![]() ![]() ![]() However, why the Chinese community did not reorganize in a tight neighborhood is partly due to how rapidly they were displaced and when they were displaced. Some have suggested that the New Orleans Chinese assimilated well and point to the Lee family that gave us Harry. When the New Orleans Tulane-LSU medical complex took over the old Chinatown in the 1930s, no new Chinatown was built. That is due largely to there being no modern Chinatown, nor hardly even a hint that a Chinatown ever existed in New Orleans. Few people realize that New Orleans has a historic and large Chinese population. And that is what most of the Houston community did – they moved westward to where land was cheap, to an area along Bellaire outside the Loop. They remained there until the early 1980s, when real estate prices downtown made selling attractive. There, Chinese clothes cleaners and restaurants thrived, just as Charles Tung in New Orleans and the Chins in Mobile. As in New Orleans, the Chinese established tight-knit enclaves in the poorer area of Houston, just east of downtown. Destitute Chinese immigrants were happy to fill that vacuum, and they poured in port cities. At the same time, enslaved African Americans gained their freedom through the Thirteenth Amendment, leaving a labor vacuum on some plantations and farms in the South. The Second Opium War, one of whose aims by the British was to legalize and control the opium trade, continued the economic depression in China that the First Opium War had started. ![]() Houston’s Chinese population, like New Orleans, came to the area around 1860. Scattered throughout the Chinese and Vietnamese enclaves, which apparently the Vietnamese people some posters here know in Houston would not appreciate being conflated together, is a light peppering of Japanese and Korean restaurants. You will also notice the farther west you go that the Chinese influence gives way to the Vietnamese. You will notice, in general, the farther west you go, the newer the strip malls become. But I see no other way to understand it truly than to walk it. You will probably double the miles if you wander through each plaza’s many branching fingers. For some, walking ten miles of the out and back linear path is too much. Although it was designed to be driven, to understand it, you must walk it. Driving it will never give you a sense for what it is. At one time this Apple Dentist office had a red apple on its roof. And if you were an anthropologist surveying this landscape without any other knowledge, you might conclude that the people of this area care about three things: food, teeth, and foot massages. To call them strip malls would not be accurate, as they are usually organized in a square fashion. Each side of the six lane boulevard is filled solidly with these commercial establishments. From Gessner on its eastern limit to the Pavillion Village near Highway 6 on its west, Bellaire Boulevard’s Chinatown is a linear five miles of restaurant after restaurant, grocery stores, tea shops, acupuncturist and dentist offices. Houston’s Chinatown seems unending and if you drive through it a few times, you might become intimidated by just how much is there. Even after I entered the “China Market” and asked for an egg roll, the cashier looked at me with a puzzled face and said, “We don’t serve egg rolls here.” So westward I went to Houston, where I know it has a vibrant and expansive Chinatown. Dear Friends, Driving through China last week whetted my appetite for Chinese food, but not a single restaurant in China, TX, or should I say, not the single restaurant, for there was only one, served Chinese food. ![]()
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