations, rooming houses for the bachelor majority, in the ratio of men to women was 20 to 1 opium dens, gambling halls was home to 22, people. The atmosphere of early Chinatown was bustling and noisy with brightly colored lanterns, three-cornered yellow silk pennants denoting restaurants, calligraphy on sign boards, flowing costumes, hair in queues and the sound of Cantonese dialects.

In this familiar neighborhood the immigrants found the security and solidarity to survive the racial and economic oppression of greater San Francisco. As fires raged, Chinatown was leveled.

It seemed that what the city and country wanted for fifty years, nature had accomplished in forty-five seconds. Ironically, because the immigration records and vital statistics at City Hall had been destroyed, many Chinese were able to claim citizenship, then send for their children and families in China.

Legally, all children of U. Thus began the influx of"paper sons and paper daughters" - instant citizens - which helped balance the demographics of Chinatown's "bachelor society. The city fathers had no intention of allowing Chinatown to be rebuilt in its own neighborhood, on valuable land next to the Financial District. While they were deciding where to relocate the Chinese, a wealthy businessman named Look Tin Eli developed a plan to rebuild Chinatown to its original location.

He obtained a loan from Hong Kong and designed the new Chinatown to be more emphatically "Oriental" to draw tourists. The old Italianate buildings were replaced by Edwardian architecture embellished with theatrical chinoiserie. Chinatown, like the phoenix, rose from the ashes with a new facade, dreamed up by an American-born Chinese man, built by white architects, looking like a stage-set China that does not exist.

The average detention was two weeks, the longest was twenty-two months. Conditions on Angel Island were harsh, families were isolated, separated, and the interrogated. Detainees were questioned in great detail about who they were and why they were claiming the right to enter the United States.

Those whose answers were unacceptable to the officers were denied admission. Chinatown, on the other hand, chose to handle its investigations silently, letting audiences unravel the mystery while Gittes does. Chinatown trusts that its viewers are just as observant as Gittes is, thus making the experience of cracking the case more organic and immersive.

The audience only knows as much as Gittes does at any given time, making each twist as shocking as it needs to be. Chinatown is best known for its heartbreaking ending, where Evelyn dies, Gittes is left broken, and Cross gets away. To play up the homage to bittersweet Film Noirs, Towne had Evelyn kill Cross and go to jail as a result. Polanski, who was processing his own personal tragedy, came up with the famous darker ending. Just as Little Bourke St was once important to the first wave of Chinese immigrants settling in Australia, so too is the street in its current incarnation as it continues to preserve Chinese tradition and ensure a sense of social and cultural connectedness for the wider Chinese community in Melbourne.

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